Welcome to the age of the late bloomer

Biden is a symbol of the times

Once the brouhaha of the immediate moment is gone, we’ll be able to look back at Joe Biden and see just how remarkable that a man in his eighties could be a competent President. This is part of a much larger trend. Older people are living the sort of lives that would be unrecognisable to their forebears.

Many of us can be more like Joe Biden today than ever before, continuing to be productive and active well into what used to be our dotage.  In politics, we’re apt to call this trend for older elected representatives a gerontocracy. But beyond partisanship, there has been a blossoming of talent in the later years of life.

Nearly one in five Americans over the age of sixty-five are in work—that’s nearly double what it was thirty-five years ago. Older American workers today are just as likely to have a degree as their younger counterparts, which wasn’t true in the 1980s, and many of them are in full-time employment. They’re also more likely to be self-employed than younger workers.  This is all testament to the value that the skills, knowledge, and experience older people bring to work.

There are now more than a million workers over the age of sixty-five in the UK—that’s 11.5% of people still working in retirement, double what it was in 2000. The over sixty-fives are the age group that has seen the largest increase in employment since 2000. The second largest increase was among fifty to sixty-four year olds. Some of this was caused by the raising of the state pension age, but it’s also testament to the value that the skills, knowledge, and experience older people bring to work.

But there’s more to be done. We have the thirty under thirty list but not the fifty over fifty. There’s a persistent belief that the most remarkable things are achieved by the young.

We forget that John Goodenough, the inventor of lithium batteries, was forcibly retired from Oxford the year after his invention, or that Ynés Mexía started studying botany aged fifty-one and went on to discover fifty new species of plants.

We are seeing more stories of late bloomers in the news. At the start of the year, a video on Instagram went viral. It told the story of Betty Soskin, who became a park ranger aged eighty-five and only retired at a hundred. Larry David is returning for a final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, aged 76. He didn’t get interested in comedy until he was in university and spent his twenties and thirties developing his skills. The 2023 Oscars saw both the best actress and best supporting actress awards go to women in their sixties. In 2021, Anthony Hopkins won best actor aged 81 and Youn Yuh-Jung won best supporting actress aged 73. The average age of female winners is 39. David Attenborough is making a new documentary in his nineties.

You don’t have to be old to be a late bloomer either. When June Huh won the Fields medal in 2017, it was widely remarked that he hadn’t been interested in mathematics until graduate school, akin, the writer Kevin Harnett put it, to picking up a tennis racket for the first time aged 18 and winning Wimbledon aged 20.

Nor is this sort of late starting so rare. A new study of late bloomers in American education found that in the people born between 1930 and 1970, 20% of them who had graduated from university by age 50 only did so after they turned 30. This trend is a large part of what closes gender and race gaps. The gap in graduation rates between men and women born got 12.45% smaller by the time they turned 50. Each successive generation contains both more early bloomers and more late bloomers.

It’s hard to see people’s potential as they age. But circumstances can change that. Without the outbreak of the Second World War, Eisenhower would have retired from the army in 1940. Sometimes it is technology that gives people a new way of flourishing. Helen Downie only started painting aged fifty. By posting her work on Instagram, she gained 250,000 followers and collaborated with Gucci.

As the Biden debate rolls on, and whatever the outcome, we should remember that we don’t need to pick between young talent and old. We don’t need to choose between the thirty under thirty or the fifty over fifty.

We can, and should, have both.