Decreasing Productivity Can Precede a Dementia Diagnosis by Years

FeaturedNeurologyNeuroscience

·July 12, 2026

Summary: Researchers tracked long-term socioeconomic data spanning decades. By pairing national medical registries with detailed tax records, the investigators discovered that individuals with early-onset dementia experience significant, progressively worsening work productivity losses up to 15 years before a formal diagnosis is established, with the exact timeline varying drastically based on the specific underlying pathology.

Key Facts

• The $86,000 Invisible Cost: Over the entire pre-diagnostic longitudinal window, individuals who later developed early-onset dementia suffered a staggering total average productivity loss of 74,577 Euros (approximately $86,000 USD) per person compared to their healthy, age-matched peers.
• The Annual Trajectory: The financial deficit represents a massive, accelerating drain, averaging roughly 12,000 Euros (~$13,800 USD) per year per person in lost earning potential as unrecognized symptoms systematically erode workplace performance.
• Pathology-Specific Timelines: The duration of pre-diagnostic productivity loss varied cleanly according to the specific type of neurodegeneration, exposing how differently these diseases attack executive functions:
  • Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD): The earliest to manifest financially, showing significant productivity drops 11 years before diagnosis due to early changes in behavior, personality, and executive control.
  • Alzheimer’s Disease: Earnings and productivity began to decline steadily 6 years before diagnosis, tracking with early episodic memory drops and structural navigation failures.
  • Alpha-Synucleinopathies: Productivity drops were only apparent at the exact time of diagnosis, likely because the sudden onset of obvious motor symptoms (tremors, rigidity) prompts immediate clinical intervention.
  
• The Diagnostic Delay Catch: Dr. Eino Solje points out that these massive financial deficits are heavily driven by widespread delays in clinical diagnosis. Because early-onset symptoms are rare in young adults, patients spend years struggling with unrecognized cognitive decline before getting accurate specialized screenings.
• Broad Socioeconomic Fallout: The study shows that the hidden onset of young-adult dementia drives an association with a decreased ability to work, sudden spikes in mid-career unemployment, and leaving the workforce years sooner than planned, severely depleting long-term household savings.
• A Call for Cognitive Screening in the Workplace: Because the study relies on retrospective registry data, it shows a clear association rather than direct cause-and-effect. However, Dr. Solje emphasizes that future research must combine neuropsychological testing with workplace monitoring to build early interventions that can support cognitive reserves and delay productivity drops.

Source: AAN

People diagnosed with early-onset dementia had reduced work productivity up to 15 years before diagnosis, according to a study published July 8, 2026, in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers also found the number of years of lower productivity varied depending on the type of dementia.

Early-onset dementia is when someone under 65 is diagnosed with any type of dementia.

The study does not prove that having early-onset dementia lowers productivity in the years prior, it only shows an association.

“Early-onset dementia affects people during their most productive years and is associated with a decreased ability to work, increased unemployment and leaving jobs sooner than planned,” said study author Eino Solje, MD, PhD, of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. “These changes can reduce household income and contribute to broader economic impact. Our study found an association between reduced work productivity and early-onset dementia up to 15 years before diagnosis.”

The study included 793 people diagnosed with early-onset dementia at two Finnish hospitals during a 12-year period. They were matched by age and sex to 7,926 people without dementia. Of those with dementia, 421 had Alzheimer’s disease, 179 had frontotemporal dementia, 46 had alpha-synucleinopathies, which include dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson’s disease dementia, and 147 had other forms of dementia including vascular cognitive disorders and mixed dementias.

Researchers used national registries to identify education levels and other health conditions for each participant. They used national tax records to find participants’ incomes.

To determine productivity loss, researchers calculated the average annual income difference between people with early-onset dementia and people without dementia. They also accounted for other factors that could affect the difference, such as education level and other medical conditions.

Researchers found people with early-onset dementia showed progressively increasing productivity losses up to 15 years before diagnosis when compared to people without dementia. Over the course of the study, they had total average productivity losses of 74,577 Euros, or approximately 86,000 U.S. dollars, per person with early-onset dementia.

When looking at different types of dementia, they found average productivity losses for people with Alzheimer’s disease began six years before diagnosis, for people with frontotemporal dementia, 11 years before diagnosis, and for those with alpha-synucleinopathies, losses were only apparent at diagnosis. For other dementias, average productivity losses were consistently high throughout the years.

“Our study found productivity loss was strikingly large, averaging around 12,000 Euros, or approximately 13,800 U.S. dollars, per year per person, with losses beginning up to 15 years before diagnosis,” said Solje. “These findings may partly be explained by delays in diagnosis, which can prolong the period of unrecognized symptoms, and they underscore the harmful, long-term socioeconomic impact of early-onset dementia.”

A limitation of the study was it looked back at data, so it does not show cause and effect.

Solje noted that future research should include neuropsychological tests to track changes in cognition over time, and interventions should be developed that could prevent or delay productivity decline.

Funding: The study was funded by Roche Oy, the Finnish subsidiary of Roche.

Key Questions Answered:

Q: Why does Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) impact a person’s work productivity so much earlier than Alzheimer’s disease?

A: It comes down to the specific territories of the brain that these diseases attack first. Alzheimer’s disease primarily starts in the hippocampus, impacting short-term memory, which a high-functioning professional can often compensate for using notes, calendars, and routines for several years. Frontotemporal Dementia, however, directly targets the frontal and temporal lobes, the brain regions that govern social behavior, personality, self-control, and complex decision-making. When these networks degrade, it immediately damages communication, judgment, and workplace relationships, causing productivity to tank up to 11 years before anyone realizes it’s a medical issue.

Q: How did the researchers accurately measure “lost productivity” from decades-old records?

A: The researchers utilized Finland’s comprehensive national registries, which maintain highly accurate, long-term tracking of every citizen’s health status, education level, and income. By pulling the exact tax records of the 793 early-onset patients and comparing them directly against 7,926 healthy peers of the exact same age, sex, and education tier, the team calculated the precise annual income differences. By adjusting for other co-existing medical conditions, they isolated the unique financial deficit left behind by the unrecognized dementia.

Q: What are the immediate clinical and workplace lessons we should take away from this study?

A: The main takeaway is that mid-career productivity drops, sudden uncharacteristic job changes, or performance issues in adults under 65 shouldn’t automatically be blamed on a simple lack of motivation or stress. Dr. Eino Solje emphasizes that we need to develop highly sensitive, non-invasive cognitive screenings that can be deployed the moment an otherwise successful professional begins showing unexpected, prolonged struggles with executive tasks. Catching these changes early can shorten the diagnostic delay, protect families from catastrophic income loss, and allow patients to access supportive treatments years earlier.

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Editorial Notes:

• This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
• Journal paper reviewed in full.
• Additional context added by our staff.

About this Alzheimer’s disease research news

Author: Natalie Conrad
Source: AAN
Contact: Natalie Conrad – AAN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
“Incidence and Prevalence of Early-Onset Dementia in Finland” by Adolfina Lehtonen, Anna Mäki-Petäjä-Leinonen, Annakaisa Haapasalo, Anne M. Portaankorva, Ave Kivisild, Eino Solje, Helmi Soppela, Iina Rinnankoski, Johanna Krüger, Kalle Aho, Kasper Katisko, Laura Leppänen, Laura Tervonen, Mikko Aaltonen, Noora-Maria Suhonen, Päivi Hartikainen, Sami Heikkinen. Neurology
DOI:10.1212/WNL.0000000000209654

@ShiningScience

New research shows the human brain is experiencing an evolutionary overload from a world it wasn’t built to process. If you feel constantly overwhelmed by a relentless barrage of bad news, social media, and workplace stress, the problem might not be your personal resilience—it may be your biology.

A new review published in the journal Behavioral Sciences suggests that the human brain is suffering from an “evolutionary mismatch”. While our minds evolved to function within small, tight-knit communities of familiar faces, we now reside in sprawling, hyper-connected cities and navigate digital environments that expose us to the problems of billions of strangers.

Our brains are effectively running on ancient software designed for a small village, leaving us poorly equipped to digest the endless stream of data pouring from our screens. This biological mismatch is further strained by what researchers call a “polycrisis”—the compounding stress of overlapping global issues like pandemics, economic inequality, and climate change.

Because our ancestors only had to worry about immediate, local threats, our brains treat all incoming crisis data as an urgent, personal emergency, even when the situations are far out of our control.

Compounding this is the psychological toll of social media, which triggers a relentless, unnatural state of comparison and competition. Rather than helping us adapt, this constant exposure to others’ extreme successes and failures acts as a form of mental punishment, highlighting how modern mental health challenges are deeply tied to an environment our brains simply never evolved to handle. source: Yong, J. C., Lim, A. J., Tan, E., & Chan, S. H. M. (2026). Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era. Behavioral Sciences, 16(5), 650.

Biography

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French (Ffrench), Sir Thomas

Contributed by

Woods, C. J.

French (Ffrench), Sir Thomas (c.1765–1814), 2nd Baron ffrench , catholic baronet, peer, and banker, was the elder son in the family of two sons and five daughters of Charles French of Castle French, Clogher, Co. Galway, who was mayor of Galway (1773–4) and was created a baronet (1779), and his wife Rose*, a daughter of Patrick Dillon of Killeen, Co. Roscommon. After succeeding on his father’s death (July 1784) to his baronetcy and estate in east Co. Galway, he confined himself to local affairs and did not join the Catholic Committee in Dublin. When Theobald Wolfe Tone (qv) visited the county (October 1792) in order to raise interest in the planned Catholic Convention he found French (‘a fine young fellow and of consequence among the catholics’) presiding over a meeting of Galway and Mayo catholics at Ballinasloe (Tone, Writings, i, 308). French attended the convention as a delegate from Co. Galway. On the first day (3 December) he was appointed, with five others, ‘to take the chair in succession from day to day’ and was one of five members chosen to carry the petition adopted by the convention over to the king in London (ibid., i, 347, 354, iii, 451). On returning to Ireland (January 1793), French was conciliatory towards factious members of the Catholic Committee, and expressed satisfaction with the catholic relief bill of Robert Hobart (qv) as a further but not final stage in emancipation. He doubted whether catholics would benefit from a reform of parliament, urged by the more liberal members of the convention, arguing that it would ‘shut out the catholics for ever’ (ibid., i, 441).

French was named in the act of parliament setting up a catholic seminary at Maynooth (passed 5 June 1795) as one of five lay catholic trustees, a position he held until his death. According to G.E.C., Peerage, he rendered, as a member of the Catholic Committee, some service to the government in return for which he was promised a peerage, but, as the king was unwilling to ennoble a catholic, it was conferred on his mother, nominally at least – like his father – a protestant, with a remainder to her male heirs by her late husband (12 March 1798). This explanation of the circumstances of the creation of the peerage has not been substantiated. On his mother’s death (8 December 1805) Sir Thomas, who nine months previously had been a member of another catholic delegation petitioning the king, succeeded as 2nd Baron ffrench. This ‘ludicrous mode of spelling’ (G.E.C., Peerage) was in the patent conferring the peerage.

Under the name the Hon. Sir Thomas ffrench, Bart & Co., he opened a bank at Tuam, Co. Galway (before 1804). In partnership with Michael Morris, William Keary and his eldest son, Charles Austin ffrench (1786–1860), and under the new name Lord ffrench & Co., he opened a branch in Lower Dominick St., Dublin (1807), which quickly assumed importance. The firm’s banknotes were said to have constituted the entire circulation of notes in Connacht. In 1811 or 1812 Lord ffrench ostensibly retired, leaving his partners in charge with new partners, Henry Taaffe and two other sons, Thomas (1790–1846) and Martin (1793–1871). But on 9 December 1814, disturbed by the insolvency of the bank, Lord ffrench made his will and committed suicide by shooting himself in the chambers at TCD of his youngest son, Gonville Redington ffrench (1797–1866), who had entered as a student some 15 months previously. The partners attempted to continue the banking business but by 1830 the firm was bankrupt.

Thomas French married (1785) Margaret, eldest daughter of another catholic gentleman, Thomas Redington (1742–1827) of Kilcornan, Co. Galway, and his wife Sarah (née Burke), and by her had five sons and three daughters. He was said by Richard Lalor Sheil (qv) to have been a duellist and ‘a very tall, brawny, pallid and ghastly‐looking man . . . studiously and sometimes painfully polite’ (Sketches, 175).

Sources

Gent. Mag., lxxxiv (1814), pt II, suppl.; Connaught Journal, 25 Jan. 1827, 18 May 1830; R. L. Sheil, Sketches, legal and political (1855), 174–5; John Healy, Maynooth College (1895), 125; C. MacC. Tenison, ‘The old Dublin bankers’ in Institute of Bankers of Ireland Journal, vi (1904), 10–12; Burke’s peerage (1912); G. E.C., Peerage, v (1926); F. G. Hall, The Bank of Ireland (1949); Brian MacDermot (ed.), The Irish Catholic petition of 1805: the diary of Denys Scully (1992), esp. 86; Tone, Writings, i (1998), 308–09, 347, 354, 358, 361, 399, 403, 406, 407, 431, 437, 441; iii (2007), 451

Publishing information

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.003067.v1

Originally published October 2009 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography

Last revised October 2009

AI

Lady Rose ffrench (d. 1805) was an Irish peeress best known for receiving the title Baroness ffrench of Castle ffrench, Co. Galway in 1798. The honor was granted by King George III in recognition of her son’s services to the Catholic Committee, bypassing existing laws against elevating Catholics to the peerage. [1, 2]

Her life and family lineage are documented in the Dictionary of Irish Biography under the entry for her son, Sir Thomas ffrench, 2nd Baron ffrench. [1]

======================

Grok 4.5. 13th July 2026

No, Edmund Ffrench (the Warden/Bishop) is not the brother of Hon. Rose ffrench (daughter of Sir Thomas and Margaret Redington). There is conflicting information across sources, and the sibling claim does not hold up under scrutiny from the most reliable records.Clear, Confirmed Links

• Baroness Rose ffrench (née Dillon, d. 8 Dec 1805) was the wife of Sir Charles ffrench, 1st Bt., and the mother of Sir Thomas ffrench (c. 1765–1814), 2nd Bt. and 2nd Baron ffrench*. This is directly stated in the Dictionary of Irish Biography entry for Sir Thomas and in all standard peerage sources. dib.ie
• Sir Thomas (and his wife Margaret Redington) had a daughter Hon. Rose ffrench (d. 13 Dec 1857). She married Francis Blake-Forster of Ashfield, Co. Galway, on 14 Oct 1810. This is confirmed in peerage records (e.g., Cracroft’s Peerage, Burke’s). thepeerage.com **

These form the solid chain you asked about: Baroness Rose → her son Sir Thomas → his daughter Hon. Rose ffrench (who married into the Blake-Forster family). This line leads to later descendants, including those connected to Marcella ffrench Blake-Forster (who married Michael Comyn KC). The Confusion with Edmund Ffrench (Warden of Galway, 1775–1852). Wikipedia entries (for Edmund Ffrench and for Charles French Blake-Forster) and some family history blogs claim:

• Standard peerage sources (Cracroft’s Peerage, Burke’s Peerage, thepeerage.com citing BP2003) list the children of Sir Thomas and Margaret Redington. They include Hon. Rose and several sons (Charles Austin/3rd Baron, Thomas b. 1790, Martin b. 1793, Nicholas b. 1796, Gonville b. 1797, etc.). No Edmund is listed among the sons. cracroftspeerage.co.uk
• Birth dates make it chronologically impossible: Sir Thomas is consistently recorded as born c. 1765 (DIB, Cracroft’s, etc.). He married in 1785 and had his first known child (Charles Austin) in 1786. Hon. Rose (who married in 1810) was likely born in the late 1780s or early 1790s.

• The core links you want (Baroness Rose → Sir Thomas → Hon. Rose ffrench) are solid and well-documented.
• Edmund as brother to Hon. Rose is not supported by peerage records or chronology. It appears to be an error or unsubstantiated claim in some secondary sources (Wikipedia and certain blogs).
• The families are still connected more broadly: they are both from prominent ffrench lines among the Tribes of Galway, and Hon. Rose’s marriage to Francis Blake-Forster creates descendant links (including to Charles ffrench Blake-Forster and later Marcella ffrench Blake-Forster / Comyn line).

If you have a specific source that claims Edmund is Hon. Rose’s brother (e.g., a book, family tree, or the exact blog post), share it and I can examine it further. Peerage and DIB sources are generally the most authoritative here for the Baron ffrench line.This resolves the confusion without forcing incompatible dates or unlisted children. The ancestry for Marcella ffrench Blake-Forster still traces reliably through Hon. Rose’s marriage, as noted in the DIB for Sir Thomas. Let me know how else I can help clarify the tree!

Edmund ffrench may be far out relation of Hon. Rose ffrench.

What Is Solid

The core ancestry chain remains reliable and unaffected:

• Baroness Rose ffrench (d. 1805) → mother of Sir Thomas ffrench.
• Sir Thomas + Margaret Redington → parents of Hon. Rose ffrench (who married Francis Blake-Forster in 1810).
• This Hon. Rose is the grandmother in the line that leads to Charles ffrench Blake-Forster and later to Marcella ffrench Blake-Forster (who married Michael Comyn KC). ***

The ffrench families were large and had many branches in Galway, so distant cousin relationships are entirely possible — just not the close ones (brother or first cousin via Sir Thomas’s brother) that the online claims suggest.

*** The Irish Chieftains; Or, a Struggle for the Crown

English edition  by Charles Ffrench Blake- Forster (Author)  Format: Paperback

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A Yale professor says America is now an ‘oldigarchy’—and Boomers on LinkedIn are enraged

By 

Nick Lichtenberg

Business Editor

July 12, 2026, 6:30 AM ET

Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College.courtesy of Yale

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I’m 42; Samuel Moyn is 54. When we talked about his new book, Gerontocracy in America, it felt less like an interview than a conversation between two people who’ve learned to live with the price of telling older, richer people something they don’t want to hear. Maybe Moyn was trying to give me advice when I asked him to describe what it’s like to write non-fiction that leaves a mark.

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“I tend to write books that get a lot of blowback,” said the Yale law and history professor, clad in a navy-blue, school-branded T-shirt, zooming into the call from the wood-paneled head of college office in New Haven. He noted that a friend of his even told him he is always “antagonizing people,” but “this is on a different level.”

The fights have tended to be “smaller” and “more scholarly” than what he calls the oldest, richest class of citizens in the history of the world. “But I’m kind of a gadfly,” he shrugged. “That’s my career.”

It’s because Moyn has written what may be one of the most polarizing political books of the year: an indictment of America’s quiet slide into generational inequality, in which older, disproportionately wealthy voters and homeowners shape the economy — and America’s democracy — to their advantage while insisting they’re really the ones who are under siege. His core argument is simple and backed with data: “the rich today are old, to an astonishing extent.”

As Moyn writes in his introduction, “an aging society is more set on preservation than on renovation,” and he suggests that we have “long been drifting into an unsuspected form of rule … a new kind of society that privileges many older Americans—­ to the detriment of all, including many senior citizens themselves.” This is what he calls “gerontocracy in America.”

“What I decided,” Moyn told me, with a slight smirk, “was that the cause which I deeply believe in, of intergenerational justice, had been taken over by folks who read Fortune magazine.” It’s a typically provocative statement from the man who was once, ironically, the Henry R. Luce professor at Yale, a seat named for Fortune‘s very own founder.

Boomers choking the economy—and why it hurts to hear it

In my inbox, the backlash to what I view as honest, data-backed generational reporting has been intense. After I reported several months ago on Steven Ruggles’ academic research likening the Baby Boomer generation to a “pig in the python” of American demography, I just had to follow up with a letters column because of the extraordinary responses.

“I apologize for not dying soon enough for you, so your generation can pick over my financial bones,” one wrote to me. Another posed an absurd rhetorical question: “Are you suggesting putting boomers on ice floes or turning them into Soylent green?” Many older readers read accusation between the lines and responded as if I’d blamed them personally for an objectively true situation of stagnant wages, high home prices, and soaring national debt and entitlements.

Social psychologists call this “symbolic threat”: the sense that another group is attacking your values and identity, even when the argument is about material facts. The more I focused on data—wealth by age, housing shares, bottlenecks in promotion—the more some boomers told me they felt confused, angry, sad, and insecure, and lashed out at me (“whiny”) as if I was blaming them personally for every problem in the economy.

Moyn has watched the same dynamic play out at a much higher volume. He told me he’d “gotten a lot of rage” and discovered an unlikely outlet for it: LinkedIn. “I had not known that LinkedIn was really a site where there were a lot of just like, senior citizens, you know, spewing out hatred,” he said. The intensity was such that he’s since stayed off it entirely. “It’s been extraordinary.”

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The site is full of what Moyn called “senior advocates,” and he argued that they are, for the most part, “not willing to talk objectively” about the reality of gerontocracy. He even revealed darkly that he’s facing organized opposition — a first for this particular gadfly. “I haven’t in my career had whole campaigns organized against me, which has happened with this book in certain ways.”

A friend offered a theory: “Sam, you’re taking on the most powerful group in world history.” Moyn’s response: “It’s kind of true. It’s like a David-and-Goliath situation. But, you know, David can lose.”

The richest old people in history—and the denial that follows

The scale of America’s age skew is staggering. Visa recently estimated that Boomers hold more than half of American wealth — about $93 trillion in assets (with Federal Reserve data putting all household net worth at $174 trillion). In terms of real estate, Americans 70 and older hold 26%, more than prime-earning adults aged 40 to 54 for the first time ever, Redfin calculated in March.

Moyn’s book noted that “aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios… In our time, the old rich have pulled away from everyone else,” with households headed by people older than 65 boosting their median net worth by roughly 42% in the early 2000s while the wealth of families of adults 18 to 34 fell by a whopping 68%. If America is an oligarchy, he writes, it’s also an “oldigarchy.”

What surprises Moyn is how many people rebel against the hard truth of numbers. He has a simple rebuttal for those who say America isn’t a gerontocracy: “We have a branch of government literally named after old men,” he said, citing an etymological finding from his book: “Senate. Council of Elders.” (Technically, it derives from the Latin word senatus, which is rooted in senex, meaning “old man” or “elder.”) I reported in May that Boomers make up 43% of Congress and hold 61% of Senate seats, a remarkable display of gerontocracy in action.

“My goal was not to be popular,” Moyn said, “but to start a conversation,” and he feels he’s done that by identifying a new kind of reverse ageism that people don’t want to admit. “If I say there’s something called gerontocracy, I get gerontocracy denialism because people think, well, older people have always been the most oppressed.” His answer: scoreboard. “Plus, if you are older, there’s every incentive to claim the posture of victim.”

Meritocracy traps and senior citizens homes

For Moyn, the gerontocracy story started close to home, when he became a Yale Law professor in his 40s and was stunned by how unproductive his old colleagues were. As he notes in his book, Yale Law School’s “golden age for intellectual breakthroughs and practical influence alike” was in the 1930s, when the average age of regular faculty was just under 43 years, a figure that remained roughly the same through the 1980s. By the 2010s, though, he found that it had leaped to almost 57, something he calls “the graying of the professoriate.”

Moyn told me bluntly that “certain of my colleagues … were overstaying their welcome,” and he noted in his book that the 1930s had only one professor over 65 and none over 70, but Yale’s faculty started skewing older when mandatory retirement was lifted. The same age ranges in the faculty have since grown to 33% and 15% of faculty, respectively, he calculated. “It was just sad to watch them hang on,” he said of his older colleagues,” and I resolved myself not to let that happen to me.” He added that his book is part of a tradition he wants to keep alive. “We’re supposed to be free thinkers and challenge conventional pieties.”

Moyn smiled when I compared his new book to The Meritocracy Trap by his colleague Daniel Markovits, a similarly impassioned tome about a fraying social contract. Markovits’ insight was that nobody was a winner in the 21st-century U.S. economy, not even the winners, as the promise of opportunity through hard work has become a treadmill that has exhausted strivers and entrenched incumbents.

“He’s one of my best friends,” Moyn said, adding that Markovits had a “big impact” on Gerontocracy, beyond serving as a key inspiration; he even uses the phrase “gerontocracy trap” in his book, a deliberate echo. Where Markovits mapped how meritocratic competition grinds down the highly educated, Moyn maps who benefits most once the grinding is done—older elites who sit atop law schools, newsrooms, and corporate hierarchies, often long past their intellectual prime.

In the corporate sector (and certain newsrooms), I’ve heard versions of the same story. Millennial managers have told me they feel stuck, watching a layer of older executives who won’t move on and a restless entry-level desperate for support. The “lump of labor fallacy” is real in the aggregate, Moyn allows, but anyone who’s ever felt their progress blocked knows, deep in their bones, that it isn’t true in particular.

Moyn said he’s been having an active debate with friends in the Yale economics department about this: “they’re right in some domains and sectors and not others.” That’s why he suggested in the book going sector by sector through the economy and seeing where it’s, well, lumpy. In fields such as academia and journalism, the old cliché that you have to wait for someone to die to get the job you want isn’t entirely a joke. “There are a lot of people waiting for jobs further up the apex. And those also are finite.”

We talked about how this plays out within families, too. In wealthy clans, adult children often wait until their 40s or 50s to inherit a house or portfolio, long past the ideal time to deploy that capital. That dynamic is at the heart of HBO’s Succession, which Moyn calls “a parable of America.” “We have this syndrome even within wealthy families of folks waiting around on their parents to inherit them,” he told me. “It’s so late. It’s the wrong time in life for people to come into their house or their wealth.” The series struck a nerve, he thinks, because it speaks to something many people have lived—“being reduced to, in a sense, being infantilized by the old.”

Old voters, young cynics

The issue that Moyn keeps returning to — and that has provoked the most criticism — is political. “It’s not okay that older people monopolize elections,” Moyn said, “especially boring elections.” In his book, he labels the AARP the “best‑funded advocacy group in world history.”

Moyn told me that his book is even a victim of a similar dynamic. “I thought there would be more youthful enthusiasm for the book,” he said, “but of course, [the] youth don’t read books.” His college-age daughters anticipated this, he said, adding that they may help him adapt it to some kind of TikTok series. “They’ve said they would do that eventually … But you know, all you can hope is an author is the facts and the views kind of percolate. And, you know, hopefully they’ll percolate into social media.”

Moyn said much of the criticism has been about his proposed solutions and that he was deliberately provocative with some of them—inflating the weight of younger people’s votes, even expropriating some older wealth. His more conventional proposals, he pointed out, are similarly outlandish in today’s climate: just raising taxes.

Moyn told me he sees Gen Z’s political posture as “passive and resigned,” beaten down by the intense power and wealth held by the oldest members of their society. Old people ignore this and embrace denialism at their peril, he added. “I think young people are alienated from democracy, and that could lead them to move to the far right; it could lead them to move to the far left, but they’re not voting.”

Gen Z sees a political agenda shaped by older voters’ shorter-term concerns and concludes that the game is rigged. He invoked the (millennial-coded) John Mayer song “Waiting on the World to Change.” The real message of the song, in Moyn’s reading, is a younger generation’s reply to accusations of passivity: you’re making us wait, so why wouldn’t we stand at a distance to your handiwork and just wait for you to die? “That’s literally what’s happening in America,” he said. “I think they’re largely resigned; they see that the issues that politicians and older voters prioritize are not their issues.” The younger generation, he added, “just don’t feel our political system is up to the challenge of what they’ll be living through. And I think they’re right.”

Explore the Fortune Crypto 100, our global ranking of the companies leading the digital asset industry across 10 categories. Plus, our Fortune Crypto Innovators list recognizes 30 firms shaping what’s next.

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Chronic procrastination is driven by a structural tug-of-war between the brain’s hedonic and immediacy principles, providing a precision behavioral toolkit optimized across 9 distinct cognitive archetypes. Credit: Neuroscience News

Study Maps the 9 Distinct Types of Procrastinators

Featured Neuroscience Psychology

·July 11, 2026

Summary: Researchers synthesized insights from hundreds of studies across psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. The study reveals that procrastination is an intricate psychological battlefield driven by a fundamental evolutionary mismatch in the brain. Rather than a singular habit, the study isolates 9 distinct types of procrastinators, providing an engineered toolkit tailored to the unique mental triggers of each profile.

Key Facts

• The Dual Psychological Principle: Procrastination is driven by the toxic intersection of two hardwired biological rules in the human brain:
  • The Hedonic Principle: The natural mammalian drive to maximize immediate pleasure and rapidly avoid perceived pain or discomfort.
  • The Immediacy Principle: The deep evolutionary instinct to focus heavily on what is directly in front of us right now, rather than abstract future outcomes.
  
• The Evolutionary Mismatch: Long ago, human survival demanded immediate, viscerally clear actions (e.g., hunt food now or starve). Today’s modern knowledge-economy forces us to perform nebulous, amorphous tasks with highly abstract future consequences (e.g., emailing tax documents or saving for a distant retirement), which fails to activate our primitive survival drive.
• The Core Archetype Spectrum: Dr. Shatz categorizes procrastinators into 9 distinct psychological archetypes. Individuals do not necessarily fit into just one box; many people embody multiple types simultaneously depending on the nature of the task.
• The Multi-System Harm Matrix: Chronic delay is proven to cause severe physical and systemic destruction. It actively damages romantic relationships through isolating resentment, inflicts massive financial penalties via delayed bill payments, and degrades physical health by causing people to postpone critical medical screenings or sacrifice sleep.
• The Myth of High-Functioning Immunity: While iconic historical figures like Steve Jobs and Douglas Adams achieved massive success despite chronic delaying habits, Dr. Shatz issues a stern warning: high-functioning procrastination creates a false sense of security that leaves individuals uniquely vulnerable to catastrophic failures when project dynamics shift.
• The AI Skill Shift: As artificial intelligence tools automate routine labor, personal productivity and self-regulation will emerge as the absolute baseline skills required to successfully deploy and manage AI systems in the modern workforce.

Source: University of Cambridge

Procrastination is on the rise, partly because of digital distractions and modern work, a new book warns. Working out which types of procrastinators we are is crucial to overcoming a problem that harms our finances, health and relationships.

Worrier, Pessimist, Perfectionist, Dreamer, Zigzagger, Rebel, Thrill seeker, Hedonist, Burnout – these are the 9 types of procrastinators identified by Cambridge University’s Dr Itamar Shatz in Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop, published by Tarcher (Penguin Random House) on 25^th August.

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Rebel procrastinators, Shatz argues, feel they don’t have enough control over what happens in their life, so they procrastinate to assert their autonomy and get back at authority figures they resent. Shatz advises them to find their own reasons for taking action and focus on their own standards (rather than on perfectionistic ones set by others), while prioritizing taking care of themselves and switching their environment so authority figures feel less prominent.

Zigzagger procrastinators constantly shift between whatever has their attention one moment to whatever happens to catch their eye the next. Shatz recommends they add structure and concreteness to their plans by setting specific goals and unpacking the steps needed to achieve them. They should also engineer their environment to reduce temptations and distractions, also ride the waves of their productivity rhythms, and seek support from an ‘accountability buddy’.

Whether it’s putting off a tax return, taking an essay to the wire, or delaying a difficult email, everyone procrastinates but few understand the problem or how to solve it. Dr Itamar Shatz, a social scientist at Cambridge, explains how procrastination works and the serious harm it does. He then offers a toolkit to help every kind of procrastinator overcome the problem.

An old problem in a fast-changing world

“Procrastination isn’t just a matter of motivation or bad time management,” Dr Shatz says. “These are really unhelpful misconceptions. Procrastination revolves around the tug-of-war between helpful elements of our drive to act and harmful elements of our drive to delay.”

Shatz draws on insights from hundreds of studies in psychology, behavioural economics, neuroscience, and related fields. He emphasises that procrastinators come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and that we can embody more than one type of procrastinator at once.

“Procrastination is an ancient human problem but the increasing bombardment of digital distractions in our lives may be making it worse,” Shatz says. “It can be hard to tear ourselves away from the various apps, platforms and games that provide an endless torrent of content that’s been ruthlessly optimized to capture our attention.”

Modern work is also encouraging procrastination, Shatz argues, partly because many tasks are “hard to care about at a basic psychological level”. “Long ago,” he says “people mostly needed to do things that had fairly clear and immediate consequences, like hunt food (or starve). People were unlikely to procrastinate on those tasks because the drive to not starve is powerful in a visceral way. Today, we regularly have to do nebulous things with amorphous future consequences, like email tax forms to our accountant.”

Harm caused by procrastination

Shatz demonstrates that procrastination causes serious harm to lives and careers, and also to entire organisations and national economies.

For many people, procrastination bites at university. Leaving assignments and revision to the last minute leads to worse grades and sometimes outright failure. Half of students have been found to procrastinate chronically and while adults in employment fare better, Shatz points out that one-in-five still procrastinate chronically, contributing to unemployment and lower salaries. He points to one large-scale study which found a $21,000 drop in average salary for every point decrease on a five-point procrastination scale.

Procrastination has been found to cost employers an estimated $20,000 per employee per year in the US, from the roughly two hours per day that employees spend procrastinating on average.

“Overcoming procrastination will become even more important as use of AI grows,” Shatz argues, because “personal productivity is expected to be one of the skills that remains essential for most types of work—including deploying AI.”

Beyond the workplace, procrastination causes other serious financial harm, including when we delay paying bills or saving for retirement.

Procrastination can also interfere with our relationships, Shatz argues. “It can make colleagues resent us, if they have to pick up our slack. At home, it can cause fights with our family, if we don’t do the chores we promised to. It can get in the way of making friends and finding romance. All of this can make procrastination a very isolating problem, which hurts us when we need other people the most.”

Procrastination can inflict serious harm on our emotional wellbeing and even physical health, Shatz says. This is partly because of the stress, shame, guilt and regret it generates, but also because it leads to unhealthy behaviours such as going to sleep too late, exercising too little, or postponing going to medical screenings.

Psychological mechanism

Shatz explains the main psychological mechanism behind procrastination:

“We are naturally wired to try to increase the pleasure that we experience and decrease our pain, a phenomenon called the hedonic principle. This leads us to pursue activities that we hope will make us feel good and avoid ones that we worry will make us feel bad, like when we watch funny videos to forget about an unpleasant task on our to-do list.”

In the meantime, the task lurks in the back of our mind, draining our energy, filling us with stress, and getting in the way of our enjoyment.

Shatz says: “The reason we procrastinate despite this heavy cost is that we’re also naturally wired to focus on what’s immediately in front of us. When this immediacy principle combines with the hedonic principle, they push us to do whatever will make us feel better right now, instead of what will be better for us in the long term.”

Solving procrastination

Shatz’s toolkit for overcoming procrastination includes calling out catastrophizing; planning how to handle potential obstacles; eliminating distractions; adding friction between you and temptations; engineering your environment in your favour; unpacking overwhelming tasks into manageable steps; starting with easy wins; rejecting perfectionism for good enough; and riding the waves of your productivity rhythms.

Shatz advises perfectionist procrastinators to avoid an all-or-nothing mentality and remind themselves that “imperfect progress is still progress, and is much better than getting stuck waiting for perfection.” 

Perfectionists should also set aside other people’s unrealistic expectations when deciding on their goals and avoid comparing themselves to others in ways that make you afraid of being imperfect. Carefully curated public highlight reels are, Shatz argues, making this pitfall particularly easy to stumble into.

Shatz offers specific advice to people with ADHD, emphasising that they might need to work in a place with lots of background noise, and retain certain temptations, such as video games, which people without ADHD might find distracting. The book also offers guidance for helping friends, loved ones, colleagues and employees, to stop procrastinating.

Shatz acknowledges that some high-functioning procrastinators, including Steve Jobs and Douglas Adams, can be extremely successful, but warns: “These procrastinators gain a false sense of security, which causes them to keep procrastinating and leaves them vulnerable to things going wrong in the future.”

“Solving procrastination isn’t about squeezing every possible drop of productivity out of your day,” Shatz emphasises. “It’s about helping you do the things you want to, when you want to, without guilt or stress. The key point is that you can choose how you spend your time, rather than have this choice stolen from you by procrastination.”

Key Questions Answered:

Q: Why do I procrastinate on simple modern tasks, like doing my taxes or responding to an email, even when I know the delay will hurt me?

A: Your brain is dealing with an evolutionary mismatch. Dr. Itamar Shatz explains that human biology evolved in an immediate-return environment. For thousands of years, if you were hungry, you hunted; if you succeeded, you ate. The consequences were instant and visceral. Today, modern society requires us to complete nebulous, abstract tasks with invisible, long-term future consequences, like emailing tax forms to an accountant. Because these tasks don’t trigger our primitive, survival-driven instincts, our brain’s hedonic principle defaults to choosing immediate, easy comfort over long-term stability.

Q: Is it true that some people actually perform better when they wait until the absolute last minute?

A: This is a dangerous cognitive illusion that traps what Dr. Shatz calls “high-functioning procrastinators.” When you wait until the final hour, the looming deadline triggers a massive spike of stress hormones and adrenaline, forcing your brain into a state of hyper-focus. While you might successfully finish the task, you are gaining a false sense of security. Relying on this high-stress adrenaline loop leaves you incredibly vulnerable to unexpected emergencies, systematically degrades the deep quality of your work, and inflicts long-term inflammatory stress on your physical body and cardiovascular health.

Q: How can someone tell if they are procrastinating due to a lack of discipline versus actual burnout?

A: It comes down to how you feel during your downtime and your underlying cognitive reserves. If you are a standard procrastinator avoiding a task, your delay is typically driven by an active search for immediate pleasure or distraction, you have the energy to watch videos, play games, or clean your house, but you are actively dodging the discomfort of your to-do list. If you are a Burnout procrastinator, you aren’t chasing pleasure; your internal battery is completely empty. You feel physically and emotionally depleted across all activities, and your delay is a systemic survival mechanism demanding absolute neurological rest.

Editorial Notes:

• This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
• Journal paper reviewed in full.
• Additional context added by our staff.

About this neuroscience research news

Author: Thomas Almeroth-Williams
Source: University of Cambridge
Contact: Thomas Almeroth-Williams – University of Cambridge
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop will be available to purchase online

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AI data centers are fueling an incomprehensible environmental crisis, as tech companies build a grid of fossil-fuel plants to meet power demands.

Texas has emerged as the epicenter of this trend, where developers are exploiting regulatory loopholes to secure environmental permits typically reserved for small businesses like dry cleaners. In doing so, these facilities are deploying thousands of toxic backup generators, quietly churning out massive amounts of greenhouse gases and air pollution.

The scale of this unchecked growth is staggering. Cornell University researchers estimate that by 2030, the burgeoning AI industry could generate up to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of putting 10 million additional cars on U.S. highways.

Beyond carbon, the immediate public health impacts are alarming; local data centers are projected to emit thousands of tons of highly toxic nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants that cause respiratory illnesses.

As communities grapple with the environmental and health fallout, tech giants are facing growing pressure to reconcile their public sustainability goals with the massive, physical footprint of their digital empires. source: Tangermann, V. (2026). The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It’s Almost Incomprehensible. Futurism.

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