Is Biden the oldest president in America? No, the record belongs to Madison-Corriere.it

All the talk is about Biden’s age. At age 78, he was the oldest president to begin his first termThis is a record that previously belonged to his predecessor, Donald Trump, who began his term in 2017 at the age of 70. If Biden wins in 2024, he will break another record: he will be 82 years old at the beginning of his second term, 86 years old. A year in the end. but In terms of the age of the era, compared to his predecessors, the current president is no exception.

Bloomberg’s analysis calculated it after Biden himself made a joke about his age at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Which indicates that James Madison is his contemporary. When Madison became the fourth president of the United States in 1809, he was 57 years old, but in 18th-century America life expectancy was about 28 years. (It has decreased significantly due to the high infant mortality rate.)

When Madison became president – Bloomberg points out – he was twice the age of most people born in the same year, and therefore, Relatively speaking, he was much older than Biden He is only 15 years older on average than those born in the same year as him (Below is a chart comparing the ages of presidents to the average life expectancy of their era).

Therefore, American presidents tend to be older than their contemporaries (on average 9.4 years older), but in the past 30 years America has had a certain consistency of young presidents like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama who were under 55 when they began their first term, when life expectancy was between 65-70 years (another notable exception was John Fitzgerald Kennedy).

Another interesting study in this regard is the statistical analysis conducted a few years ago by J.S. Olshansky, an aging expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reveals that the majority of presidents (taking into account 23 out of 34 deaths from natural causes) have, even after the presidency, lived longer than American males born in the same year as them.

The average age of the first eight presidents, from George Washington to Martin Van Buren, was 79.8 years, while the average age of Americans born in their era was no more than 40 years.. Some were exceptionally long-lived: Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan lived to be 93, and John Adams and Herbert Hoover lived to be 90.