Bryan Caplan presents us with his dilemma:
When I’m old, I want to be the octogenarian that the Young Turks
come to with their crazy new ideas. I don’t want to be the senior
professor that the whippersnapper assistant profs avoid. Above all
else, I never want to be a lunch tax – I like lunch too much.Unfortunately, by the time I’m 80 I’ll probably be too befuddled to
figure out how to do any of this. So I want to figure it out now, tape
it on my office wall, and refer to it when the time is ripe.…Not mentioning any names, what
are the biggest social mistakes elderly faculty make? What are some
simple strategies for them to ingratiate themselves to the next
generation? If you’ve got some good advice, I’ll thank you when I’m 80.
If I remember!
I remain a fan of Richard Posner’s book on old age, one of his best. I ask Bryan: would he still take the advice that his 12-year-old self might have taped to a door? Neurological changes aside, the elderly simply have less incentive to be deferential and to court their younger colleagues; Aristotle knew this too.
Bryan’s best lunchtime bet is that, when he is eighty, I am still around at ninety.
An alternative strategy is to find — today — the eighty-year olds who are still fascinating and run your new ideas by them. Most of them will gladly receive you. I used to fly out to Ann Arbor occasionally to meet with the great Marvin Becker, but in general I haven’t done much of this in my life. Call that my failing but it’s another reason why so many eighty-year-olds don’t bother to appeal to Young Turks as a constituency.
Overall I am struck by how little beneficial trade there is between the generations. I find this one of the most striking stylized facts of the social sciences; one simple model is that people don’t want to leave groups that produce fun and high relative status for them, and that is what switching across the generations usually entails.
Do you all have any other advice for Bryan?
“Overall I am struck by how little beneficial trade there is between the generations.”
But what about the written word? I’m middle-aged. I don’t often travel to meet and chat with the elderly, or the young for that matter; but I read their stuff, and also engage in a fair bit of correspondence.
The old have little incentive to learn – why build human capital when it will soon depreciate? – thus they are annoying at lunch because they don’t really listen.
Thus, I have two predictions. 1) Old people will be less annoying as life expectancy increases. 2) Robin Hanson will be the least annoying old person because he expects to live forever. Thus, my advice to Bryan is that we need to keep Robin around – of course, he already knows that.
Within econ, the young are often focused on the latest and greatest narrow topic; technique is valued over ideas. The elders are more likely to be out of touch (re: the latest whiz bang) and also more likely to be focused on broader syntheses (aka “big ideas”). This can make for difficulties of translation, with the young being just as much at fault. Given this unavoidable bias, the best thing for the elder is to keep in touch with the general trends and make some effort to frame his ideas in ways that seem relevant for the young’uns. Or at least be entertaining. Generally, the second best course of action is to become genuinely interested in hearing about the work the young are doing.
The biggest mistake elderly faculty make is not retiring. Nobody knows what to do with this unproductive tenured geriatric deadwood that sucks up valuable resources.
Quite the opposite is the case in the business world, where the trend is toward retirement at ridiculously young ages. 55 is the new 65, and all that.
What Bryan fails to realize is the valuable social function the “old” play in throwing cold water on new ideas. I agree with Karl Popper that most new ideas are wrong. So that the uncritical exuberance of the “young” needs to be tempered by the negativity of the old. But out of that conflict good new ideas can come. The mistake that Bryan makes is that he wants the young to like him. Sorry, that is not what the growth of knowledge is about. A popular professor is not always good one. The growth of knowledge can be painful. Bad new ideas may cause big disappointments in those who think thay have discovered the New World, but have not.
The old have little incentive to learn – why build human capital when it will soon depreciate?
I don’t buy this. It’s way too stylized.
Many people simply enjoy learning for its own sake. I assume this is particularly common among those who have followed academic careers. Also, there is the question of alternative activities. Physical activity gets limited as one ages. Few 80-year olds play tennis or go camping, so they may be more rather than less inclined to spend time reading.
The notion that old people will simply eat, sleep, and watch TV until the end comes is not only insulting but wrong.
There’s a tale of an old boy at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, who had been appointed before they had a retirement age. He just went on and on. When he turned 80 he remarked that he was no longer an anomoly, he had become an abuse.
Alex & Aaron -
Whatever were (or are) things like in your predecessor family setting?
And those of you focusing on “Economics” as a subject of principal interest seem unaware of the constancy of change in perceptions of what is “important” and what we think we know.
There is a scent of over-generalization here. Individuals “age” differently, just as they differ in all other aspects of living.
There are many who are as out of place with their own “age group” as are most of the commentators here are with their own “age groups.” Many don’t live in “retirement” groups – unlike those many “academics” who have retreated into the cocoons of academic environments, so those there should not be shocked that those who age in those environments do not represent a desirable future, or companionable present.
As for not listening: By one’s 80s (this writer is into year 84), by then one has seen and smelled many a Narcissus, and while each has its beauty and moment, the charm on offer is ephemeral.
As to continued learning: those of us so moved have grasped that it is a form of hunger, possibly unquenchable thirst – not a matter of self-gratification or ego embelishment, or the joy of being drunk from the Pyerian Spring.
It is all highly individual; and many of the views expressed indicate a sad future in aging and its relationships for those with such views.
R. Richard Schweitzer
s24rrs@aol.com
the internet may be a great leveler for this.
I wonder what share of the people who comment here are of retirement age, but nobody realizes it?
Not every elder who is amusing and chock full of interesting anecdotes is a teacher – if by teacher you refer to those once in the profession.
Spend time in a retirement home and you’ll quickly see that generalizations as to who best communicates with the young are out the window. Wisdom and humor abounds from the unlikeliest of sources. As does inner vitality of course.
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