Just sayin'....

A quick Google search of the phrase, “stupid old people” brought up no fewer than 665,000 hits.  While the majority of these were supposedly humorous or wry comments, along with jokes and numerous videos of “funny stupid old people,” there was at least one fairly convincing scientific article that showed older people are, in fact, more prone to making stupid decisions. The gist of it is as follows:

Older people make worse decisions under risk than younger ones...Researchers asked subjects to choose some bets with known payoffs. And they found that whereas 52% of under-40s made the right choice--in terms of maximizing expected payoffs--only 32% of over-60s did so...In particular, older people were more likely to do worse as the number of bets they were asked to choose from increased. They were more bewildered when confronted with greater choice...

Other studies have documented that processing slows down dramatically, meaning that old people work harder to figure out problems that would have taken them far less time in their early adult years. And these are people who aren’t suffering from dementia—just the normal aging process.

Every rule has its exceptions; there are plenty of brilliant, engaged elders who defy the odds. And this group appears to share certain characteristics (staying mentally and physically active, for example) which could imply that cognitive decline isn't inevitable.

I’ve met a fair number of these individuals, some of them quite illustrious. It may be fitting (or just name-dropping) for me to mention my encounter with the historian Will Durant, as this month marks the 30th anniversary of his passing.

At that point I wasn’t even a cub reporter, but a mere high school student with enough moxie to think that Will and Ariel Durant would let me interview them for my class assignment (a fairly straightforward one: just talk to some old people about the way things were.) I looked them up in Who’s Who, sent a note—and in a week or so I got a personal letter back from Dr. Durant inviting me to spend half an hour with them at their home. 

They fit the requisite “old” category—he was 91 and she was 78, but in all other ways they were atypical. My shyness and total lack of experience as an interviewer allowed the couple to engage in a spirited debate on various topics; at one point Ariel took over and started asking Will questions—while I recorded it all. One exchange I remember vividly:

Ariel: What are future hopes and plans and aspirations?

Will: Well, that’s not a question to ask a man who’s 91 years old, darling—I have no future aspirations!

But he was wrong about that.  The two of them were still hard at work on a planned (but never completed) volume of their popular “Story of Civilization” series; they made TV appearances and published a joint memoir a year or so after I met them. And when they died in 1981, just two weeks apart—at 96 and 83—they’d been working productively almost to the end.

So the next time anyone (including myself) makes a dismissive remark about “stupid old people,” let’s all remember the wonderful exceptions—and hope that maybe we’ll be one of them.

Will & Ariel Durant