Why Ageism Never Gets Old
18th December 2017
How To Be A Progressive: Take some random noun, add ‘-ism’ and the end, and start whining.
This sharp shift in the age of authority derives from increasingly rapid technological change. In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer’s “half life of knowledge”—the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete—was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it’s five years at most, and, for a software engineer, less than three. Traditionally, you needed decades in coding or engineering to launch a successful startup: William Shockley was forty-five when he established Fairchild Semiconductor, in 1955. But change begets faster change: Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five when they started Google, in 1998; Mark Zuckerberg was nineteen when he created Facebook, in 2004.
So there’s actually a good reason for preferring young people.
Like the racist and the sexist, the ageist rejects an Other based on a perceived difference.
Well, ol’ Tad has the lingo down, I’ll give him that.