Is the age of president relevent? Are we evaluating correctly?
Is the age of president relevent? Are we evaluating correctly?
Much is being made of Joe Biden’s age as he announces a bid for his second term. He is the oldest president ever inaugurated. It seems natural because the focus is on the absolute number OF his age coming into office at age 78 and departing an assumed second term at 86.
But age and aging are quite variable. Senator Diane Feinstein will be 90 in June and already cannot fulfill her duties as a senator! But I have known people over 100 years old still mentally as sharp as a tack. So I decided to do a bit of Excel calculations and crude assessments.
This also ignores any discussion of policy differences of any given candidate.
There is another way to measure the age of a president and that is to measure it relative to the expected lifespan for from his birth. I ran the numbers on a spreadsheet of the ages of the presidents when they came in to office and when they left to arrive at a percent of their age relative to the expected lifespan of the period in which they were born and lived.
I admittedly used crude data from google to insert average life span for the periods of their lives, but you will get the point.
Our first seven presidents from the founding generation all started entering office well past the expected lifespan of their day and age with the percentages ranging from 163% to 174%. In other words, the expected average lifespan of people born in the early to mid-1970s was 35. Yet these ment all lived well into their 60s. This isn’t really surprising as averages go because these were all well-off or wealthy men not beaten down by hard labor. Five owned slaves and two were lawyers.
The next group could be termed “heirs to the founders” as HW Brands would call them. The second gneration leading up to and through the civil war. Again, most were well off. William Henry Harrison’s campaign appeal as a regular dirt farming guy was largely a myth, for example. Several were, again, slave holders. Their percentages ranged from 121% to 166%. Garfield’s was at 114% when entering office and stayed 144% due to his assassination. Abraham Lincoln entered office at 121% of the average lifespan age and would have left office at age 60 for a 140% ranking.
If we look at presidents 25–34 who were all born in the mid-to-late 1800s (McKinley through Eisenhower) where the average lifespan was 43, we see them entering office at about 119% (except a young Teddy Roosevelt at 98%) and departing at 128–163% (again excepting Teddy Roosevelt leaving office at 116%.
Our next cohort as life expectancies rose, were born in the early 1900s (1908–1924). Kennedy through GHW Bush. Kennedy, like Teddy Roosevelt, entered office young and this is an outlier at 84%. The rest range from 108–135%. This group exited the office 108–151%. Kennedy again an outlier due to assassination at 90%. Assuming an eight year presidency he would have left office at the average age of death for his cohort (age 51) and likely lived far longer.
The final cohort birth years range are in the baby boomer mid-1940s with exception of Barak Obama born in 1961. Clinton, Obama and GW Bush all entered office at 66–77% of the life span of 70.
Trump and Biden are the two oldest men to be elected and the life expectancy of people born in the 1940s average is 64.
Entering office their percent to life expectancy is:
Donald Trump 109%
Joe Biden 122%
Assuming either one completes a second term, I entered their ages at that point to get the hypothetical percentage when exiting office:
Donald Trump 128%
Joe Biden 134%
So we can see that, relative to life expectancy, neither Trump nor Biden ages relative to average lifespan for their age group are out of line with the vast majority of presidents. They are even 50–60 points lower than our first cohort, the founding generation.
Again, people’s capabilities and faculties can vary widely. One person at 85 may be completely in full faculty while another has lost cognitive function or arrived at dementia, even. But merely addressing it by an age isn’t necessarily the metric we might think.
