I’m going to ask my readers for a favor.
I’ve written before about my experience with women’s and gender studies courses in college and grad school. The short version is that they proved useless in getting jobs, but incredibly helpful in doing jobs. They forced me to look at things from other points of view and to consider how an idea or practice can look very different depending on your social location. That’s useful in administration. They also forced me to learn not to take structural critiques personally. Learning not to be personally offended when someone mentions male privilege comes in handy when someone angrily starts a sentence with “The administration …” If the point of a liberal arts education is to equip people to be citizens in a democracy—which I maintain it is—then they’re exemplary liberal arts classes.
I’m going to ask my wise and worldly readers of a certain age to make the same move here. A book about gerontocracy—the rule of the oldest—makes a structural argument, rather than a personal one. “But I’m one of the good ones!” is not a helpful response. A structural argument should be judged on structural terms, rather than dismissed summarily out of personal pique.
Here goes …
The easiest critique of speculative political theory is that it’s otherworldly. The giveaway is when a theory doesn’t specify who, exactly, would make it happen. Samuel Moyn’s new book, Gerontocracy in America , falls neatly into that category; there’s no plausible agent of transformation in the book, nor do its preferred changes seem likely without one. That said, it’s a useful, if flawed, way to connect some dots that normally don’t get connected. It rewards some suspension of disbelief and could help shift the discourse in helpful directions.
The central conceit of the book is that resources in the U.S., and therefore power, have steadily moved up age brackets. That’s easy enough to illustrate, given the ages of the last couple of presidents we’ve had. But as Moyn points out, the ages of politicians, while vivid, are only symptoms. The average age of home buyers has moved up by decades since the 1970s. The average age of corporate CEOs is the highest it has been since we’ve kept records. The median age in the Senate is over 60. Medicare is sacrosanct while Medicaid absorbs cut after cut. Many states freeze property taxes for seniors, such as California’s Prop 13; everyone else has to pay more to compensate. It’s commonplace in both private companies and public employment to have “tiers” of health care and/or retirement benefits that are much more generous to those who had the foresight to have been born earlier. (My career has been marked by the annoying habit of consistently missing those cutoffs, sometimes by just a few years.)
Social Security is commonly known as the third rail of American politics—touch it and you die—because of the political power of seniors. And the shift in higher education financing from public good to private consumption has saddled the young with costs an order of magnitude higher than their elders, even as the increase in house prices has benefited the older at the direct expense of the younger.
At times, generational bias—like other kinds of bias—is actually strong enough to defeat self-interest. For example, voters old enough to receive Social Security are often the most anti-immigration, even though increased immigration is the easiest way to improve Social Security’s finances. (That’s because immigrants are, on average, much younger than the native population, so they help with the pay-as-you-go system. Perversely, many aren’t eligible for Social Security themselves, even as they pay taxes toward it.) The fact that nearly nobody connects those dots in our political discourse is a sign of just how deep the bias goes.
Even age discrimination laws, in practice, tend to work only in one direction. As Moyn notes, it was possible until very recently to use a diversity argument to favor hiring people from racially underrepresented groups, but you couldn’t use that same argument to bring someone younger into a group dominated by the old. Admittedly, this point may be moot now.
The symptoms of gerontocracy are clear, even obvious. The key questions are how we got here and what we should do about it. And this is where Moyn’s book disappoints.
Moyn goes through some of the standard explanations for the aging of the population, which are fine as far as they go. The baby boomers—hey, I made it this far without mentioning them—are 60 and over, and subsequent birth rates were lower. The recent clampdown on immigration disproportionately strikes the young. Life expectancies have grown longer, partially thanks to vaccines. (This, too, may become moot.) And as the opportunity cost of children continues to grow, birth rates continue to suffer. Over time, the demographics do what they do.
But that’s only part of the story. Yes, in 2024, the median age of a voter in a primary election was 65 (p. 91), with predictable consequences for who got elected. Local government tends to favor people who have time to attend meetings, such as retirees, and people who own property, who tend to be older. If the longtime residents of a town decide to use zoning to keep out new housing, the longtime residents get to vote, but the folks who would have liked to move in don’t. If decisions are made by those who show up, then those who are already there and have time on their hands can wield disproportionate power.
The missing part, though, is how wealth accumulates. Leaving that out leads to a fatalism that doesn’t need to be there.
Since the advent and spread of the 401(k) in the 1980s, it has become the most common vehicle for accumulating wealth; 401(k)s—named after part of the tax code—allow people to set aside money on a tax-deferred basis (often with an employer match) to save for retirement. They work by investing the contributions in various assets, but mostly stocks. Over time, the accounts grow through a combination of contributions and investment gains. Although investment returns aren’t technically compound interest, the effect is the same: Growth occurs on a squiggly upward curve over time, rather than linearly. That’s because, say, 7 percent of $1 million is more than 7 percent of $1,000. There’s no end of details and asterisks, but at a macro level, that’s close enough. Those who have a lot already gain much more quickly than those just starting out, by design. And those categories tend to correlate with age.
Death may be a fact of life, but taxes are very much a human invention. The tax code can be tweaked—indeed, it’s tweaked on a regular basis. It doesn’t have to be this way. In most countries, it isn’t.
Blindness to the larger economy also hinders Moyn’s explanation of Social Security and its projected shortfall. As Stephen Goss, the former chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, has been explaining for years, the key issue isn’t the aging of the boomers. The 1983 task force that tweaked the system knew that the baby boom had happened and predicted that the aftereffects of the boom would continue into old age. They planned for that, and until the recent crackdown on immigration, their projections were substantially correct.
The issue isn’t the boomers. It’s income polarization.
The 1983 task force, chaired by Alan Greenspan, set the upper income cutoff for Social Security taxes at the 90th percentile of salaries. Since then, it has adjusted for overall inflation. But salaries haven’t moved with inflation; the highest ones have grown much more quickly, and the lowest have stagnated. Accordingly, as of 2023, the upper income cutoff had dropped to the 82nd percentile, rather than the 90th. If it were reset to the 90th, most of the shortfall would vanish.
In other words, those who benefit the most from the 401(k) are also those who benefit the most from a flaw in how Social Security is funded. In principle, that flaw could easily be fixed.
It’s unlikely in the short term, though, in part because seniors have a rational fear of the financial abyss. Self-interested parties have learned to exploit that fear.
In the U.S., we combine an age-biased mechanism for accumulating wealth with a horrifyingly brutal end-of-life care system. Anyone who has paid for long-term care for an aging parent knows how preposterous the costs are and has learned the hard way that Medicare doesn’t cover them. What Moyn condemns as “hoarding” is, in part, a rational bit of self-preservation in the face of an indefensible system. If you don’t know whether you’ll need long-term care, but you do know it would cost six figures annually, then a certain amount of hoarding is simply self-preservation. If you want different behavior, change the incentives.
To his credit, Moyn correctly identifies the trope of “generational theft,” popularized by the Peterson Institute, as a distraction. The way to a fairer and more sustainable economy is not to “reform” (that is, cut) Social Security or Medicare benefits. That would only incentivize even greater hoarding to compensate. Instead, a combination of more progressive taxes with greater service provision at the end of life—say, expanding Medicare to cover long-term care—would dislodge money from static accounts and get it flowing through the economy. It would allow families to devote resources to their kids, rather than to private equity–funded chains, and it would give the elderly reassurance that they’ll be OK at the end of life. Redirecting funds to the needs of the young would have a salutary effect on public higher education. On this, we agree.
Of course, the book includes a number of smaller proposals of varying merit, such as restoring mandatory retirement ages, weighting votes of younger people more heavily on the grounds that they’ll have to live longer with the consequences of decisions and requiring representation of the young on corporate boards. (I’ll go with yes, no and maybe, respectively.) Readers are invited to pick and choose.
Caveats noted, though, I have to tip my cap to Moyn for making a serious attempt to address a real problem that our political discourse bends over backward not to notice. I don’t see who’s going to do it—a major flaw—but that may be descriptively accurate. If so, that’s not his fault. It’s asking a lot of readers to put aside the knee-jerk ad hominem response, but a bit of self-discipline can be helpful. The book may be speculative, but sometimes seeing an issue in a new light is worth the effort. This one is.