This article was published in the IAST magazine, 2024/2025 winter issue, exploring the power of belief, from ancient rituals to 21st-century politics. Discover the full PDF here or email us at com@tse-fr.eu for a printed copy.
Produced by IAST and University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute, the third season of Crossing Channels came to close in front of a live audience at the Institut Français in London in June 2024. This was a fitting venue for a joint enterprise between the UK and France’s great universities, said former BBC correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, who is stepping down as host of the podcast. In this episode, ahead of Joe Biden’s historic decision to make way for new talent, our experts drew on their research in economics and anthropology to discuss the need for constraints on elderly leaders.
Diane Coyle (Bennett Institute)
A good leader needs a portfolio of attributes: technical skill, age and experience, judgment, a range of people around you. Do you want somebody who knows how to operate things or fresh ideas? You might say there should be a maximum age for a position of responsibility, just as we have a minimum age. But people age differently so it should be about testing their fitness for the role.
One of the issues is older people’s lack of understanding about rapidly changing technology. Medical innovations, genetic technology and zero-carbon energy... Can Joe Biden and Donald Trump evaluate generative AI policies? You might be addressing leaders who are still printing out their emails.
We've got an ageing population, so compulsory retirement is not going to happen. It would get rid of some very good people and breach principles of non-discrimination over personal characteristics. The things to go for are term limits and reduction in the voting age so that younger people have more influence.
Ruth Mace (UCL, IAST)
Do cultural norms change because the whole population changes its view? Or do we have to wait for generations to die out? Overwhelmingly, it's the latter. Attitudes to homosexuality are a major outlier; otherwise, it’s frightening how much change requires older cohorts to move on. The younger generation might be looking at very different leadership criteria, like Greta Thunberg’s moral integrity.
Leaders may be hanging on just because they're powerful. An awful lot of the world has gangster politics. If you killed a lot of people on the way up, you won’t live very long on the way down. So, you get rid of any rules that force you to retire.
Leaders should retire much earlier than 70 because our mental and physical capacities get bad quite rapidly. In pre-war Japan, the father at 60 was meant to pass the running of the household to his son. I'm a hypocrite: over 60 and not retiring. That's why you have to get me out.
Paul Seabright (IAST)
Over the past 30 years, chief executives in Europe and America have been getting older by about a year per decade. I’m not worried about whether older leaders are better or worse on average, but what happens in a crisis? Future leaders will be increasingly troubled by dementia and may be very difficult to replace.
We tend to select leaders for skills like delivering a good speech. We can all tell whether Biden is less skillful in getting down steps. But it’s much harder to assess his judgment about dealing with aggression in the Asia Pacific, and that can have world-shattering consequences.
We haven't thought creatively enough about how to use the wisdom, expertise and experience of older people. But to be able to launch a war at 82 or 85, cutting decades off other people’s life expectancy, would seem a breach of the social contract. We need a younger compulsory retirement age for those who make critical, potentially existential decisions.
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Our podcast series is back for a fourth season, with a new host and fresh perspectives. Drawing on expertise from IAST and University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute, former BBC journalist Richard Westcott will lead discussion of complex challenges including 21stcentury prisons, mental health, AI technologies, and democratic survival. Listen to the latest episodes at www.iast.fr/podcast
