I want to come back to the pessimism of the old.  Since the old were once young, their pessimism entails disillusionment, including disillusionment about schemes for human betterment, for such schemes are usually founded on hope rather than on experience. The young may have read about the failure of such schemes but the old have lived the failure; and in many areas of human activity book learning is not an adequate substitute for lived experience. . . . Being pessimistic, disillusioned, and cynical, the old, however “wise,” become preoccupied with their own survival and happiness, these being the only goods of certain goodness to them. From that obsession can spring avarice and shamelessness.

A puzzle in Aristotle’s account is why people become more and more pessimistic with age, rather than remaining on a plateau of realism reached when they are in their prime. There is a possible economic explanation for at least one component of the pessimistic outlook of elderly people, the belief that things are getting worse—that they were better in the old days—that the country is “going to Hell in a handbasket.” Over a period of decades, some aspects of the social environment get worse while others get better. It is rational that older people should be more conscious of the things that are getting worse than of the things that are getting better, and vice versa for young people. Many though not all improvements consist of novelties, as distinct from incremental improvements in cost or performance. The elderly, because of the age-related decline in fluid intelligence, have difficulty—incur large costs—in taking advantage of novelties. Thus, innovations in art, fashion, or styles of living are likely to be accepted much more readily by young than by old people; the latter may even think the “innovations” retrograde. At the same time, young people have a less acute sense of what has been lost on the march to progress than old people do. The old actually experienced the good things that are no more. The young can only read about them—and may not bother to do so, having other calls on their time. In sum, the costs of information about the costs of progress will be lower to the old than to the young, but the costs of information about the benefits of progress will be higher, though I admit an exception for cases in which the young take for granted improvements of which the old are acutely aware, such as air conditioning and the polio vaccine.

(Richard A. Posner, Aging and Old Age [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995], 107-8 [footnote omitted])