[closeparen]

Life has its seasons. Children learn, young adults are passionate, older adults are more relaxed but also more set in their ways. A society where the older-adult phase dwarfs the others in terms of duration/population/power probably does make less progress, in the same way that a society overweight on hothead adolescents has more wars.

[radu_floricica]

You're probably young yourself, right? Or for some reason haven't had a chance yet to observe what old age does to cognitive abilities. Old people aren't set in their ways because they lived a long time, but because they literally don't have the capacity to change. It's very much a hardware problem. And it's masked by the fact that dementia is taking the ability for novel thought first and fixed patterns last - so what we're actually seeing around us is people (apparently) functioning perfectly at 60, when in fact they already have years of cognitive decline masked by doing perfectly well on decades of acquired skills and habits.

Actually fixing dementia, even without life extension, would probably be a social revolution easily comparable with gender equality.