That's exactly the spot where I disagree. Understanding political-economy properly requires a certain amount of cynicism that can only come from observing the world for a while. Very different from programming skill. In programming, "this time it's different" can be true sometimes, we've only got 60-odd years of programming. In political economy, after 3,000 years or so, it's almost never the case.
For what it's worth, I didn't feel that way when I was 22.
Cynicism hinders understanding, though it may be a product of understanding, and while cynicism may come from age, its a whole lot more related to particular experiences interacting with underlying personality.
> For what it's worth, I didn't feel that way when I was 22.
For what it's worth, I might have been more inclined to your simplistic paean to the magical powers of age and the value of cynicism when I was 22 -- or at least 17-18. At 40, not so much.
Note that I wasn't really arguing from authority except when giving him investment advice. Also note that I could tell his age from his arguments.
Its really not. If you are trying to evaluate how good of an idea someone is likely to come up with, their scope of understanding of economics and past efforts in that field is relevant, and age is an extremely poor proxy for that. (It's exactly the same problem as using age alone as a proxy for to measure programming skill would be.)
If you have an actual idea in front of you, its better to just evaluate that rather than the source.
> Everyone thinks they have a simple way to fix everything when they're 22. By the time you're 30-40 it's amazing how much smarter the rest of the world got.
That's not universally true, and to the extent it is true, its significantly about increased focus on near-term self (or immediate-circle) interests rather than increased knowledge -- there's a reason why major advancements more often come out of work people do very early in their career.