Is Biden America’s Oldest President? No, the record belongs to Madison-Corriere.it

All the talk is about Biden’s age. At 78, he is the oldest president to begin his first termA record previously held by 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 at the start of his second term and 86 at the end. But still In terms of longevity of the era, compared to his predecessors, the current president is no exception.

A Bloomberg analysis calculated that after Biden joked about his age at the White House Correspondents’ Party. suggesting that James Madison was his contemporary. When Madison became America’s fourth president in 1809, he was 57 years old, but the average life expectancy in 18th-century America was 28 years. (significantly reduced by high infant mortality).

When Madison became president — Bloomberg notes — he was twice the age of the majority of people born in the same year, so, Relatively speaking, he is much older than Biden He is on average only 15 years older than those born in the same year (Here’s a graph comparing the ages of presidents to the lifespans of their eras)

So American presidents tend to be older than their contemporaries (more than 9.4 years on average), but in the last thirty years America has had young presidents like Bill Clinton, George W. People like Bush and Barack Obama were under 55 when they started their first terms, so they had a certain stability when it comes to life expectancy. Between 65-70 years (another notable exception was John Fitzgerald Kennedy).

Geriatrician JS at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Another interesting related study is a statistical analysis conducted by Olshansky a few years ago, which found that the majority of presidents (he considered 23 of the 34, deaths from natural causes) lived longer after the presidency than American men born in the same year.

The average life expectancy of the first eight presidents, from George Washington to Martin Van Buren, was 79.8 years, while Americans born during their eras averaged no more than 40.. Some lived exceptionally long lives: Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan lived to be 93 years old, and John Adams and Herbert Hoover lived to be 90 years old.