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This episode is brought to you by indeed. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com podcast that's indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Fox One, where you can watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month with with three days free. Build your own multiview, follow player Spotlights, customize your audio, and stay on top of the action with live stats, highlights and instant replays. Don't miss a moment. Watch the FIFA World cup live on Fox One. Offers are subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions today. Gerontocracy in America for the last few weeks I've been reading the book Freedom from Fear, a Pulitzer Prize winning, 900/ page history book by David M. Kennedy about America and the Great Depression and World War II between 1929 and 1945. It's freaking awesome, and I'm about a third of the way through. Which means that just as I was prepping for today's show, I was learning about the creation of America's Social Security system. In these chapters, Kennedy the historian, describes the abject misery of old age in Depression era America in the 1930s, he writes, for the vast majority of workers who lacked any pension coverage whatsoever, the very thought of retirement was unthinkable. Most elderly laborers worked until they dropped or were fired, then threw themselves either on the mercy of their families or on the decidedly less tender mercies of a local welfare agency. End quote. Before the introduction of Social Security, the extreme poverty rate of seniors in America was nearly 66%. Two thirds of senior Americans were in extreme poverty. Today that rate is closer to 10%, which is both a clear story of progress and also, I would say, about 10 percentage points too high. But something else has changed. In the 90 years since the passage of the Social Security act, older Americans have gone on an astonishing run, and no one has had it better than the boomer generation. Born in the 1940s through early 1960s, thanks to new medicines and public health initiatives, their lives have extended compared to their parents, and thanks to a rising stock market and buoyant housing valuations. Their wealth has skyrocketed too. Since 2000, households headed by adults older than 65 have increased their inflation adjusted median net worth by 42%. Now the political and business worlds are older than ever. In the S&P 500, chief executives are 10 times more likely to be over 70 years old than than under 40. Boomers have so dominated American politics in the last few decades that there are actually more presidents born in the summer of 1946. That would be three Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump than there are Presidents born after 1946. That would be just one Barack Obama, born 1961. Our last two presidents, of course, are the two oldest in American history. I began this open by describing the state of old people in America before the Social Security act as a reminder that it was not always so easy to paint elderly people in America as this nation's winners. We used politics and policy to improve and improve their lives until Today more than 50% of all federal spending through Social Security, Medicare and parts of Medicaid is spent to help the elderly. Now in his book Gerontocracy, in How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth and what to Do About It, Samuel Moyn argues that the American economy and tax system are rigged on behalf of the elderly. Now, one point I want to make exquisitely clear here at the top of the show is that Moyn is not denying the role of class in this analysis, and neither am I. He's not trying to shove aside all talk of oligarchy or rule by the rich and replace it with gerontocracy, which is ruled by the old. Rather, he's trying to help us see the way that many elderly people who have become rich have used their power to hoard wealth, to hurt families, to stop the construction of housing, and to block the promotion of young workers. And at a time when many Americans are most worried about oligarchy, Moyn says the larger concern is what he calls old, that is rule by the old who are also rich. Today, Samuel Moin and I talk about the shape of gerontocracy in America, whether elderly power is as dangerous as he says it is, what he thinks we should do about it, and whether this entire conversation is completely offensive and unforgivably ageist nonsense coming from two people who just haven't turned 60. Hi, I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Professor Samuel Moin. Welcome to the show.
- [06:00]
A
Oh, thanks for having me, Derek.
- [06:02]
B
In your new book, you present a range of statistics and Facts to prove the thesis that elderly people in America today are hoarding wealth and power. Before we dig into some of these sectors and domains where you think gerontocracy's bite is sharpest, I want you to pick three statistics. Three statistics that you think should change our minds or concretize our certainty that gerontocracy is a problem in America today.
- [06:31]
A
Well, so I do try to gather together a lot of receipts, few of which I generated myself, but that I think haven't been presented in one place. And since a lot of folks already since 2024 are obsessed by our politicians and their age, I tried to shift the discussion a bit towards these other domains. And that's where my statistics come from. For right now, the first is elections. And it turns out that the age of voters is really high in the United States. We calculated that the median age is 52 outside presidential elections, 55 or 6, and some primaries as high as over 70. So that's the first statistic. The second comes from the big domain of gerontocracy that I associate with wealth in its various forms. And since as an abundance, bro, I know you're obsessed with housing, and I am too, I'm going to cite the stats on that, which are, I think, pretty staggering. And so the group most likely to own a home, and it's at over 80% is the 70 to 74 age bracket. And the second highest rate is the age group next higher than that. And then as my last two and a half statistics, I'll give you the fact that the median home buyer by age has leapt 20 years lately, from barely 30 years old in 1981 to 53 in 2022.
- [08:31]
B
So American voters are old. American homeowners are old. Why isn't this story as simple as, yeah, American power is aging and Americans are aging. And these are just the same stories. Americans are living longer, period. And that's the entire story of Gerontocracy. Why isn't the book's thesis as simple as that?
- [08:53]
A
Because I think it's just slightly more complicated. I mean, that is a big part of the thesis. And I do want to present the facts about the extension of life, just how far it's gone, in spite of a slight correction during the pandemic. And of course, it's natural to then assume that everyone will be getting older and therefore everything about everyone will reflect this fact. But I think it's worse than just what you would expect, because when you accrete power, you're able to increase your gains once your power's entrenched. And I think that the level of exclusion by age is just much worse than you would expect, just let's say naturally from the increase in age. And so the point of the statistics and the point of the overall story they're driving is that I think we're not just an aging society, we're a gerontocratic one, which means that power has accreted even more than is fair to those who have aged. Like all of us. Yeah.
- [10:09]
B
I want to zoom in on several industries and sectors and perhaps let's start close to home in the world of academia. In the last 20 years, the Harvard Crimson reported the share of tenured Harvard professors who are still working after they turn 74 has increased from 3% at the beginning of the century to 43%. That is just unbelievable. And it goes to a very important point which you just made, which is that it's not as if longevity among Harvard professors increased by a factor of 13 in the last 20 years. Instead, the share of tenured professors at Harvard still working after 74 increased by a factor of 1213. I wonder, is this something that you've seen at Yale or Yale Law School as well, this sort of relatively sudden even increase among professors and maybe even, you know, administrators with power in their 70 and 80s?
- [11:08]
A
Oh, to a huge extent, and inspired by that Harvard Crimson story, which was pioneering, I actually did the research on not Yale alone, but Yale Law. And really the results were, I think, stunning. Yale Law until recently at least, was ranked number one. And it really achieved its reputation, first in the 1930s when it was very closely connected to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. And then in the 1980s when it became something like the theory school, kind of for elite intellectuals as well as folks who wanted to launch themselves into power. And right or wrong, what was true at both of those moments of great importance for the school was that the faculty average age was in the 40s. Now it's pushing 60. And where at those earlier dates there was essentially no 1 in their 70s and definitely no 1 in their 8. Now we're talking about almost 20% of the faculty in that cohort. And I've lived it. I mean, I'm getting old myself, but I'm still not. I'm still a youngin. I'm below the average age of the Yale Law faculty at 54 years old, which is outrageous, honestly. But what's more important is that it's an old folks home. I mean, it's literally, you know, the Easier the job. And I've noticed this in law schools. The more older faculty who have no incentive to leave, stay on indefinitely.
- [12:47]
B
Why has this changed so quickly, so recently? I mean, surely it must have been relatively fun to be a 70 year old professor at Yale Law School in the 1970s and 1960s. Surely it's roughly the same amount of fun, I'd think, in the 2010s and 2020s. It's not as if there were, you know, some medicine that came online in the aughts early 2000 and tens that specifically and dramatically increased the life expectancy of a Yale Law professor. So was there a policy change that's responsible for the degree of aging we're now seeing among Harvard tenured professors, Yale Law School professors? Is it about policy? Is it about culture? Like what has changed so dramatically, you think, to cause the changes that you're describing?
- [13:35]
A
It's mainly policy in the form of a legal prohibition of mandatory retirement. Actually, folks after World War II in many sectors were subject to mandatory retirement, even though back then they were likelier than later to die early. And then in a series of stages, a law from the 1960s called the Age Discrimination and Employment act basically prohibited rules that required retirement at a certain age outside just a few sectors like air traffic control and piloting. And so that hit academia. And actually there are folks, you look back, who warned about what would happen when you already have tenure and can't be removed for any reason short of basically crime and you're not forced to retire and the job is increasingly easy as you're more powerful and you're the highest paid in the profession. Why would you leave and people don't. So it's partly human nature. But I also think there's a cultural factor that a lot of these folks we're talking about are workaholics. And like Americans in general who are workaholics, they can't define their vocation outside the terms of their work. But most, most important is that they were allowed to stay and the law said it was discriminatory to make them leave.
- [15:08]
B
Before I ask my next question, which is going to be more pointed, I do think it's worth recapitulating this, which is that you're describing both a policy reason why people aren't being forced to leave positions of power when they're elderly, and this cultural phenomenon that I in a previous essay called workism, whereby a lot of people, especially I was talking about millennials, but surely it applies to boomers as well, define themselves by their and therefore don't want to leave their job because it would essentially amount to a kind of first death. Like before the death of the corporeal body, there's an identity death that comes from leaving your job and they push off that. Let's say I am now representing one of your septuagenarian octogenarian colleagues at Yale Law School. I'm hideously offended by everything you've just said, Sam. And I say, look, now I'm talking to Derek, the host. Derek, it's obvious what's happening here. Sam Moyn, elderly Gen Xer, is mad at his boomer colleagues for not retiring, therefore not giving Sam the opportunity to move into positions of greater power at Yale Law School. This is incredibly self serving of Sam. I can't believe you had him on your podcast. Why isn't this, Sam just, is this just sour grapes? Is it just younger generations saying, it's just really annoying that older people who have every sort of moral right to do what they want to do as long as they want to do it, like, isn't that liberalism? Isn't this just sour grapes from the younger generation essentially saying, it's not fair, it's not fair. And stomping around, what's your response to the elderly colleagues that I've now ventriloquized on this podcast?
- [16:52]
A
So first off, just in passing, workism is very real. And never forget then when Max Weber talks depicted the rise of the Protestant work ethic, he singled out America and Ben Franklin as like epitomizing where we were going. And yet the United States, I think, remains the home of workism, especially compared to across the Atlantic. But no, I mean, look, I don't want to deny that there could be selfishness in any social critique because that would be like to ignore that. You know, that's a real phenomenon. And I don't, I don't want to exempt myself and claim purity. I have committed to retire at some point before my elderly colleagues have chosen to do so. But fundamentally, it doesn't much matter what my stake in it is if it turns out that there's a systemic crisis that the aging of faculty and the aging of Americans in power implicates. And I think there is. And some of those folks who warned us about the aging of university faculty said, well, what's at stake is creativity and innovation in the first instance. Because it's just a fact, as harsh as it is, that as we age we become more repetitious in our intelligence with some good outcomes, but also ones that are inimical to creativity and innovation. And then there's the distributional justice side of things. Because it's just a fact that staying on, especially in sectors where there is a bottleneck, will mean that others don't get jobs. And honestly, one of my main reasons for writing this book is in memory of the many students I've had who have been unable to become academics themselves. I mean, I have survivor's guilt. As a Gen Xer. We used to complain about there not being jobs, but that was nothing compared to now when there are literally none in the humanities where I'm from, in spite of all the statistics that I gathered for this particular book. And so there's maybe some selfishness. I personally don't want to wield power. I'm disinterested. But even if you don't believe me, you should care about our intellectual culture and fairness on intergenerational terms towards those who are up and coming.
- [19:41]
B
One theme that you touched on here that I think we're going to revisit as we hop across a couple other sectors is this theme of older workers, even if they're productive and nice and well meaning, serving as a kind of bottleneck to the progress of younger workers. And you reminded me just as you were talking, there's a famous, at least in my field, of people that are nerds about the practice of science paper by Pierre Azoulay and some other researchers called does science advance one funeral at a time? Because there's that famous quote about how science advances one funeral at a time. Because in order for any new scientific paradigm to take over, the old guard that believed in the previous paradigm has to die off. And the new paradigm sort of, you know, works its way up that proverbial corporate ladder and takes over. And this particular paper, relative, famously found that after the death of a star scientist, quote, the flow of articles by non Collaborators increases by 8.6 on average. Continuing with quoting the abstract. Once in control of the commanding heights of their fields, star scientists tend to hold onto their exalted position a bit too long. End quote. This idea that a certain amount of turnover in a field like physics, in a field like chemistry, in a field like maybe law, is good for innovation, not to mention good for allowing for younger workers to enjoy the kind of productive careers that their older workers enjoyed. I wanna move now from academia to sort of your second home, which is politics. Again, the statistics here are just objective and also somewhat objectionable. The Senate's average age is now the highest in its history. Supreme Court service has nearly doubled from 15 to 16 years in the last few decades. Our last two presidents are the oldest presidents in American history. Is the graying Sam of politics that you describe in this book. Is it something that's happened slowly and steadily in the last a hundred years with medical progress, or is the age that we're living in actually quite sudden and unique?
- [21:47]
A
So I just don't think there's been constant extension of life in the past hundred years. I mean I narrate that a But I think in the last 50 years and maybe more among the Democrats as well as in life tenured professions like judging, we've just seen a great leap forward for the desire of older people to stay in harness. And that's all documented and it is having I think a lot of effects. And we need to kind of enumerate what those are because when you start with politicians and the kind of acid bath of 2024 we live through, your first thought is cognitive decline. And that's obviously real. And the risk of it is is genuine. And I think it might have been been dismissed as ageist before to even raise it in national discussion. And Joe Biden and his staff I think took advantage of that fact. But now I think we're beyond that and we really do have to think seriously about that particular issue. There's also death because the Democrats do die eventually and a lot of them they do.
- [23:09]
B
But you're taking is making is that the Democratic Senate leadership and Nancy Pelosi the last Democratic speaker of the House and Joe Biden the last Democratic president. All of them I believe. I think it's like 82, 86 and 75 are the respective ages. 75 being Chuck Schumer. So the Democrats in general, you're saying are older than the corresponding leadership among Republicans.
- [23:28]
A
Exactly. I tried not with that theory craft that I don't have hard evidence for this. But you know, I think there's both more opportunities for lobbying on the Republican side and less of an ethical prohibition of transitioning into that profession. And you even see like recent Republican speakers of the House who have without much compunction had in that direction. Pelosi didn't. But what I want to say about death, which is different than cognitive decline obviously is that it has left the Democrats at times without the number of votes they would otherwise control at absolutely crucial moments. And so the one big beautiful bill, its passage was facilitated by just a wave of now not leadership Democrats, but rank and file Democrats just dying like flies in the six months before that bill. But then you get Something which I think is much bigger and much more important and could, in a sense, get screened out by the cognitive decline obsession, which is, well, wait a second. Should Americans be represented by age in an era? We constantly talk about a political class that looks like America and demand understandably adequate representation of non whites and non males. And yet I think our worst and most unrepresentative defect at the federal level is that there are just so many old politicians and correspondingly very few young politicians. And so that has direct implications for remedies, because I advocate an age limit, but that's not going to be good enough because based on current trends, wherever you set the age limit, you're going to have tons of politicians hugging it. And so we need to think even more creatively if we care not just about cognitive decline, but fair representation so that our politicians resemble those they're purporting to represent.
- [25:35]
B
But why is it important that our politicians represent us chronologically? I mean, like, couldn't the Democratic Party still do a fantastic job representing the interests of Democratic voters and Americans writ large if the median age of elected Democrats was, say, 15 years older than the median age of overall Americans? Like, why is it almost automatically better for politicians to be to have the same age distribution as the electorates that they represent?
- [26:07]
A
Well, I think the main reason has to be that our policy views are age correlated in the aggregate. And that is of very great importance. Maybe we tend to avoid this fact both because we fear making generalizations about age and political views. And in fairness, it's hard to do so because there are things that political scientists called cohort and generation effects that are different than technically just like, what's your age? But if you take those into account, you're still talking about folks who were born at a different time, had different experiences, and just diverge from those who are of a different age and have other experiences. And so I just, you know, if you take some very basic policy issues like climate change. Well, the old, I mean, the statistics show very clearly that the older you are, the less you care about it. And that has to translate into policy orientation. You know, on the output side, immigration, this is a fascinating one because one of the great use of immigrants is to do labor that, you know, existing laborers don't want to do. And one of those things is elder care. And so one of the chief beneficiaries of a more generous immigration regime would be older Americans. And yet, once again, the older you are, the more hostile you are towards immigrants. And so my sense is that we shouldn't exaggerate because it's true that people of any age can represent those of any age. However, we also can't just dismiss the fact that there are age correlated views. And then that has a lot to do with what comes out of our political system.
- [28:15]
B
I think surely one statistic that makes your point is that the average age of an American is about 39 and a half years old, which is easy to remember because I'm like six months older than the average. So I am profoundly average. I guess chronologically speaking. You said the average voter in a presidential election is 55. And then in a primary it's in the 60s.
- [28:34]
A
It's in the 60s.
- [28:35]
B
In New Mexico, you said it's in a primary in New Mexico, it's 71 or 72. Right. So I guess we could say here that the average American voter in a presidential election is 15 years older than an average American in a primary about 25 years older. And you can take that statistic and then put right next to that statistic the fact that this is a famous fact among budget nerds like me, the Federal government spends $7 on Americans over 65 for every $1 that it spends for Americans under, I think, 25 or 18. That right there. I'm not suggesting any kind of like strict correlation or causation, but it certainly is not surprising. It is not surprising that the electorate is significantly older than the average American. And the federal government that is elected by that electorate is significantly more generous toward older Americans than younger Americans. This problem is clearly worse at the local level. I mean, the more local the election you look at, the older the electorate. Local elections, you know, often track less than 20%. You report of the electorate and that share or the average age of voters there is again in the 60s or early 70s because we're about to move into housing. So know that that's the on ramp here. But what do you see as the consequence of the. That local elections in particular seem to have an average age that is so much older than the actual cities and counties that are being represented by those electeds.
- [30:04]
A
Well, so, you know, there are a lot of facts here. I mean, in response to the one you cited, that six to seven federal dollars is spent on senior citizens for every one on young people. It's often said, well, we organize educational expenditure locally and therefore you'd expect the welfare state to dominate the federal budget. It's just that, you know, kids are getting their due in local expenditure. And there's an element of truth to that. In the sense that there are public schools. However, I believe they're underfunded. And it seems as if we can tell a story, and I try to kind of piece it together in the book, about how elder control, both of the political system and of the electoral system has meant basically that you get a kind of a protection of property as the first and foremost political item that older voters and the politicians who serve them of whatever age pursue. And so the age of gerontocracy is an age of tax revolts, not just at the federal level where you saw in the one big beautiful bill elder benefits protected while SNAP benefits for child poverty were slashed, but at the local level. And you also see stories about how the mobility of older voters to cross lines and flee taxes means that there's a big story at the local level of how older folks are avoiding paying for the education of particularly other people's children. And so this is, I think, the central story about older voters at the local level. And I think it oughtn't surprise us because as long, long ago as Aristotle, we've known that as you age, what do you care more and more fanatically about what you've accumulated and in particular your property? And America, I think, fits that diagnosis to a T. And we just have to do something about it.
- [32:28]
B
And we are absolutely going to get to property in just a second because I think that housing is probably the most interesting place where your arguments for the gerontocracy really hit the road. Before we do, let me play defense attorney for the elderly here. So the fact that national elections and even local elections are disproportionately voted on by the elderly is not necessarily a critique of the elderly at all. I mean, who here is not showing up to the polls? It's young people. So if I'm like a politically involved 68 year old grandmother listening to this podcast, I'm screaming like, hello, it's not my fault that I care about city council. It's not my fault that I understand what day the primary is and my daughter and my granddaughter don't understand what day the primary is. In fact, I'm the good guy here. They're the ones who aren't politically involved. And Sam should probably be writing a book called I don't know what it should be called, but it's about the follies of young people and how they have essentially self deported.
- [33:36]
A
It would be more age appropriate for me to do so.
- [33:38]
B
Certainly you're not gonna get accused of ageism. Young people have self deported from the political process. If they're not gonna vote on mayor, well then why should they have some kind of say? Why are they protesting when the mayor doesn't respond to their interest and their proclivities? So why isn't the real problem here not that local democracy has been conquered by the old, but rather that local democracy has been abandoned by the young?
- [34:03]
A
Well, there's truth to that. But then we have to ask why did that happen? And part of the reason is apparently as far back as you go in democracy you have this effect that the older you are, the likelier are to vote. However, I think we have a class of young people today who feel profoundly alienated from Gerontocracy. And why would they participated in it? In it. You know, there's this song by John Mayer I mentioned, not that I'm a big fan and my own daughters told me, you know, that because he broke up with Taylor Swift, I shouldn't mention him. However, his song Waiting on the World to Change is literally about, you know, the, you know, a response to this argument you're making that, well, you expect us to participate in your political system, but you've captured it, so why wouldn't I, in a sense just wait my turn and abstain until then? But I think there's a better line of response because this book, my views are not against old people, but they are against Gerontocracy. And let me just shift the example to make my point. It's also true that non whites vote less than whites in America today. And we could say, well, that's not their fault. It has to do with white supremacy, which is structural. And we'd have to figure out. How do we figure out why that's happening, what is white supremacy, et cetera. I can consistently say that, look, there's Gerontocracy and it's having these effects which are not the fault of the youth, it's the fault of the system. And that would prominently include the fact that young people feel alienated from a government of buy and for old people. And so even when you're old and you're benefiting from it, if you care about citizenship, you should want to change that outcome onto housing.
- [36:10]
B
One subject obviously that I've covered quite a bit with abundance, my own reporting, is that land use policies in the US have become more restrictive in the last few decades and that neighbors have used their power to block housing developments. A phenomenon that sometimes goes by the name of NIMBYism. To what degree do you see NIMBYism as being yet another tendril of another offshoot of the phenomenon you're describing, that is gerontocracy.
- [36:37]
A
You know, society's complex and there are a lot of causes for everything. And I am very far from claiming that the aging of America is responsible for each and every one of our ills. However it's implicated in this. One has to be. Given the housing data I reported, it's just clear that there's some connection. And scholars like Kate Einstein have shown that when you look at the local zoning meetings where we insanely in this country make land use decisions, not just predominant but overwhelming, age of the participants is very high. And that means that even when it's a question of building senior housing, older Americans are blocking builds. And so I think as part of the abundance agenda of which I'm a kind of critical fellow traveler, at least in this respect, we have to say that the aging of America, the gerontocracy we're living through, is part of the reason why the supply is constrained. And does that mean that like it's all their fault? No. But we do have to take seriously the changing attitude towards land generally, property generally, and housing in particular that older people have and have had as far back as we have analyzed them. And the result of that is a great resistance to moving to age appropriate housing, control of especially desirable urban cores by older and older people, and the exclusion of a lot of folks just from owning a home, from having the wherewithal to make a down payment, but also towards graduating slowly into the more desirable housing that is occupied by our seniors.
- [38:42]
C
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- [39:11]
D
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- [40:13]
E
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- [40:49]
B
Save at Whole Foods Market Another implication of housing scarcity, especially in big, productive, rich cities, is that as one generation makes it impossible to build sufficiently to moderate housing, appreciation for the middle class. Middle class families leave. This is something that you write about. It's something that I followed. It's something the economists recently reported. Between 2010 and 2024, according to an Economist analysis of Census Bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 12% in New York City, by 22% in Chicag, and by 23% in Los Angeles. And Sam, in your book you have a statistic to blow all of those out of the water, which is that New York City, the neighborhood of Washington Heights, lost a jaw dropping 48% of its children in the first two decades of this century. How is this story, the story of the childless city, a kind of implication of tragedy, of gerontocracy as you see it?
- [41:53]
A
Well, the childless city is one in which the children are still there, but on the outskirts or periphery or beyond the borders. And that's just because they've been priced out of the market by folks who are retaining their homes, controlling supply, at least hyper locally. And then that means that younger people can't afford the down payment. And it's partly about space, because it's precisely those younger folks who are likely to have the kids in tow rather than just invite them back for Thanksgiving and need the space day to day. And yet, precisely because those are the premium spaces, they're completely priced out. So a younger person might well be able to afford a studio in Washington Heights, but that's not the person who wants it to live there, because it was an old bastion of families and now it's basically a big senior center.
- [42:55]
B
So we've talked about academia, we've talked about politics, we've talked about housing. I wanna finish on the economy. And there's this phenomenon of the boomer bottleneck that I've reported on for the last few weeks. And so it was really perfect timing for this book to come by. You reported, and I just discovered. You discovered it long before that because it was in your book, this paper showing that the pay gap between younger and older workers has increased significantly, especially in older and larger firms. And it's a little bit like a game of musical chairs where when companies are old and mature and they're not growing as quickly, and you have these boomers who are sitting in the upper level management positions and they're staying there through their 60s, through their 70s, even into their 80s, well, that makes it impossible, mathematically impossible, for the next generation to move up and take those jobs as they might have in previous generations. So fold into the story that we've been telling. The way that you see gerontocracy working its way through the economy as well.
- [43:56]
A
Well, so, you know, if we're talking about jobs other than university professorships, you know, there are domains in which there's the same kind of apex to the profession and tight supply on the positions at the top. And you find a comparable phenomenon. Now that's not true in all professions. School teacher, underpaid, undervalued. Maybe we should want senior citizens after they retire from Harvard or Goldman Sachs to go teach some school because we just don't have enough teachers. Or we could pay them more and make it more like a profession that people want to enter in large numbers because it's remunerative and it's high status in those kinds of professions. We're seeing outside the kind of myth that Silicon Valley leaves us with that elites in business are aging, even though it's counterproductive for their own proposition. What's the whole point of business? Well, it's as, as in so many other domains, creativity and innovation to meet new market demand, create new market demand. And yet the very folks who are directing those businesses are less likely to make the breakthroughs themselves or even have a sense of who's likely to do so. And so there's another paper I mentioned which is quite interesting because it turns out that when a younger CEO just quits, the stock price goes down. When a very aged CEO finally retires, the stock price goes up. And so the market is actually aware of the consequences for us commercially and in Terms of creativity, of an aging workforce, especially in positions of power. And that's just another consequence of the abolition of mandatory retirement, which we didn't think about at the time that it was pushed through.
- [46:10]
B
Sam, listening to your description of the phenomenon of gerontocracy across these domains in politics and academia and economics and housing, the metaphor that occurs to me, the analogy that occurs to me is that gerontocracy as you describe it, is a little bit like the way people like me in the center left think about capitalism, which is that capitalism is this system that we don't want to entirely overthrow. We don't want to make it illegal and go full communism. But we recognize that without countervailing laws and regulations and even cultural norms, capitalism will run rampant in a way that will have negative consequences. So it is natural, one could say, for rich people to use their power and time to protect their assets. It is legal and almost natural. It is legal and almost natural for someone in their 50s who likes their job and is relatively good at it to not retire at their 60s when they're still able bodied and like it, to not retire in their 70s when they still like their job and are able bodied and like it. And that so many of the phenomena that you're talking about in a way aren't surprising. What is notable is that there is no countervailing rule or force to block that which is now natural and legal. So for example, you take something like an age limit. This is where I want to get to solutions a little bit. You can think of an age limit as a kind of regulation for gerontocracy, the same way that an anti monopoly law is a regulation for capitalism. Right. It's a rule that exists to countervail a natural force that's endemic to the thing that you've decided is going to be the system. Right. So can you talk a little bit now about like the ways that we can write rules that don't aim to, you know, immiserate the elderly? Obviously that's not something that I want. I know it's not something that you want, but. But it's designed essentially to soften some of the most painful outcomes of the system as it exists. Start with age limits. Now let's talk a little bit more about other regulations that you think would help to soften gerontocracy in our time.
- [48:36]
A
No, I love that analysis, Derek, and it really does fit with my picture. We expect folks who have power to want to keep enjoying it. I mean, power corrupts. And so the Question is not how to be mean to older Americans, but rather how to protect everyone against this human impulse that goes all the way back. And so in the political domain, we've talked about age limits and youth quotas, which have been used in different kinds of electoral systems than we have. Admittedly to basically force parties to put up age differentiated slates of candidates. But somehow we need to age differentiate our political representation just to, I think very minimally to decrease the alienation of younger people towards democracy. Because one study I cite proves very convincingly that all other things being equal, you basically want to vote for someone your own age. And youth very rarely have that opportunity. Even people in early middle age are lacking in that regard. On the electoral front, I think we punish young people for mobility, which they're more likely to engage in through registration laws that are too restrictive. I think older people either are retired or have power at work to leave to vote. And we want to basically facilitate elections, mandatory elections if necessary. I cite a study that observes that, that there are so many elections in American democracy that we in a sense may be asking not too much from citizens, but to go to the polls too often, which exacerbates the gerontocratic effect. The edgiest proposition I mentioned is considering waiting votes, which is very radioactive for various reasons. But to me it stands to reason that we should correlate your voting power with your life expectancy. Like what stake do you have in the election? Why should you have the same, say over the future when you're not gonna see it? And so we could experiment with various things in that regard, not just lower the voting age or consider proxy voting for the unrepresented children.
- [51:21]
B
I mean, with waiting votes for expected longevity, wouldn't you also naturally have to reduce the individual voting power of the sick? I mean, it seems like that gets into pretty.
- [51:37]
A
I don't think so. I mean, you.
- [51:38]
B
Dicey moral waters quite.
- [51:39]
A
That's dicey. But we, so we won't do that. But we'll say like, if you're in the decade that begins with seven, you should have less voting power than if you're a teenager or, you know, in your 20s or 30s. I mean, I don't regard, you know, all slopes as slippery. Some are, some aren't. And there's just no reason why we can't kind of parse between the reforms. We need to not just increase turnout among younger voters, but give them the kind of recognize the stake in the election they have, especially with the warming planet and so forth, that older people May just not have.
- [52:19]
B
But, you know, I mean, a solution I would feel more comfortable with is something like mandatory voting. And I wonder, because my neighbors are Australian and I spoke to them a little bit about the way that mandatory voting works there and how, you know, there's a penalty, but it's like, I don't know, it's like 50 bucks if you don't vote. And I wonder whether mandatory voting passes would pass your test. Because at least from a first principle standpoint, if the vast majority of people under the age of 50 aren't voting in local elections, but you suddenly mandate their participation in those elections at risk of, you know, a penalty equivalent to a parking fee, you're certainly gonna get a lot more of them to vote. And so you're gonna move farther along the spectrum toward a voting electorate that is representative of the actual underlying population. Do you have any particular objection to mandatory voting?
- [53:07]
A
No. In fact, like many others have done, I propose it in the book. I think, you know, I just would mention that a lot depends on the amount of the penalty and how it's enforced. You know, we, we do, you know, as anyone with kids would know, want to just like consider, you know, the sometimes counterproductive effects of requirements. You know, like the moment you require something, there's a certain group of people who are going to be less incentivized to do it just because you've required it. But in general, absolutely, it's a step in the right direction. I just think the, you know, international data we have, like Brazil and so forth, it may suggest that, like, it's not a big enough effect. And that's why I have like a list that gets more and more radical. And of course you can stop yourself before you get to weighted voting if you think that's dodge.
- [53:59]
B
Right. Well, speaking of radical propositions, we have to get to entitlements because there's no way to talk about the power of the elderly and the federal government without observing the fact that I believe more than half of all federal spending goes to the elderly is allocated toward elderly spending. When you put together Social Security and Medicare and the parts of Medicaid that are more for long term care. I mean, to. You push back against the idea that the simple solution here is to disempower the elderly by cutting entitlements, why do you instead argue that a stronger social safety net for the elderly would actually weaken the gerontocracy?
- [54:43]
A
Well, so, you know, my basic aspiration in the book is to take arguments for intergenerational justice, which were, if not devised, then mobilized to attack the welfare state and in a sense articulate them because they're good ideas and then talk about the welfare state. So first of all, I think, I'm a historian most fundamentally, and I can tell you that life before any modicum of a welfare state, which is what we have in the United States, sucked and older Americans were the worst off and we don't want to return them to that situation. If you think that part of the hoarding reflex is that we're now going to live an indefinitely long time and we don't know who's going to take care of us, the state's certainly not, because Medicare excludes long term care. And the pandemic revealed just how powerless the state of our nursing homes really is. And so my kind of jujitsu is to say, well, wait, what if we actually were more generous to, to older Americans as part of a deal, you give us your power, including downsize your home, and in exchange we will guarantee a better welfare state. Now, how to fund it? Well, we could move to single payer and raise taxes. And that would be something that a lot of folks haven't been willing to contemplate lately, other than Bernie Sanders, but so that would be. We should avoid the sense that an austerity era has created that a welfare state is just too expensive. It's only too expensive because we've inflated the price and we've decreased the tax take that the federal government in particular can use to pay that price.
- [56:45]
B
I take your support for expanding the welfare state, but there's a more controversial claim here that you make that I want to make sure I get you to respond to.
- [56:54]
A
Great.
- [56:54]
B
This is a quote from your book. Quote, a fairer system with the elderly divested of political power, wealth and property would help everyone and most of the aged. 2. End quote. And that is, I think, a fairly shocking thing to read, right? I think if you replaced the word the elderly in that sentence with some other group, right? If you read that sentence and replace it with, say, women, a fair system with women divested of political power, wealth and property would help everyone and most women too. I mean, we would have to shut down the podcast because, like, we would be both immediately shoved out of polite society. So how could it possibly be true? Not of women, but of the elderly? What is the point you are trying to make with this claim?
- [57:43]
A
Well, so don't count our audience out because I may still yet get canceled on this stuff. My basic what's different about older people is they were once young. And we should want to organize society so that young people are equipped for their prime, when they're likeliest, to make the creative and orthogonal moves, and they're supported in reproducing society and making that generational transition that, as you said in the case of the history of science, has been shown to be essential to collective progress. While also thanking older people for their service and saying, you have a chance, one last one, to reinvent yourself, take advantage of the long life you've been provided, and we will take care of you. But what we will prohibit for the sake of the health of, of capitalism and democracy and our future is we prohibit that you hoard and obstruct. And I don't think it's at all ungenerous. It's basically saying we can make the last stages of life something that's utopian, while also providing for those older people who are suffering and they're there in the millions and doing a better job of thinking in time, accepting the transience of our lives and bequeathing something that's worth having to youth and people in their early middle age rather than having to wait around for their turn late in life.
- [59:26]
B
Yeah. For the purpose of rounding out this conversation and reaching some kind of conclusion, I think that as I read the book and really enjoyed it as a piece of provocation and as a piece of scholarship, because there's parts of it I agreed with, there was parts of it I disagreed with, you know, especially with the solutions, as I just mentioned. But the part of it that really connected with me, if I was going to put it in like, one single sentence, and I've been trying to sort of think about, like, what that one sentence would be, is that in an era of longer and longer lives, power will continue to accumulate among the elderly. That is a kind of inevitability of aging and life cycles and just how economics works. But sometimes power accumulates among the elderly in a way that isn't innocent or harmless. It accumulates in a way that deliberately disempowers the young, as in the case of older NIMBYs blocking housing. That's going to go toward younger people or older workers staying in a job. That means that younger workers cannot graduate into that job. And that rather than say, oh, well, this is just the way it has to be. Homeowners will always have more local power. Older workers will always have more corporate power. We should create a set of rules that pushes back against those natural tendencies. And one set of rules is sort of Regulatory. It's things like age limits, it's laws. But I also take and tell me if this is a misread of your book, this idea that we should have cultural expectations too. It's not too much to dream of a world where we see chief Executives in their 80s and 90s of large companies or maybe entire C suites that are older than 65. And we look at that and one of the first thoughts that we have is, oh, think of all the 40 and 50 year olds at that company or in companies like that that can't continue to move up and the younger workers who can't continue to move up into the middle management jobs that are blocked by the top. Think about the kind of stagnation that exists when you have people working until their 80s and 90s among younger workers. And so is that a fair recapitulation of some of the ideas of this book, that there are these natural tendencies for power to accumulate among the elderly in America and throughout the world. And what we need is a set of rules and cultural expectations that push us back against that natural tendency.
- [61:51]
A
It's brilliant. I'm sending you on the road, Derek. I mean, I think my basic aspiration is not to convince everyone on every point but to start a conversation about something that's often passed over in silence because it seems like bad form or just discriminatory. And it's not. Actually we should care about how older people are mistreated, but we also have to ask how are they mistreating others structurally and then arrange our structures so that they're fair and they're futuristic. And I think you nailed, you know, that basic proposition.
- [62:30]
B
Samuel Moyne, thank you very much.
- [62:32]
A
Thank you, Derek. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have
- [62:57]
B
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- [62:59]
A
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- [63:03]
C
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