In this country we don’t have and haven’t had a Nobel Prize (except for two in Medicine for a while) that isn’t in Literature. None, to date, in basic research or Economics.
I interview one from Chemistry, Fraser Stoddart, who at… 81 years old! he has just been signed to the University of Hong Kong to run a dream lab for an astronomical salary, which has made him decide to leave Northwestern University, where he captains a stellar team of young chemists, and where he obtaining, already at the age of 70, revolutionary patents in compounds that today are used in skin care or in the extraction of gold and minerals without polluting rivers.
Stoddart repeats to me what the economists, also Nobel laureates, Kydland and Maskin, who have already passed 70, told me about their colleagues in Spain, who at the height of their career as scientists are retired or deferred (from the age of 60 here they lose influence and leadership). In fact, in Spain no one can continue to work at a public university after the age of 65 (only professors are allowed to reach the age of 70).
Are you surprised that China and the US, on the other hand, are distinguished by having their creators, scientists and teachers generate value with their talent, experience and leadership for as many years as they want as long as someone, public or private, wants to hire them?
Doesn’t this flexibility have something to do with the fact that the US and China, which have the most senior researchers, are also the two research superpowers? And if Spain and the EU slack off on innovation – today they suspend artificial intelligence – to give us more facilities to retire than to continue being productive?
My vote as a boomer takes into account the options that give professionals more freedom to choose whether they want to continue working or not – and contributing, of course, to Social Security – without being penalized for it.
At the end of the day, progress is nothing but the broadening of our ability to choose and everything should be facilitated if we choose to continue sharing what we learn beyond an increasingly relative age.
