Populists Like Late Bloomers

Late bloomers … possess qualities that can only be acquired through time and experience. They tend to be more curious, compassionate, resilient and wise than younger people of equal talent. (more)

We don’t treat people as equals in our society; some are seen as more valuable than others. And a key question is: how fast do we learn who is more valuable? The faster that we learn, the faster we can successfully sort people into the more versus less valuable, and the more strongly success and respect will correlate with merit. But the longer it takes to learn who is more valuable, the less we can infer about who is good from who has succeeded so far. 

A populist culture will pander more to the typical person, who wants to believe that he or she is really more valuable than their success so far suggests. An elitist culture, in contrast, will pander more to the typical elite, who wants to believe that his or her current high success level is a strong indicator of their higher merit. So is our culture populist or elitist? 

One big clue comes from our attitudes toward late bloomers. The harder it is to tell quality early in life, the more often that people who seemed low quality early in life will be revealed as high quality later in life. That is, in the world that populists want to believe in, there are more late bloomers. So a populist culture should more expect and celebrate late bloomers. An elitist culture, in contrast, should expect few late bloomers, as quality is quickly revealed early in life. Both should expect that at older ages a higher fraction of elites are late bloomers.

The tech industry famously prefers young workers, and rejects older workers, and so takes a more elitist stance. The high status of that industry suggests that our larger culture is also more elitist. Finance, management consulting, and athletics are also high status areas that prefer younger workers who are quickly sorted into high versus low value. Management and politics, in contrast, usually prefer older workers. Overall I’d say our culture leans elitist, though I admit this is hard to tell.

Note that the degree to which people want to believe more in late bloomers depends both on their status and on their age; the strongest difference is that mid-aged unsuccessful people want to believe in late blooming, while mid-aged successful people don’t want to believe in that. Early in life, the indicators are weak, and so everyone can believe that they will eventually succeed. And late in life, people have mostly been sorted, and there’s relatively little chance left for reversals of fortune. It is in the middle of life that the successful most want to believe the game is over, while others most want to believe the game has hardly begun. 

Within traditional gender roles, it takes longer to evaluate men than women. Women are traditionally evaluated more on beauty, fertility, and nurturing, which are revealed earlier. Men are evaluated more on fame, wealth, and career success, which are revealed later. Thus traditionally, men were more the late bloomers. This implies that the populist stance made more sense regarding men, and the elitist stance made more sense regarding women. 

This implied that when men and women paired up with others of the same age, men could more reliably see what they were getting in female partners, while women were taking more of a chance on male partners. So women who prefer older men would tend to believe more in late blooming for men, and thus take a more populist attitude. Similarly, men who prefer younger women would believe less in late blooming for women.  

I was personally a late bloomer; I started my Phd at the age of 34, with two kids age 0 and 2 at the time. I also chose to marry a woman who was four years older than me. So I guess that leans me toward populism regarding how fast value is revealed. Though now that I’m getting relatively old, I guess I’m less vested in such opinions. 

Added 29May: The new book Range argues that late blooming correlates with a more generalist strategy. The longer you search for an area in which to specialize, the more general skills you collect.