Effects of Aging

Report from a sample size of 1

The effect on the presidential candidates of aging is currently a hot political topic. Almost everyone commenting on the subject has an axe to grind, a conclusion he wants people to reach, which makes it hard to know what claims to believe. I, however, have a source of information on the subject that, though limited — my sample size is one — I can at least trust, since it is my own experience. I am a year older than Donald Trump, two years younger than Joe Biden, so my first hand evidence of the effect of aging on me may be at least relevant to the effect on them.

In some ways the effect is surprisingly low. Two potentially life-threatening problems, a blocked artery and a failing valve, were solved by miracles of modern medicine without even cutting me open. My physical strength, measured by the ability to get the center pole of my and my wife’s pavilion — we do historical recreation as a hobby — up by myself, has not visibly declined. It has been at the limit of my strength for many years and I can still, barely, do it.

My physical strength is still there, but not my endurance. After a couple of hours of physical activity I start feeling sleepy. That is not often a problem in my current undemanding life but it might be for a president.

The main decline has been mental. For most of my life I have been able to learn a poem I liked by reading it a few times. I no longer can. My daughter observed, a year or two back, that I sometimes told her the same thing multiple times. I am a less safe driver than I was not because my reflexes have slowed, though they probably have, but because I am less able to keep my attention on driving. I can, mostly do, try to compensate by not listening to satellite radio or a CD of songs while I drive but there is no way I can block my mind, which is usually thinking of something more interesting than driving.

A related problem is the failure to pay attention. I have never been very good at parallel processing, doing two things at the same time, but I have gotten worse. Several times recently I put a saucepan on high, intending to turn it down when it got close to a boil, started doing something else while waiting, and had my attention called back to my cooking by the smell of burning food. Several times I have left a saucepan at a simmer, intending to cook it for an hour or so, and had my wife or daughter ask me, several hours later, if it should still be on.

Most of these are relevant to the job Trump and Biden are competing for. The president has other people to drive for him but there will be negotiations with political allies or rival heads of state where he needs to keep his attention focused, avoid letting himself be distracted. Repeating the same conversation — one recent news story reported Biden starting and ending a meeting with an EU leader with the same anecdote — is a pretty clear signal that he is not paying attention to the conversation, running on autopilot. Neither Biden nor Trump needs to memorize poetry but as president they would need to continually add new information to their body of stored knowledge in order to do their job, keep up with a changing world. Paying attention to multiple things is a much bigger part of their job requirement than of mine.

That brings me to a more concerning problem. I have learned a fair number of computer games over my lifetime, but none in recent years — learning a new one feels like too much work. I occasionally read a new book but fewer than in the past, am more inclined to reread instead. The drive to learn new things is not entirely gone, but it is substantially weakened.

When it first became clear that Covid was going to be a serious problem I was on a speaking trip in Europe. It did not occur to me that there was any reason to change my plans. My younger son emailed, urging me to cancel the remaining talks, fly home, self-quarantine. My initial reaction was that he was being unreasonable, as young people sometimes are. I had been alive for more than seventy years and never experienced a plague serious enough to require a major change in plans.

Then I remembered my past thoughts on the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence, inspired by observing my own father. Fluid intelligence responds to a problem by figuring out a solution, crystallized by remembering the solution you found last time. As people age they tend to shift from fluid to crystallized, perhaps because the old have a larger stock of past solutions, less time to benefit by new and possibly improved answers to old questions. It occurred to me that I was dealing with a new situation on the basis of past experience not obviously relevant. I cancelled my last two talks, flew home and self-quarantined with my family — fortunately we all get along — until a vaccine became available.

That experience may be relevant to the qualifications of both candidates. We live in a rapidly changing world. Very likely either of them will deal with new problems by remembering what worked last time instead of thinking seriously about what will work this time.

At the moment, the election is between two candidates, both old. That may change if Biden is persuaded to withdraw but I do not expect he will be; the same effect of aging that made me reluctant to change my plans makes him reluctant to change his. So it is worth asking what we know about the difference in the effect of aging on two men, one three years older than the other.

The debate, the reason Biden’s age has become a hot topic, gives some evidence. I was in a debate about a week before Biden’s.¹ Like him I was in poor shape, short of sleep and suffering from jet lag due to the three hour time change from California to New Hampshire. I was a little worried about my ability to improvise arguments — my debate probably required more thinking on my feet than theirs — under the circumstances, but it did not turn out to be a problem. The debate has been webbed, so you can check that claim for yourself. I can at least report that, under the Soho voting rules, which judge the winner by the change in audience sentiment between before and after, I won.

Biden lost his debate, judged by the polls since. He performed so badly, pretty clearly due to age related problems, that prominent Democrats started to suggest that he be replaced by a younger candidate. He is, in that respect and by that evidence, in worse shape than I am. That is not surprising, given how much more strenuous the life of a president is than the life of a retired professor.

Trump showed no visible signs of age related problems. He told a lot of lies but they were obviously deliberate; he told them well, projected nonsense with great confidence. Between voters who do not know if his claims are true and voters who don’t care, that looks like a winning strategy.

If you were choosing one of them to do a difficult task that he wanted to do, Trump would be the obvious pick. The problem with him, perhaps even more than with Biden, is that the task he wants to do is not the task I want done.

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1. At Porcfest on June 19^th, discussed briefly in a recent post.