[Gerontocracy In America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026; 299 pp.)]
Samuel Moyn, who teaches history and law at Yale University, thinks that old people have too much power in America. Fortunately for those, like myself, who are old, he does not propose to do away with us. We should instead be given generous benefits so that we can live out our few remaining years as pleasantly as possible. But we must make way for the young.
Moyn’s view at once raises two questions: Do the old have a great deal of power? And, if they do, why should their power be reduced and by whom? He is clearly right that old people have a great deal of political power. Owing to improvements in medicine that enable people to survive conditions that used to be fatal, there are many more old people than there used to be. The old dominate all the branches of our government and the private sector as well.
I am less satisfied with Moyn’s answer, or rather several answers, to the second question. One of his points is that old people are set in their ways; it is the young who are creative and innovative. He says, for example, “Far beyond education, elder priorities, according to experts, have come ‘at the expense of investments’ that ‘promote long-term growth’ such as housing and infrastructure. Enterprise in the broadest sense is not a priority of gerontocratic societies.” Suppose this is right, although I doubt that it is always true. Wouldn’t we need a further argument that more growth and innovation is desirable? Moyn does not supply one but treats it as self-evident that it is.
Moyn would probably reply that the desirability of growth should be determined by a “fair” political system, not one that is biased against the young. In a democracy, membership in the government should reflect important group interests and not be skewed in favor of some and against others. In fact, though, Moyn doesn’t want to have a fair political system. He wants a system that is biased in favor of the young and against the old. He says:
A culture that forthrightly promoted youthful candidates for office would refresh the American political class. David Hogg, a young Democratic activist who founded Leaders We Deserve, made waves when he decided to help field federal election candidates under thirty-five, even if it meant challenging incumbents in his own party. (He was briefly the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee before resigning amid controversy over his activism.) As for those who hold on, the most obvious fix for the failure of representation in what passes for democracy in America is to repopulate the political class—easily achievable by adding age limits, and not (or not only) the historically more familiar and popular term limits, for all important political offices. In conjunction with that remedy, it is also worth considering youth quotas across government. Combined, the effect would transform government to show younger faces in the highest places. Oh—and eventually, abolition of the old man’s titular branch of government, the Senate, is a must. (Moyn really hates the Senate and mentions several times that we need to get rid of it.)
Moyn would in response acknowledge that the political reforms he supports are biased against the old. But, he would contend, we need this bias to counteract the power wealthy older people have over our economic system. Heavy taxes should compel them to disgorge the money they wrongfully withhold from the government. Praising a proposal of Bernie Sanders, he says:
Sanders has also argued for innovations like hiking net investment income taxes to 12.4 percent on annual proceeds, in order to ensure that Social Security will last. And it is easy to propose a change to our capital gains system so that it doesn’t incentivize deferral of asset sales until death. While both would provide a tax windfall for government, the latter would also reduce the current hoarding of assets and hasten wealth transfer between generations.
How awful of people to want to keep their money for themselves! In this comment, Moyn reveals the fundamental assumption that separates him from Rothbardians like us. He is a socialist who believes that income and wealth belong to “society.” Matters are different in the free market; everyone has a right to the money he makes, inherits, or receives as a gift. Once we grasp that wealth is owned by individuals, then Moyn’s problems dissolve. How innovative a society is and its rate of economic growth are determined by the voluntary transactions of people in the marketplace. There is no need to speculate about what the growth rate “should” be. Moyn of course doesn’t accept individual rights, and, in other books, he has written about the genesis of the concept. But he does not in these works display any interest in a philosophical analysis of their basis. Like many historians, he takes for granted that ideas about rights are historically relative and not universally true. But that is not a debate we can have here.
Moyn gives an erudite survey of conflicts between the old and the young throughout history, but he does not note that an appeal to youth was a basic theme of Italian fascism. Mises remarks:
Italian Fascism masked itself as a youth movement. Its party song, “Giovinezza,” is a hymn of youth. Its buffoon Duce boasted still in his late fifties of his youthful vigor and was anxious to conceal his age like a coquettish lady.
As I mentioned earlier, Moyn thinks that old people should be helped to live out their remaining years in comfort. But the time they are allotted is strictly limited and must not be extended by medical interventions to prolong life beyond its “natural” lifespan. He says about the bioethicist Daniel Callahan’s “reasonable” view:
In defense of setting priorities, and limits, Callahan offered a full-scale meditation on where to place the interests of aging people in the scale of social values. And just as his argument wasn’t really about costs, his argument about the meaning of life wasn’t really about health care. A theory of life and the life course, and a deep allergy to the individualist dodge of just letting people make up their own mind about social issues that affect everyone, lay closest to the heart of Callahan’s vision. As he saw it, elderly cohorts had lost their original purpose and were responding by grasping to stay beyond their welcome. Their utopian hope for eternal life could never be fulfilled, but it could ruin things for everyone else.
Callahan proposed that the cutoff point should be around age 80. As I am near this point myself, I hope you will understand why I’m not entirely enthusiastic about Gerontocracy in America.
