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Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

The issue is not electing people... it's re-election advantage. Incumbent candidates rarely lose, especially in Congress... and power is addicting. This leads to the current situation where U.S. Congress median age is pretty far on the cognitive decline curve - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/01/30/house-get... . I think there were multiple issues that took down USSR, but aging leadership with inflexible thinking that was not capable of keeping up with times was probably complicit in most of them.

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> The issue is not electing people... it's re-election advantage.

The fix for that isn't age limits, it's term limits. Which would also help with many other issues that are caused by politics being a lucrative career.

If someone is doing a good job why wouldn’t we want to keep them around? If a 30 year old is elected to congress I don’t see why they couldn’t serve for 40 years if they are competent.

You would. Congressional politics is closer to a complex game than a cognitive exercise. A game that is only learned and won with experience.

> Congressional politics is closer to a complex game than a cognitive exercise. A game that is only learned and won with experience.

None of that means the game actually accomplishes what government is supposed to accomplish. The actual result of the game is a huge bloated bureaucratic government that (a) does a poor job of what it is supposed to be doing, protecting everyone's basic rights, and (b) also does a poor job at all the other stuff that gets piled on top by legislators looking to make a mark and get re-elected and having to pander to special interests to do it.

As the saying goes: if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well.

Was this response supposed to be relevant to the age question under discussion? Because that was the context of my response.

Second, my response both implies that the game and the government are indistinguishable and that what it is supposed to accomplish is as much a question that comes with experience as is the knowledge of how to play.

The output of a system is always its purpose, which is an upscaled cognate to the maxim that there are no mistakes in politics. The key to overcoming cognitive dissonance is to understand that this may not align with your perception of that purpose nor your perceived interests. Such is Life.

The evidence is that the current crop aren't doing a good job though; and despite that they have shown remarkable staying power. The last 50 years of political leadership have led to ... vast amounts of capital being built in China, Trump leading in the polls [0] and while civil war looks unlikely it is an option that comes up from time to time in the discourse. Happily the US population has had lots of practice from a series of disastrous foreign expeditions that may have achieved nothing (or the achievements are too unpolitic to talk about, maybe). The US Congress has a lot of trouble pointing out the genuine wins they have presided over if their popularity polling is a guide.

The 2-term limit on presidents seemed to do great things, more limits on the congress is probably a good idea. There are 333 million people in the US, even if the candidates are drawn from the top 10,000 instead of the top 1,000 the results would be good in practice.

[0] Love him or hate him, symbolically the man isn't an endorsement of the status quo.

Part of the issue is that you haven't shown the 30 year old to be competent when s/he stood for the first election. (Now I think of it, you haven't shown a 70 year old to be incompetent, but that's another issue.)

If you have rules that are not based in competency, but on a simple feeling you have that group of people X, are not competent to do job Y. That's just not going to go well for you. Age minimums as conceived by the founders, for instance, were based in competence. A desire for people to have experience. Even then, they were not draconian. As evidenced by the fact that someone 35 years old could be President of the US.

If you were arguing in favor of competency testing, people might get behind you. But you're arguing in favor of a blanket ban. Which is another matter entirely.

Being a political representative is not a regular job. It should come with some finite term, no matter how good you are.

Are they really doing a good job of governing, or just a good job of getting (re-)elected?

Right. For that matter it would be nice if we had decent tools for gauging all of activity, competence, attendance record, record of inserting garbage into bills, sponsoring useful bills, defending bills against garbage, etc.

As far as I know voting record is reasonably available BUT bills are mostly not single issue and are very convoluted so that for any given bill it can be hard to tell whether you would have voted for or against.

The problem comes when that now 70 year old is supposed to foster an urgent and relevant response to problems of the current 30 year old generation. They may be a well respected leader with an impeccable service record, but how can they possibly be effective when they don’t know how to use a smartphone or think cookies refer to the things they in the jar in the kitchen, or think AI is that thing that calls you Dave?

Europe doesn't have term limits and have much younger leaders than USA, so term limits seem to increase the age not decrease it.

We’re talking about age limits.

> If someone is doing a good job why wouldn’t we want to keep them around?

Because they won't keep doing a good job. The longer a politician stays in office, the more they are corrupted. The only solution is to keep them from staying in office too long.

After seeing how term limits work in the California state legislature, I stopped being a fan of them.

The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effective assembly members would end up forced to seek a "promotion" into the state senate if they wanted to stay in politics. This often meant challenging members of the same party. This ends with people constantly fighting their "allies" to scramble up the greased pole, rather than doing more useful work.

Of course, that can happen even without term limits (politicians are the ambitious sort) but they definitely accelerate the effect.

The worse problem is that all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists! Since they're now the only ones around with deep experience, they invariably get even more involved with crafting laws.

This actually dove-tails into the other problem with the lobbying industry: the revolving door from legislator to the lobbying firm. Even without term limits this happens all of the time. It's very common for a retiring US House member to immediately get a lucrative job lobbying their former colleagues. However in a term-limited legislative body this only gets worse. Not only do lobbyists become more powerful, but term limits provide a guaranteed flow of politicians needing a new job.

So, if you find yourself as a newly-elected politician in such a system and you actually want to make a difference, probably your best bet is to immediately find some lobbyists to get sweet with. They are the only ones with the experience to make the political machinery work, and they're probably your future employer as well.

So at least in my observation, the ultimate effect of term-limits is to transfer power from democratically elected representatives to well-funded special interests. By un-entrenching the politicians you're accidentally making another group even more entrenched.

By contrast, I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest. Imagine somebody who has been working on, say, education policy for decades. They know every policy detail, all of the stakeholders, all of the experts. In a world of term limits, how will such a person ever emerge?

All of the above is specifically about legislative term limits. I believe the case for executive term limits is much stronger.

> it caused unneeded intra-party drama

That seems like a problem with the parties.

> all of the legislators are now short-timers. But do you know who aren't newbs? The lobbyists!

Sounds like a reason to outlaw lobbying.

> I think the very top legislators are ones that become a true expert in their field of interest.

They're not actual experts in the actual field. They're experts in working the system to favor partisans of the field. Not the same thing.

An actual expert in an actual non-political field would be doing productive work in that field. The real root problem is that we expect politicians to be "experts" in anything other than making sure the government does the limited things it's supposed to do, and nothing else--we want to use the government as a tool to solve whatever problems we see, instead of as an umpire whose sole job should be protecting everyone's basic rights and stopping there.

Thank you for your insights. It’s making me question if term limits is the solution I always thought it would be.

well maybe work on that "re-election advantage", understand and curtail it instead of instuting blanket (and imo insane) bans?

If you’re old enough to retire and collect old person benefits you are no longer fit to lead not because you are might be incapable but because you are simply not generationally relevant. The office of president has term limits for effectively the same reason and nobody calls those insane.

Term limits on the presidency have nothing to do with age. You could be 35, serve two terms, and you’d still be banned from being president again … at age 43.

The ND ban is nothing but ageism.

It’s not. Nobody is saying old people are subhuman scum who shouldn’t be treated kindly and with respect. The argument is that after a certain point you may not have a lived experience that is relevant anymore for being an effective political leader. The same way we wouldn’t put two 80 year olds in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft… the risk there is obvious and clear.

Why are you not generationally relevant after a certain age? Would you say the same to Noam Chomsky, Leslie Lamport, and Donald Knuth?

Even if someone could do fine, I'd prefer to skip out on them rather than let those who aren't fit through.

If there really such a wealth of honest, talented, dedicated people that you are ready to waste proven ones?

Yes

We should not strive to be ruled by wise elders. I am not arguing that there is no place for respect or that old people can’t have great influence and utility. Just that they shouldn’t be on the field playing ball.

That's what's weird to me also.

I honestly don't understand? Clearly the problem is incumbency, why are we going after age? It doesn't make much sense.

The law is clearly unconstitutional and would be overturned without a change to that document. And a change to that document won't happen.

But we can make laws to diminish the power of incumbency that would be in complete compliance with all constitutional parameters. I'm not even talking about the constitutionally questionable things like term limits. (Which, clearly, we could also try since people don't care about the constitutionality of the laws apparently.) I mean, why wouldn't we?

Why are we nibbling around the edges? Let's go for the jugular.

I don’t think incumbency is inherently a problem. Having representatives that have experience is an advantage.

The real problem is gerrymandered districts that essentially mean it’s impossible to lose, even if you aren’t doing a good job.

And age is still a separate problem, there’s a different between a 40 year old wanting to serve 20 more years and a 70 year old doing the same.

there’s a different between a 40 year old wanting to serve 20 more years and a 70 year old doing the same

No there isn't.

Both these people will put your society into a world of hurt. They want to serve 20 years. I can guarantee that ain't for the benefit of the poor and downtrodden, any more than the district they draw up for themselves to achieve their dream is for the benefit of its constituency.

Age is a problem and it’s not ageist to say so. What we’re talking about here is not a world where a 24 and a 56 year old cannot both play on the same ball team. We’re talking about elderly people. Your grandparents. I love the grandparents of mine that are still alive but my god are they nowhere near fit to lead a freaking country. One still uses the term “the gays”, one is losing their coherence in small ways, one has serious health problems which are the dominating factor in his daily routine. Seriously. I’m not saying you’re subhuman scum if you’re old. I’m saying maybe you’re past the point of political effectiveness and relevancy.

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