
The Average Age and Years Served of Members of US Congress Every Year Since 1789 - Four_Star
http://thesoundingline.com/congress-the-art-of-incumbency-part-ii/
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thedaveoflife
Seemingly relevant, this recent meme being shared in China:
[https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/998932355527139328](https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/998932355527139328)

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numbers
That's very interesting! thanks for sharing!

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ta1357
For about the last decade or so, I've held on to the idea that there ought to
be a maximum age for elected officials. Ideally, in my view, 60.

As I myself have aged, and watched those around me age, I'm really quite
struck by just how many people reach 68 or so and spend an inordinate amount
of time looking back, fondly, on their prime years. It seems incredibly
natural for that sort of nostalgia to arise, as the body decays. I can't help
but think it also leads to "back in my day..." style thinking, and the
mythical "golden past" to which we need to return.

When you've reached such a mental state, I suspect you're no longer as capable
of thinking critically about the future as someone younger, someone who _still
has a future_. You've got no skin in the game anymore, and when that happens
you're no longer fit to serve in any decision making capacity. Act as advisor,
absolutely. But without skin in the game, you'll do precisely what our gov't
has done: mortgage our future for gains _today_ , and completely screw over
coming generations.

It's a weak rationale, I admit. Borne of my own biases against the status quo,
for sure.

Still I can't help thinking its a good idea. An enforced retirement age for
elected officials would be in public interest.

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nostromo
I wonder if Berkshire Hathaway should have forced Warren Buffett to retire at
60, 17 years ago.

For reference: he's more than quadrupled his investors' money in the years
since he turned 60.

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AQuantized
He's 87, so that would be 27 years ago.

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nostromo
Thanks for the (huge) correction.

It's interesting that the vast majority of Warren's wealth came after he
turned 60.

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Shounak
Maybe inflation is part of the reason for this

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dfee
It’s unfortunate to not see life expectancy explicitly mentioned.

There does seem to be a correlation between average age of the congressman and
average years served, though. I’m assuming that reflects the life expectancy
piece.

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daxorid
My understanding of historical life expectancy is that, adjusting for infant
mortality and wars, we aren't significantly longer-lived now than in the 19th
century.

Specifically, once you've made it to 40, you're nearly as likely to make 76
then as now. I will try to dig up a source and edit as soon as I find time.

edit: Found a very useful source, though it only weakly corroborates my
initial comment. The vast majority of gains in life expectancy have indeed
been for infant mortality and early-life infections, but there is still
roughly a seven year differential in the life expectancy of of a forty year
old:

[https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy](https://ourworldindata.org/life-
expectancy)

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moultano
The gains are more modest at 40 than at birth, but still significant.
[https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png)

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dollar
We made structural changes to our government in the 1920s-1930s and this is
one of the long term effects.

1\. Congress on its own decided that 435 representatives was "enough" and
ceased apportionment. Since then representation has diluted from approximately
100000:1 to 1000000:1.

2\. We changed the way the Senate was elected, from a majority of each state's
legislature, to a popular vote.

The result is that we have effectively created 2 Senates. Winning a majority
vote of so many people requires massive funding. Hence, the profound
corruption we live in today.

[http://www.thirty-thousand.org/](http://www.thirty-thousand.org/)

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vkou
If winning a majority vote from the public requires massive funding and
corruption, what, pray tell, does winning a majority vote from a ruling class
require?

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dollar
I'm simply advocating apportionment as the founders intended with Amendment
the First.

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vkou
The founders also very explicitly intended for the aristocracy to control the
government, because the proles (even land-owning ones!) can't be entrusted to
make good decisions.

A lot of what they intended was incredibly self-serving, at the expense of
their subjects.

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aphextron
This is all I can think about these days watching the news. My generation
(millenials) are forced to just sit by and watch as these senile dinosaurs rip
our country to shreds and destroy our standing in the world for their own
blind greed. And the pieces that we will be left to pick up after these
cretins die out may not be enough to put back together.

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surgeryres
At what point though must we consider that we, the American people, elected
these people into office? They are there because we put them there.

To play my own devil's advocate, my perception is that the barrier to entry
into politics, i.e. money, has risen substantially which prevents younger
candidates from even running for office.

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emodendroket
Who are "we"? I didn't vote for them.

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pwinnski
That's how democracy works. If you can convince enough people in your area to
vote for your preferred candidate, you're happy. If not, then not.

Every one of these representatives is there because they got the majority of
votes.

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emodendroket
Taking this idea to its most extreme expression, we would end up saying that a
minority persecuted by a democraticrally-elected government is to blame for
its own persecution, as it failed to convince others to vote against ethnic
cleansing.

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blfr
Despite people's low opinion of politicians they seem to be steadily improving
in their most important skill -- getting reelected.

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lotsofpulp
Voters have low opinions of other voters' politicians. They like their own.
Hence we seem to have quite a hard time getting things done which benefit the
nation as a whole.

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stronglikedan
> They like their own.

I'd say that's true for the vocal minority of cheerleaders, but I would wager
that most people are just voting _against_ other candidates at this point.
I.e., the lesser of two evils.

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lotsofpulp
That's true, I guess there is usually some significant block of voters that
politicians are appeasing to which can't be overcome by the general voting
public on that one issue (such as government employees voting themselves
defined benefit pensions, or a concentrated group of religious people pushing
a religious agenda, or employees of a large employer(s), etc).

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slg
I think there are two important pieces of data that might lend insight into
this. What is the average age of the population as a whole and the average age
of the voting population? It makes sense as the population gets older with the
baby boomers aging that the government also gets older with them. That might
not be "fair" but it is the way representative democracy works. Also no one
currently votes with the frequency and consistency of senior citizens and they
therefore have a disproportional impact on the government. That has been true
as long as I can remember, but has that always been the case?

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rllin
Why is this a priori bad? Take a look at how the short tenures of California
congress has turned California way more populist than most people are
comfortable with.

There are many things wrong with short tenures (not that there aren't things
wrong with long ones). The main ones include turnover of associated staff who
actually know what wheels to grease to get things done. Meanwhile the
"figurehead" actual politician has no time to build up political capital with
his colleagues.

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pwinnski
It's not bad in or of itself, but as the post points out, it correlates with
ever-worsening approval scores.

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cafard
I believe that part of the explanation for the increase is that politics is
more and more a high-stakes business. The parties are reluctant to swap out a
known winner and risk losing a seat. I admit that this does not account for
cases such as Strom Thurmond or Orrin Hatch on the one side or Dianne
Feinstein on the other.

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kingbirdy
Based on the age and tenure graphs, it seems a lot of representatives in their
50s were voted in during the 90s, and relatively few of those have been
replaced. This would be the Baby Boomers coming in to their full political
strength.

However, there seems to be a similar wave of fresh-faced, long-sitting
senators coming in the early 80s, and I'm not sure what generation that would
map to. The "Greatest Generation", perhaps?

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theresistor
At a guess, 1980 marked the rise of the "Christian right" / "religious right"
as organized forces in conservative politics. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority
was founded in 1979, for instance.

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danso
The authors mention "having built a database of the over 13,000 members of
Congress since 1789" but I didn't see a link to their dataset. FWIW, the folks
who contribute to the Github unitedstates repo has historical data in CSV/JSON
form:

[https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-
legislators](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators)

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SilasX
Isn't this (the trend toward longer terms) due to the rewards for seniority
that Congress gives itself, _specifically_ to make it harder to be voted out?

I mean, every time, voters basically face the dilemma: "Oh, he voted for
stupid policies? Cool. He's also the third most senior member. You can replace
him, if you want to start with a new congressman with the least seniority."

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motiw
Something to think about. Congress approval rating is at all time low, about
19%, however years members serve is at all time high

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tibbon
I'd like to see approval rating (when we have them) mapped over this data, and
also some metric for how much they actually got done (bills passed vs brought
to vote?)

I can't help but feel (and I wish I had more data for this) that Congress is
doing less and less over time.

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ardent_uno
It would be better to see the difference between average age of members of
Congress and average age at which people died in the year considered.

What I suspect this would show is that seniority in Congress, at least on a
relative comparison basis, has actually not increased. Length of tenure
obviously has, but the numbers must be put in the context of their age to be
properly interpreted.

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dv_dt
It would be interesting to see other measures of tenure served over a similar
scale. I suspect that a lot of our political problems are multiplied because
the current body of politicians in the US got to step into power earlier, then
due to increasing life expectancy, keep that power longer than any before
them.

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mkempe
It would also be interesting to distinguish the seats that are "inherited"
within political dynasties, as well as the seats that have been buttressed by
gerrymandering.

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thegayngler
I think term limits are the answer here. Twelve years is plenty for a
congressman or senator.

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soheil
This should be adjusted for life expectancy increase.

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Andre_Wanglin
Behold the development of a permanent ruling class, complete with hereditary
dynasties.

