by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: July 28, 2009

Legislative gerontocracy guarantees social and economic stagnation.

Many congressmen today were born before television was a commonplace household item. These entrenched dinosaurs are making decisions on topics ranging from net neutrality to regulation of the financial sector. We have the spectacle of people like the corrupt 86 year old Ted Stevens, mentally reckless 72 year old John McCain (with choice of Palin being most telling about deterioration of cognitive faculties), and 92 year old Robert Byrd (who had the rank of Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan).

The average age of a member of the House is 56 years and 62 years for a Senator . Improving medicine and incumbent friendly tools have driven up the average congressional age in the last few decades. The stranglehold on major important congressional committees by the oldest legislators is resulting in a gerontocracy to rival that of China and Soviet Union in the 1980s.

People who are well past the legal age of retirement (already way too high in the workaholic United States) are simply not cognitively fit for a number of key governmental functions in the 21st century. Things such as modernizing the country, managing cutting edge technological developments to maximum material advantage, conducting high stakes geopolitics, being on the same cultural page as an average elite (the playboy Ivy League lawyers are definitely incapable of being on same page as an average American), or futuristic interdisciplinary national/global strategy.

The reality of political power growing along with the numbers of years spent in Congress has resulted in United States falling further and further behind the developed world. The lack of serious political competition in the archaic political system (where oligarch clans throw support to one or both of the structurally allowed parties) makes it extra easy for senior citizens to keep making and proposing laws.

As such, the senior citizens have divided up United States into regional spheres of influence with only some battleground states providing a neural cognitive challenge to privileged incumbents (incumbents have close to 90% re-election rate). The recent event of Republican party being pushed towards a true regional party status will not help matters.

Interestingly enough, the average age of the executive seems to be falling due to the extra special cultural attention placed on this spot as well as the viciousness of competition. The fall in age (of those occupying the powerful

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