Average age in online economic forums is pushing 45

The average age of people debating economics online is pushing 45

How old are the people who argue about money on the internet? Forty-five, and rising. That is the estimate that comes up most often in Spanish-language digital economic communities, and the one that best matches the self-reported ages that trickle in whenever someone asks the question: forty-somethings who signed up at 23, veterans admitting to a freshly turned 60, and one holdout who declares 77. The realistic range runs from 40 to 65. Below 25, almost nobody.

The three camps fighting over the number

The most frequently cited estimate puts the average age at around 45. A second camp pushes it up to 60, pointing to the accumulation of profiles that have been writing in the same place for over a decade. And then there are the individual declarations, the hardest data to fake: a 77-year-old admitting he camps out in a tent in the Sierra de la Demanda mountain range and boasting of looking a year younger, and another who turns 50 in two months and insists nobody would guess him over 49 and a half.

The one figure nobody disputes is baldness. Most of them are bald, with apologies to the Swiss-mesh rug sported by a certain British secret agent. It is the most reliable generational marker of all.

The generational renewal that never comes

The problem is not age, it is rigidity. Those who joined at twenty are still there at forty, not out of loyalty, but because there is nobody to replace them. Some put it bluntly: there has been no renewal, it is the same people repeating the same jokes for fifteen years. The curve does not decline through departures, it declines through death, as the veterans themselves admit when they joke that you join at twenty and only leave when you die.

The full demographic calculation —joiners, departures, average tenure and the profile of those who left— paints a picture that flatters no one, and that only makes sense when you look at where young people have migrated: to shorter formats with fewer writing demands. Long, argued-out conversation has been left without a talent pipeline.

Nine out of ten are men, and mental age is another matter

The second structural trait is the gender bias: between 85% and 90% of those writing are male. The third is the recurring joke about maturity: the average physical age would be 30 years, and the mental age, 30 months. A harsher variant holds that 80% have not reached the mental age of moving out of their parents' home and would still need guardianship to run their own lives. The comparison with a school playground comes up more than once, not as an insult, but as a diagnosis.

Nobody has run the survey that would settle the question. Someone proposed it and it was left hanging, which is the most elegant way of not knowing the answer for fifteen years. So we carry on with rough estimates about a community that has spent over a decade arguing about other people's money with figures nobody verifies. Comforting.