(New York City) One of the recommendations of our major recent report, “All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement,” is to experiment with lowering the voting age to 17 in local and state elections. Voting for the first time at 18 is a bit problematic, because that is just when many people have left the communities in which they grew up for work or college. They are suddenly in networks of other 18-year-olds, in which everyone is new to politics, and less connected to older adults. On the other hand, if you could vote at 17, you could register in school and learn about the political system and how to vote in your social studies class.

In November, Takoma Park, MD tried it. Their 16- and 17-year-old residents voted in the city’s municipal election. Their turnout was 16.9%, nearly double the 8.5% turnout rate of eligible residents 18 and up.

This is a tiny data point–one election in one small community. A possible explanation for the respectable turnout is that it was the first time; there was a “buzz” about the new right to vote. We know that the first presidential election in which 18-21’s could vote, 1972, set a turnout record never since matched. But the more optimistic explanation is that Takoma Park kids heard about the election in school and were encouraged to vote. That could happen every year.

This is a interesting pair of graphs produced by an economist named Hannes Schwandt. Graph A shows people’s reported life satisfaction at each age (the square dots) and their expectations for how satisfied they will be five years later (open dots). Most young people expect to see dramatic improvements in the near future, whereas older people expect to be worse off after five years. But their actual (self-reported) satisfaction does not climb and then fall off in old age. Quite the contrary: it falls and then rises. Graph B shows the error in their predictions: they are substantially too optimistic until about age 50, and then too pessimistic from age 60+ (although life takes so many directions in the last decades that a few people err on the side of excessive optimism).

Schwandt thinks that the U-shaped curve in our subjective life-satisfaction results from errors in expectations. Although people of all ages hold diverse views, many young adults feel that they are not yet getting what they want from life (money, security, positive impact, love, sex, or whatever). Many expect to get all this in five years. In middle age, the same people are disappointed not to have seen their expectations met and rate themselves dissatisfied. This is the notorious Midlife Crisis. They also expect life to get worse–it won’t offer important new satisfactions or successes, but their health will decline as their years  run out. Instead, life does offer new rewards in the later decades, and so people are pleasantly surprised. Mean self-reported satisfaction is the same at age 70 as it was at age 30 (and much higher than it was at 50).

For those of us who work primarily on issues of youth, this is a challenging theory. It suggests that young people’s expectations are often so high as to cause distress later. This pattern certainly does not affect everyone. We found that before teenagers enter YouthBuild, just 30% expect even to live to old age. YouthBuild raises their hopes to the point that 90% of its graduates expect to live past 65. That is clearly a success. The U-curve may be a “first world problem,” affecting people whose teenage years have gone reasonably well. It is still a problem, however, and I have never seen an effort to address it. Maybe encourage young adults to read Stoic or classical Indian philosophy?