Gerontocracy

From time to time, usually when in what used to be called a saloon bar, I dilate on the superior arrangements we have in the west for turning over senior management. With the general idea being that no-one should be in a very senior position for more than five years. Perhaps stretching a point to ten years. All power corrupts and all that sort of thing - for more on which see reference 1. There is also the consideration that, other things being equal, performance at eighty is not what it was at sixty. A problem which Shakespeare knew all about hundreds of years before Lord Acton got going. For which see reference 2.

So, for example, it used to be the case that senior civil servants in the UK retired at sixty, which meant that they were unlikely to do much more than five years at the top of the heap. And unlikely to have dementia. In the US, they have a rule that a president may not serve more than two terms. I believe that large public companies have rules or customs which mean that the chaps at the top do not stay there too long.

Unlike the rest of the world, where it is all too likely that someone will scramble to the top of the heap and then sit there until he or she expires. Brushing aside, in the case of Russia and China, constitutional rules about such things - not taking their constitutions quite as seriously as they do in the US. Perhaps getting hold of the armed forces somewhere along the line, just to be on the safe side.

On a good day, I remember about some exceptions before someone in my audience reminds me. So in Australia, we have the chap above. In the US, we have Supreme Court judges who are appointed for life, with quite a lot of them staying the course. And then, here in the UK, we have monarchs who do not do the decent thing and stand down after 50 years on the job.

PS 1: I believe that among the original peoples' of Australia, the older you are, the more status you have, and if you are a man, the more wives you are allowed. Maybe there is less to go wrong there. Maybe they do not often make it to eighty.

PS 2: in the US, they have another age related problem in that large chunks of their life are governed by a short document - the constitution - which was written well over 200 years ago and which it is very difficult to change, let alone update properly.

References

Reference 1: https://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-6/power-corrupts.

Reference 2: King Lear - William Shakespeare - 1603.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/09/country-smells.html. Lord Acton has had a number of outings in these pages over the years. Search of the archive suggests that this one was the first, not long after kick-off.