It’s really great when a chart tells a story. Your chart comparing job categories and median ages in Eva Xiao’s Datawatch piece “Alarm grows over rise of US gerontocracy” (Report, September 18) tells such as story.
It shows that at median age 19, the core job category is working in a restaurant, at 47 it is being a lawyer, and by 65 it’s the median age of the Senate. And the story? In their late teens, people work in restaurants to fund their way through college. By their mid-forties they’ve made it as a lawyer and go into politics reaching the Senate just as they make retirement age. It all makes for a coherent story (and one that can be plotted on Shakespeare’s “Seven ages of man”).
Peter Backman
London N3, UK
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