Commentary
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been making headlines for scrutinizing the spending habits of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
As expected, DOGE has faced considerable criticism, including claims that the young age of some employees is a liability. According to some critics, their youth and inexperience—all are under 26 years old—calls their competence and capabilities into question.
The assumption underlying such criticism is that proficiency and expertise are the exclusive products of years spent in the field, and that insight and innovation emerge only after a long apprenticeship under the tutelage of older, more seasoned minds. However, intellectual history reveals a more nuanced reality.
The idea that experience is the ultimate proxy for capability is deeply ingrained in our cultural assumptions, but it is a claim that does not withstand scrutiny. Indeed, some of history’s most profound insights and innovations have come not from those weighed down by decades of experience, but from youthful minds unburdened by convention.
Consider Albert Einstein, who at the age of 26 formulated the special theory of relativity, overturning long-held Newtonian physics. Isaac Newton himself was in his early 20s when he began the groundbreaking work that would define modern science. Évariste Galois was still in his teens when he laid the groundwork for group theory, an area of mathematics that would later underpin much of modern algebra. The pattern is evident: youthful intellects, unencumbered by rigid mental frameworks, have often been the catalysts of transformative change.
Our society, however, remains fixated on experience as an irreplaceable credential. We assume that wisdom accrues incrementally, that it must be earned over time through hard-won struggle. But this is a narrow and misleading account of intellectual progress. Youthful minds, by their very nature, possess a cognitive plasticity that allows them to make leaps of intuition and imagination that older minds, steeped in habit and conventional wisdom, often struggle to achieve.
History provides ample evidence of this contention. Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus“ at 19, a work that remains foundational to literary and philosophical discourse. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, by 17, was already a court musician in Salzburg, composing some of his most innovative works before his 25th birthday. Friedrich Nietzsche, appointed professor at Basel at 24, was already developing the ideas that would later upend Western moral philosophy. These examples should give us pause before we casually dismiss anyone on the basis of their youth.
It also strikes me that the issue at play is not merely the age of the DOGE employees, but a deeper cultural tendency to conflate credentials with competence. There is a widening chasm between credentialing and true education, as institutions prioritize formal qualifications over substantive intellectual growth. Our society—whether in academia, business, or politics—places immense value on professional titles, hierarchical seniority, and institutional affiliations, often at the expense of genuine insight and ability. This deference to authority is anti-intellectual. It discourages diversity of thought, stifles innovation, and entrenches a status quo where ideas are judged not on their intrinsic merit, but on the perceived prestige of their source.
More broadly, we live in an era that fetishizes “lived experience.” This concept, while not without merit, has been taken to absurd lengths. It is assumed that only those who have personally undergone a particular experience are qualified to speak about it. Yet as Frederick the Great reportedly quipped when his generals objected to taking university courses—insisting that their battlefield experience rendered further study unnecessary—“A mule that has carried a pack for ten campaigns under Prince Eugene of Savoy is still a mule.” Experience, in other words, does not necessarily produce understanding, let alone wisdom.
To be sure, experience can have advantages. It can cultivate prudence, patience, and a depth of understanding that comes only with time. But it can also ossify into dogma, producing minds that are reflexively cynical, incapable of recognizing new possibilities. (There is more than a little truth to the cliche of the grumpy old man.) True innovation, by contrast, often requires an openness that experience alone cannot provide. As Marcel Proust observed, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”
None of this is to suggest that youth is a guarantee of brilliance, any more than age is a guarantee of wisdom. But to reduce competence to the question of age—to assume, as so many do, that youth is a handicap rather than an asset—is to ignore the historical record. Again and again, it has been young minds that have reshaped our understanding of the world.
Rather than dismissing Mr. Musk’s young employees for their lack of credentials or experience, we should recognize that it is often the young who inject fresh perspectives and bring to their tasks an intellectual agility along with a fearless willingness to challenge orthodoxy—qualities that have long been the engines of innovation and progress.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
