In short
The episode argues that America’s “gerontocracy” (older voters and leaders holding power) is a major, under-discussed threat to democracy and fairness, shaping policy toward stability and protecting entitlements while younger people face worse prospects.
Guest backgrounds
Samuel Moyn, Yale Law professor and author of Gerontocracy in America. He studies law and politics; he’s 54 and discusses aging in elite academia, where faculty have aged substantially.
Key claims
Fear of decline and mortality helps explain why older politicians/justices don’t retire. U.S. institutions (incumbency advantages, life tenure for judges) and an older electorate contribute. Gerontocracy skews policy “rightward” (small-c conservative), including lower priority for climate change and more hostility to immigration, despite older people needing immigrants for care and funding. Older Americans are often wealthier due to tax breaks/asset bubbles and the abolition of mandatory retirement.
Notable examples
Mitch McConnell’s health rumors; Ruth Bader Ginsburg not retiring; Joe Biden’s age controversy; Western Europe’s age limits for judges; AARP and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ending mandatory retirement; property tax revolts and tax immunization of seniors’ homes; Medicare/Social Security as “third rails.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Tyranny of the Elderly
0:31 to 1:16
Discussion on aging leadership in America and its implications.
“What if the real threat to American democracy is the tyranny of the elderly?”
Aging Politicians and Power
1:42 to 4:10
Exploration of why older politicians refuse to retire and retain power.
“This conversation will determine just how interesting people find the times.”
Cultural and Structural Factors
4:10 to 6:24
Analyzing cultural and structural reasons behind elderly leadership.
“I wouldn't want to scapegoat the boomers who were kind of in the right place at the right time.”
Corporate Leadership and Aging
6:24 to 7:20
Examining the phenomenon of aging in corporate leadership roles.
“And there's very good data that in spite of the illusion we have, thanks to the kind of mythology of Silicon Valley, CEOs in America have been aging and indeed just in the last bit of time aging rapidly.”
Drawbacks of Gerontocracy
7:20 to 10:00
Discussion on the drawbacks and societal impacts of a gerontocratic leadership.
“all my own children to strike a blow against power that I will inherit if I stay around.”
Policy Implications of a Gerontocracy
10:00 to 13:15
How aging leadership shapes public policy and governance.
“And we wouldn't want to miss that a gerontocratic society tends to produce policies that often hurt elderly people a lot too, especially when older people control the political system.”
Entitlements and Government Spending
13:15 to 14:00
Exploring the relationship between aging populations and government entitlements.
“So on government spending, what do you think the net effect of an older skew is?”
Entitlements and the Aging Population
14:00 to 15:44
Discussion on older Americans' attachment to entitlements and taxes.
“They may be small, C conservative, but that is true of aging liberals, too.”
The Economic Status of Older Americans
17:34 to 22:00
Examination of how wealth and poverty among older Americans have changed.
“Let's go a little deeper on the material side, right?”
Generational Wealth and Inequality
22:00 to 24:37
Analysis of generational wealth shifts and their implications for millennials.
“with their children or less likely to sort of pass on resources while they're alive than prior generations?”
Show all 19 chapters
Intergenerational Solidarity and Political Change
24:37 to 28:00
Discussion on the need for intergenerational solidarity and political reform.
“creative and dynamic, like people are more likely to figure out the best idea for a new business or understand a new political problem or something else at age 36 than they would be at 56?”
The Anti-Gerontocratic Agenda
28:00 to 31:30
Explore the proposed changes to address age representation in politics.
“Give me the, let's say the three pillars.”
Wealth and Age Inequality
31:30 to 36:40
Discussion on the age wealth gap and the need for tax code reform.
“jobs in many sectors, I basically think we should rethink our tax code.”
Intergenerational Solidarity
36:40 to 40:35
Debating the importance of cross-generational alliances in politics.
“I don't see any conflict between those two missions.”
Intergenerational Solidarity
40:59 to 41:49
Debating the importance of cross-generational alliances in politics.
“This podcast is supported by NERTECH ODT Remedjapant.”
Intergenerational Resource Management
42:30 to 46:55
Discussing the rationality behind older generations holding onto resources.
“And you need, you know, you need resources for that future.”
Reimagining Old Age and Generational Responsibility
46:56 to 48:49
Exploring how middle-aged individuals can engage with their aging parents.
“Do you think that there's a different kind of attitude towards the old from 40-somethings or 20-somethings that would encourage that kind of attitude in return?”
The Debate on Assisted Suicide
48:50 to 53:30
Examining differing perspectives on euthanasia and assisted suicide.
“But invested not just at a fiscal level, but at a personal like...”
Personal Reflections on Aging and Family
53:31 to 55:50
Sharing personal experiences related to aging parents and intergenerational conversations.
“I definitely want to impose a lot of burdens on my children to take care of me in the future, and I am already talking about it.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Ross Douthat:The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. I go to games always. Doing the mini, doing the wordle. I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. This app is essential. The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. Forget fascism. Forget socialism. What if the real threat to American democracy is the tyranny of the elderly?
0:39Ross Douthat:America's leadership class has grown very, very old. Questions about Senator Mitch McConnell's health are only growing. Senator Lindsey Graham from the state of South Carolina has died. With images of his bruised hands covered in makeup going viral, President Trump is now defending his health. And the rising generation seems to feel like their elders are hoarding the American dream. Boomers ruined the economy for us. College is unaffordable. Health care is unaffordable. Gas is unaffordable. Utilities is unaffordable. They inherited the greatest economy for the working class in, quite possibly, the entirety of human history.
1:14And they f***ed it up in a few decades.
1:16Ross Douthat:My guest this week is a Yale Law professor and the author of Gerontocracy in America, A new book that argues that the concentration of wealth and power among older Americans is our least discussed crisis.
1:37Ross Douthat:Samuel Moyne, welcome to Interesting Times. Are they interesting, though? I mean, we're going to find out. This conversation will determine just how interesting people find the times. But we're going to start with politicians, aging politicians, because right now we are watching Mitch McConnell, formerly the Senate majority leader, still an active senator, essentially seem to die in office with various conspiracy theories swirling about whether he is, in fact, already dead. One of the most consequential political decisions of the last decade was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decision not to retire from the Supreme Court.
2:20Ross Douthat:Nobody on the Supreme Court seems to have learned anything from that. And of course, there was the Joe Biden incident. And there are some people who think that our current president may even be not quite young enough for the job. Start with the psychology of this phenomenon. What do you think is behind the refusal of older politicians and justices and powerful people to retire? I'm surprised you said that Mitch McConnell seemed to die. A lot of us are not sure he is alive. I think there's a deep existential reason to retain power, quite apart from the old saying that power corrupts. and anyone who's powerful wants to keep their power.
3:09It's that as we age, we face mortality. The shadow of death hangs over us our entire lives. We're starting in hard. That's good. We are. Well, but I think there's no way to explain the retention of power as we age except in the face of decline to deny it. But then there are other reasons. I think we get used to a sense of our significance in our vocation or our job, especially when one's in the news so often, when one is instrumental to making policy. And that's a powerful drug. And it's hard to imagine weaning oneself from it if one doesn't have to.
3:55Ross Douthat:Is there some specific American thing or generational thing? Or is this just put any group of human beings in a position of power at 84 years old and they will be likely to hold it? I think there's something universal, and that's the fear of decline and death, which I think is baked in. I wouldn't want to scapegoat the boomers who were kind of in the right place at the right time. They benefited from something new, which is that we don't just enjoy long lives, almost all of us, but doctors have succeeded in making us high functioning till near the end. They coined a phrase for it called compression of morbidity, saving death for the end rather than having us decline.
4:41And then there are American features that have less to do, I think, with the boomers and much more with the incumbency in office our politicians benefit from. After all, if you look across the water to Western Europe, even though half of humanity lives under political leaders over 70, Western Europeans are generally exempt from it, even though they have lifespans that are as long or in some case longer than ours. And is that term limits? What's the Western European secret? I think that their way of organizing political competition, funding elections, and governing parties has a lot to do with why in general they have not had the gerontocratic crisis in the political class that we have done.
5:31If you're interested in judges, and I'm deeply interested in them, they don't have life tenure, which our constitution offers and has kind of on principle from the start. And so their judges do have mandatory retirement and often specific age limits.
5:49Ross Douthat:How far does this extend beyond the political realm? And again, especially in the United States, right? Because Mitch McConnell, RBG, Trump and Biden, right? These people are front and center. But do you see the same phenomenon in corporate leadership, in sort of private sector leadership? Absolutely. I think that it turns out that aging politicians are the tip of the iceberg. Part of the reason why politicians are so old in the United States is that the electorate is so old. And then wealth in a lot of its forms turns out to be age inflected. And there's very good data that in spite of the illusion we have, thanks to the kind of mythology of Silicon Valley, CEOs in America have been aging and indeed just in the last bit of time aging rapidly.
6:47and we should disaggregate and look at different sectors because of the old adage, write what you know. I do privilege a bit in the book universities where faculties, especially at elite universities where I teach and you have taught, have aged substantially. I am in my mid-50s. I'm still below. How old are you exactly? I think we need an exact. I'm 54 years old, 54 and a half.
7:14Ross Douthat:When do you join the gerontocracy? Like what's the moment? I'm aging gracefully into it and I have a lot of gerontocratic power awaiting me, which is why I wanted to seize the opportunity while I still identified a bit with those younger than me and above all my own children to strike a blow against power that I will inherit if I stay around. So what is so bad about this state of affairs beyond the specific desire not to have, you know, someone who's not up to the job, right, in a position of power? But assuming that lots of these older CEOs are still, you know, capable of doing the job, what is the structural problem that this creates for society?
8:06Ross Douthat:Right. So first off, life extension is a miracle. And I don't think you're in favor of it, especially when it comes to my life. But I do think we should benefit from life extension. Individuals should extend their vocations if that's what they want to do. All other things being equal. And we should benefit as a society from the new lease on life that many of us can expect to have far into the future. But I think there are some drawbacks, a dark side, if you will. One is just the injustice that comes from not fairly organizing a succession process. Most firms have an internal hierarchy, and there are very few people tend to be the old at the apex.
8:54And those beneath them, like in the HBO show Succession, are waiting for their time. and I don't think that's good for anyone. Then there's an existential side, which is that maybe we, because of the cult of longevity and the age-old wish for eternal life, are not reckoning with our future and we're holding on in spite of the other things we could be doing in a last chance to reinvent ourselves from taking advantage of the extension of life, which grants us potentially an ideal retirement, not just hanging on for dear life until death comes.
9:41Ross Douthat:So the gerontocrats themselves are moral, philosophical, existential victims of the system in the sense that they are encouraged to remain with power instead of confronting themselves or spending time with their grandchildren or both? I believe so. And we wouldn't want to miss that a gerontocratic society tends to produce policies that often hurt elderly people a lot too, especially when older people control the political system. So what kinds of policy are you likely to get in a gerontocracy? And we should stipulate, as you said earlier, right, that when we're talking about gerontocracy in politics, we aren't just talking about the power of Mitch McConnell.
10:29Ross Douthat:We're talking about older voters wielding power through older elected representatives. How does that, in your view, shape and warp public policy? I think this is probably the most important question because it wouldn't matter how old the politicians are if they're still government, not of, but by and for the old. I think that we become more conservative with a small c as we age. Some people are conservative as youths. Many people become more conservative. Some are born to it. Some have a creep upon them. That's right. I've given myself a lot of room to move right. But again, my point is not about left, right.
11:18It's about do we think about stability as the most important thing, about the protection of what we've painstakingly acquired. Do we think about the future in the same way a younger person would? And I mean, there's an ancient debate. Cicero, in really the greatest defense of older people in power ever written in our tradition, says that older people plant trees for the future. Well, they don't. Aristotle says, no, older people live in memory rather than hope. And when we look at specific issues, we find that the older you are, the less likely you are to prioritize climate change as a policy area.
12:06Take immigration, which I think is an especially fascinating one. We should note that, you know, older people are whiter to an extreme extent. And we also know that older people, as they age, tend to be more and more hostile to the welcoming of newcomers to the country. And of course, that's true across the Atlantic, not just in the United States. Now, we could get into whether there's a need for border control and immigration restriction if you want, but I'll just observe that as we age and we need care, someone has to fund it in a context where there aren't as many young people being produced and someone has to do the caregiving.
12:56And so there's a very credible argument, I think, that more immigrants would actually help older people as they age, and yet they're the ones most against it.
13:08Ross Douthat:So these are ways in which essentially a gerontocracy skews right in its politics. So on government spending, what do you think the net effect of an older skew is? And because it seems like you could say, well, it also skews conservative or Republican because old people have more resources. At the same time, the American welfare state built by your left wing forebears, right, is designed heavily around retirement protections, Medicare, Social Security. These are the third rails of American politics. What do gerontocrats want when it comes to taxes and spending? I think that's a super point. And it's really important to say this.
13:57It's not that the old are on the right. They may be small, C conservative, but that is true of aging liberals, too. As an example, the No Kings protest, especially as they continued, became more and more white and gray haired in their constituencies. And we could argue that following their old standard bearer, Joe Biden, they were nostalgic in character, looking for a kind of status quo anti Donald Trump, preferably a kind of more liberal version of the 1950s and 60s, the glory days in which many boomers were involved of civil rights activism, maybe anti-war protest. but the side you're raising is entitlements, so-called.
14:50And it is true that older people tend to be fanatical about the protection of their entitlements, no matter the budgetary consequences. I think it's sad that the concerns I'm voicing for fairness to younger people have generally been mobilized by those who want to get rid of those entitlements. When, to me, a more obvious approach to not just guaranteeing entitlements, but expanding the care that older people need and that Medicare doesn't cover would be raising taxes. But no matter whether they're left or right, most older people tend to be, let's say, concerned with taxes. And I think it's no accident that the gerontocratic era of American history has been the era of tax revolts.
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16:59Ross Douthat:Brought to you by the Ad Council. This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. Have you ever had so many tabs open that your computer starts slowing down? Life can feel like that too. BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report found that 74 % of Americans believe society still discourages asking for help. Therapy can help you sort through what's taking up space and quietly affecting you. With BetterHelp, connect with a licensed therapist online and switch anytime. Maybe it's time to close a few tabs. Visit BetterHelp.com slash New York Times to get started. Let's go a little deeper on the material side, right?
17:36Ross Douthat:Because it's not just about Medicare and Social Security and taxes, right? It's also that whereas when the welfare state was first being constructed in the New Deal era and so on, old age poverty was sort of a central zone of poverty in the United States. Today, there's still senior poverty. But if you're just looking at, you know, balance sheets, saving stock portfolio and homeownership, old people, well, how are they doing? Tell me how they're doing. The fortunes of older people in our country have radically shifted. Of course, it's true that they were once the worst off, in part because when we were much more a country that involved physical labor, people were kind of injured out of their jobs and had nothing to turn to.
18:31And it's for that reason that Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security Act in 1935 was such a transformative moment. At the same time, it wasn't that costly because there were so few older people, especially living on. Um, and, uh, there was, uh, an enormous number of, of able-bodied younger workers who could fund, uh, these programs. That's not true, uh, now, uh, but while it's important to acknowledge how many older people there are who are poor, their, their, the rate of their poverty is no, uh, greater than, uh, any other cohort of adults. And of course it's, it's way, they're way better off than children.
19:16Donald Trump's one big, beautiful bill cuts snap benefits for children in poverty. And so if we're concerned about poverty, we should maybe look a lot more than we have at children. Older people, especially when you get to the upper echelons of the class structure, have been the great winners of the latter part of the 20th century, in part because of some asset bubbles, in part because of all the special privileges that have been built. into our tax code and in part because the abolition of mandatory retirement. Why was mandatory retirement abolished? Well, it was abolished across the country due to the AARP and a federal law called the Age Discrimination and Employment Act that was revised a few times between the 1960s when it was first written and the early 1990s.
20:12And essentially, in all but a few sectors like air traffic control or airline pilot, mandatory retirement was made illegal.
20:23Ross Douthat:So what we call the age wealth gap has been expanding, meaning just give me a couple examples of what are the specific benefits that seniors get in our system in terms of policy that you were just referencing with, let's say, homeownership or something like that? Well, I think it largely consists of tax breaks ever since California started the property tax revolts of our time. The outcome of many of our tax laws has been to immunize older people's possessions from taxation, which once would have been a very noble cause given that they've lost income. But as a result of some of these asset booms, these aging Americans are sitting in very nice houses, the best there are.
21:16They're blocking the construction of new housing for everyone else, including senior appropriate housing. And it might be true that many of these relatively wealthy older people can't access their wealth because it's tied up in a house, but they've created an incentive structure where they don't want to sell. And so it's a kind of perfect storm that's resulted in a lot of injustice.
21:44Ross Douthat:Just as a larger generalization, do you think there's any evidence that boomers or boomers fading, you know, going into the silent generation have been stingier with their children or less likely to sort of pass on resources while they're alive than prior generations? I don't think so. I think generations do have different experiences, which can lead them to behave differently in the aggregate. But from what I can see, the boomers were just like the rest of us, just in a particular time and place, especially with some early good fortune and then some asset bubbles along the way that benefited them hugely.
22:34that have made them the standard bearers of gerontocracy, but we will all inherit it from them.
22:44Ross Douthat:Do you think that the millennial generation in particular, like there's an ongoing debate about the like, how screwed are millennials debate? Because this was a generation or at least part of a generation that came of age around the Great Recession. And they have been the ones most likely to be priced out of certain areas and neighborhoods, the most likely to say, well, I can't get a home in this school district because homes are too expensive and no one's building new homes and so on. At the same time, there's a lot of countervailing evidence that says, no, you know, if you actually look at sort of overall salaries and overall income and so on, millennials seem to be doing just fine.
23:34Ross Douthat:Um, how do you, where do you come down on that debate? I think some of the trends that we've been talking about have been relaxed or even reversed in, in the couple of years since the pandemic. But when you look at the broad swath of the past half century, it's staggering how far there's been a shift in wealth upwards, uh, to older people. You know, we had a trillionaire for a bit and I'm not going to say he's old, but if you look at the billionaire class on a worldwide scale, 90 % of those people are over 50, 45 % are over 70. And I'm not, you know, calling for generational warfare, in part because my nightmare is that millennials will do fine.
24:24It's just they're in a waiting game to come into the resources. And our political question has to be about when in life, not just whether you get the resources you need.
24:36Ross Douthat:Do you think that it's just as a sort of baseline better for society to have younger people in strong positions of influence just because, let's say, young people are more creative and dynamic, like people are more likely to figure out the best idea for a new business or understand a new political problem or something else at age 36 than they would be at 56? Is that is that that's a substantial part of it? If we're interested in why are we stuck, why are we on this timeline? I think we could ask, have we gotten the balance right between the kinds of, you know, gifts that relatively younger people bring to their organizations compared to relatively older ones?
25:26And I'd call for balance since, you know, what psychologists call crystalline intelligence, which is about the kind of, you know, experience and habituation. Wisdom. It can be called wisdom, but then you would need it balanced, especially if you purport to care about creativity, innovation, dynamism, which we ought to in a modern society. Okay.
25:52Ross Douthat:I'm going to save the defense of the gerontocrats for after you give me some prescriptions. So anyone listening or watching who's waiting to have someone speak up. Remember, I'm a lot older than you. It's coming. No, well, I know you're going to. So be prescriptive. What do we actually do about this? Because you just said you're not calling for generational warfare, but aren't you calling for generational warfare? No. In part, out of just the real concern that, as you suggested earlier, unlike the time of the boomers who were rebellious in their youth, even if they paradoxically built a pretty objectionable world in the end.
Read the full transcript
26:34In the end, we all build a somewhat objectionable world, probably. I don't know. I'm not counting you out or myself, but I think the distinctive feature of the boomers is that they were very numerous and they had a chance by coming into power early to shape the world that no successor generation has gotten. And I speak as a Gen Xer, you know, we were the forgotten generation. Our mantra is reality bites. And that was really a reference to, you know, the world at the end of history that we were in a sense weren't bequeathed because the boomers hung on. They kept running it. But I, I guess I would say that it's not just out of that strategic concern that there aren't enough youth who aren't already resigned that I say we need intergenerational solidarity.
27:32Because again, gerontocracy hurts older people too. And I'm convinced that there are a lot who see that they have hung on and they're part of an unjust structure. And so just as we've had transracial movements to attack racism, we could imagine intergenerational solidarity to think about a better form of succession in American society.
27:59Ross Douthat:Let's say you get this intergenerational solidarity. Give me the anti-gerontocratic agenda. Give me the, let's say the three pillars. Well, so I would just say there are buckets. There are the politicians who I think we could benefit either from age limits, mandatory retirement for them, or I think better, a way with youth quotas of having different age cohorts represented in our political bodies. When it comes to elections, we didn't talk about those, but elections are stunningly old, especially kind of non-presidential elections in our country. So what do you do about that? There, I think there's a range of fixes, some more modest, like mandatory voting, stopping our practice of punishing young people for mobility or for their inability to leave work as easily as a retiree.
28:56I've gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country. So those are edgy. Why not assign them to those children's parents? Well, because there's a divergence of interest between parents and children. And I think it's likelier that young people, not people who are raising families, will have the best insight into the interests of children. Whereas if you were awarded five proxy votes...
29:34Ross Douthat:I think it's absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do. And I say this with all due respect to 24-year-old recent college graduates of whom I hope to be the parent of in nine years or so. I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. And part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren't the hostages of their parents as much as we rely on parents to raise them. In my experience, parents are more likely to be the hostages of their children.
30:18Ross Douthat:But look, I would love to live in a world where you and I sat down at the bargaining table, right? And we're trading, you know, your weighting of votes for 20-somethings for my extra votes for parents. in practice in the United States, where we have a system of one person, one vote, we have various constitutional issues, and then we just have sort of, you know, no, no one in Congress is standing up and proposing giving parents votes for kids. This seems fun, but fanciful. Yeah, I just said, you know, let's throw the edgier ideas on the table. I will mention we already do have weighted voting. Those who happen to live in less populous states have votes, not just because of the Senate, but because of the consequences for the Electoral College that are not one person, one vote.
31:09But if we accepted that we have such a thing, maybe we could experiment with it more. But I agree with you that if in the short term, we're dealing with more actionable proposals. So just to turn to the last bucket that involves wealth and the obscenity of having the age wealth gap that we do. And there I basically, aside from proposing mandatory retirement for those retaining jobs in many sectors, I basically think we should rethink our tax code. And far from punishing the worst off seniors by stripping them of their badly needed entitlements, we should fund them better and we should just recognize how well off many seniors are and redesign our tax code to catch up.
31:58Ross Douthat:Okay. I have more questions about the realism of this, but just at the level of existing political factions, you are on the left. Your book has been reviewed by a lot of people on the left, and there is a running left-wing critique, which I will offer to you, which basically says no matter how much you are trying to cover yourself and present this as just, you know, I'm going to tax Elon Musk and a lot of 80 year old billionaires and we're going to redistribute and it'll be great. you are still scapegoating the part of the population that has benefited from the welfare state that liberals built.
32:42Ross Douthat:And in so doing, you are handing ammunition to the right, to libertarians, to budget cutters. And that really all that a good leftist should say is the old have what everyone else should have. So how do you respond to that critique? So I'd say we have to distinguish the description of what we're living through from our prescription of what to do about it. The left view often on the more descriptive first side is to say age isn't really why there's an advantage in the United States. It's just class. And that's easy to dodge because it turns out that you can't understand class today without seeing how it's age inflected.
33:32Right. Class advantage compounds. Exactly. And I absolutely I'm sensitive to the criticism that my ideas could be easily mobilized to scapegoat older people and hurt the wrong ones. And if that happened, I'd be horrified. But as far as I can see, there's no way out of our quandaries without having an honest, open conversation about this experiment we're running, which is a demographic in the first instance. I think we have a chance to save the really just view that there's intergenerational inequity from those who are abusing it in the name of attacking older people and destroying the welfare state.
34:19And I think if we don't talk more about age and politics, we'll have not just misunderstand our situation, we'll have missed the chance to create a new coalition of youth and old.
34:34Ross Douthat:Okay, now I'll speak for the male factors who would twist your perspective, right? It seems like from a right-wing perspective, if you start with your analysis, you don't have to become Paul Ryan tomorrow, right? But if this is your perspective on the world, you should not just want to impose crushing wealth taxes on entrepreneurs or something. No, we're dealing with a society that redistributes through the welfare state resources upward to people who are not dynamic and productive. We should be means testing Medicare and Social Security so that older people who are well off, you know, aren't getting benefits that they don't need.
35:19Ross Douthat:We should be, you know, stripping out regulations that prohibit building new housing of the kind that you mentioned. Right. And you can go on from there. Right. Like, why doesn't this analysis make you a man of the left more libertarian, a little more Paul Ryan esque? Well, I do want to insist that we should have policies that are aimed at least some of the time at unleashing our capacities and stoking innovation. Where I might differ from some other podcasters at the New York Times is that we're not just concerned about abundance and novelty with economic innovation and economic growth. But where I think I'm going to differ most with the libertarian or neoliberal POV you're rehearsing now is that there's still this question about the floor of care to which everyone's entitled, especially as they age.
36:16and there are lots of ways of making that not just less costly but more generous and we really should i think we could get into some some but to get but to get that
36:29Ross Douthat:to get that uplift right yes you need growth and dynamism you need money that given our budget deficit picture we don't have at the moment right so somewhere in raising taxes right well you can get it from raising you can get you can fix part of the fiscal picture again by raising taxes on some of the wealthy old but you still need to sort of generate economic energy right you do and that is why is that not a deregulatory abundance oriented mission well it it is but i don't i think there's a you're now presenting what i would hope it turns out to be a false choice between deregulatory and regulatory policies on the one hand and generating the funds to pay for care on the other.
37:26I don't see any conflict between those two missions. It's going to be really hard work. But if we abandon either, we're lost.
37:35Ross Douthat:Is it possible in order to get that kind of politics to have younger Americans think of themselves as a constituency in as like a politically engaged constituency sort of unto themselves in the way that like the AARP did for seniors? Because it seems like for your politics to work, you would you again, I do think you would need a kind of sense of intergenerational warfare. Right. As part of politics. I think that's that's very fair, Ross. I mean, I do think maybe our biggest political problem is the alienation of younger people from the political system. I see it in my own daughters. My children, you know, college age have inherited a world they think is irreparably broken.
38:27and beyond redemption in many ways. And I think that's a tragic thing. So we do have to imagine them angrier than they have been. Also, if they could be activated in the way you're envisioning, they could see the need for establishing cross-generational solidarities because not just for strategic reasons, but on principle, they could be, you know, a kind of new universal class thinking of themselves as acting for the sake of everyone. I wonder though, if it almost isn't the like 35 to 45 year olds who are more of the challenge
39:16Ross Douthat:in the sense that, yeah, young people may be apathetic, but it's sort of natural for the 20-something to think of themselves as kind of oppressed by the weight of the world that older Americans have built, right? Whereas it's people in the thick of it, like in the midst of their working lives or their family lives and so on, who seem less likely to think of themselves as a class with sort of coherent interests. Absolutely. You know, I feel bad, even in our conversation, that it's easy to slip into a dichotomy of age versus youth. But actually, it's age versus everyone else. And that would most of all, from my perspective, include the broad middle of those in the prime of their lives who are under-resourced, who are stagnating and haven't been bequeathed by their elders, whether within their families or on a social basis with, in a sense, their inheritance, which is resources when they could most use them to make our world a better place.
40:35better and more creative place.
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41:36Ross Douthat:Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NERTECH or visit nertech.com. All right, back to your podcast. This message comes from Betterment. Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment takes the time-consuming work out of smart investing. I was doing all of these things that were pretty straightforward to implement.
42:11Ross Douthat:I just needed to spend my time doing them. Betterment automates the same good practices so that I know I'm doing portfolio management and goal-based planning without me having to spend hours of my life doing it. Learn more at Betterment.com. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed. Now let me speak on behalf of those elders, right? Because I think the argument that would be made by them and on their behalf is that what you call unjust hoarding or sort of like, you know, holding on to houses that you should sell or stock portfolios that would benefit your kids is, one, a rational preparation for a world where whatever you do in your professional life, you're going to live longer than anyone has in recorded history, right?
43:08And you need,
43:10Ross Douthat:you know, you need resources for that future. Two, in maintaining those resources, aren't you actually in the end reducing certain burdens on your kids, on your middle-aged kids, right? That like, you know, one of the stories of American life before the 1930s, before Social Security, well, you know, well, what happened to old people when they were injured and couldn't work anymore? Right. Well, they moved in with their kids. Absolutely. Right. And you had a whole system based on that kind of intergenerational burden sharing that imposed really big burdens on, you know, on younger people and workers and so on.
43:50Ross Douthat:Right. And now we're in an age where people live a long time. People need long-term care. They need all of these things. And isn't gerontocracy just, you know, planning for that future? Well, there's a lot there. Yeah. Well, I have to, you know, speak on behalf of my elders. And it was a very moving peroration. I will say that I believe very deeply that we've created a society in which it is rational to hoard because we will live indefinitely long. We know from the pandemic that the state of care to which we're entitled at the end of our lives is horrendous. I mean, horrifying. And it is completely understandable that one would stash away everything one could to avoid that fate.
44:52It's also because, as you say, we've moved away from the intergenerational family. which we could revive, but we could also revive intergenerational community. And that also has gone by the boards. There's enormous age segregation in the way we live residentially. Part of the reason is that older people control the best real estate, but also because I think there is a kind of alienation where young people no longer want to support not just their aging parents, but older people in their society generally. And so, you know, on remedies, I think we have to do something culturally to overcome these problems.
45:36What to me is not a viable solution is to have older people retain so much that they, in a sense, disinherit the future because they are convinced that they will have to spend down an enormous amount just to survive till the end.
45:57Ross Douthat:But what is this, I guess, what is the standard of care that you're aspiring towards, right? So like right now, you know, I I observe, and I'm sure many people watching and listening have observed the end of life of people who are technically millionaires, right? People, they own a home. It's appreciated. It's worth$1.2 million, whatever, right? And they enter end of life care. And it's not like just sort of Republican grinchiness to say there's a lot of tradeoffs here that are not resolved by just taking a tax bracket up a little bit. There are. Look, you've got to be right. And I'm not trying to downplay the immense complication of these policy domains.
46:47But we also know there's a lot of rationalization involved in, let's call it hoarding. And there are a lot of reasons one has for not pivoting to more intergenerational generosity. And if we just have this fiction that older people are there for the wisdom they have in their heads and not everything they've acquired and are keeping that they should begin to pass on under the right conditions, then I think we haven't really, you know, organized the inevitable succession that our humanity involves very well.
47:28Ross Douthat:Do you think that there's a different kind of attitude towards the old from 40-somethings or 20-somethings that would encourage that kind of attitude in return? Like, how should the middle age think about their parents that they don't know? They're not going to get everyone among the old on their side, but they could deploy some tough love, let's call it that. And it would involve the insistence that you've had your turn and you have a chance to one more time in your life to reinvent yourself. but what you cannot do is deprive the rest of us of our futures or just make us wait until we're old to enjoy resources and but there would also be i think you know some promise there we provide you care we make retirement great because neither care nor retirement have been great things for most of them who've been lucky to get them.
48:38And so we're just at the beginning, I think, of imagining what an ideal old age could look like. And young people and people in their prime would have to be as committed to it, as invested in making it real. But invested not just at a fiscal level, but at a personal like... That's right. It would mainly be the resources physically of the elders, But it would have to be a participatory project across generations to be real. Okay.
49:08Ross Douthat:Let's end by talking about maybe the starkest alternative to that vision of care, which you touch on in the book, but maybe, you know. Gingerly. Gingerly, right. Which is assisted suicide and euthanasia, which are ideas and policies that have themselves gained a lot of ground under conditions of aging populations in North America and Western Europe. Just give me your general views first on assisted suicide. Is it a desirable policy, a human rights victory, something dangerous? What do you think? I think it's a legitimate and noble thing if one under one's own power and freely decides to end it.
49:53But of course, we would need to understand that in the conditions of our day where older people often are suffering from depression, a sense of neglect, and prematurely end their lives, let's say under psychological duress, we would want to make sure that these choices were free. and maybe that's not always the case.
50:24Ross Douthat:Yeah, I'm interested in this because there's sort of a couple of polls here, right, in the euthanasia debate. You have the argument that you just made that says if people are making this decision absolutely freely, feeling that they've lived their life and want to go out on their own terms, that's okay or maybe good, or if they are sort of, you know, suffering from depression, poverty, all these kind of conditions that sort of render them incapable of making the decision, that's not ideal. But I think just based on what you've been describing in this conversation, there's a middle zone, right, where you basically feel, you feel a kind of pressure towards euthanasia, towards assisted suicide, Like, you don't want to burden your children and your grandchildren, right?
51:20Ross Douthat:And so you end up feeling a sort of pressure to go out as soon as you're not, you know, sort of not in good shape, right? It seems like that could be the kind of the way that societies end up reconciling these difficult forces. They say, look, we're not going to take away. We're not going to take away your big house or your comfy retirement. We want you to enjoy all those fruits. But it's just that when you get to the last three years where it's really expensive, like then we want you to feel some pressure to exit early. That seems like that's my, I guess it's a dystopian vision, but it just seems like where someone, where these lines could intersect.
52:06Sure. So that's, it's a credible nightmare scenario, but it would be a travesty of my views. Yeah, yeah.
52:12Ross Douthat:I'm not imputing it to you. No, I understand. I wonder sort of if you have a gerontocracy that sets up a system of assisted suicide, what does that look like, I guess? Well, you know, I would just contrast it with the utopia, which seems to me, you know, more plausible to achieve in real life, which is that we insist that as we age, we never become a burden or useless. It's actually our ancestors, some of the pre-moderns I talk about in the book, who did have euthanasia, even like euthanasia accepted by the aging when they were burdensome. We live in circumstances in the wealthiest country in the world that we should never tell anyone that they're a burden.
53:06On the contrary, we have the resources to, you know, as long as doctors can perpetuate life, not to, you know, provide immortality. That's Brian Johnson talking for an elite, but at least to provide care to the end.
53:25Ross Douthat:Would you rather die as a burden on your loved ones, but while being cared for, or relieve them of that burden? if I'm only a burden? Do you want to be a burden? I definitely want to impose a lot of burdens on my children to take care of me in the future, and I am already talking about it. They are critics of my hoarding of books, among other things, and insisting that I divest myself of those things so that they don't have to. But I I think it's eminently just for me to be a burden on the future, on my own children or my society generally. If there's a point at which I'm nothing but burden, including to myself, because I have nothing left to create or explore, then maybe I should have the choice to exit on my own terms rather than in some other way because there will be an exit.
54:29Ross Douthat:How did this play out for your own parents? And did you have profound conversations about gerontocracy or personal conversations about intergenerational obligation with them? I have not with my father, to whom my book is dedicated, who died long enough ago that I didn't have the chance. My mother is still alive and thriving in her 80s. And we have talked about it now and again. my father-in-law who did recently pass away, we talked about these issues all the time because he was a realist. But I've also had the benefit of going to his synagogue and talking to many people who are actively as aging Americans thinking about these issues every day.
55:24And I think it's been a kind of fascinating conversation to interact precisely with not so much in my own direct family, but with older people generally who are all over the map on these matters. And I get as much fan as hate mail.
55:41Ross Douthat:Well, you and I, like everyone, will reach a point of greater familiarity with these dilemmas. But for now, Sam Moyne, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Ross.
55:57Thank you.
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From the publisher
American leaders are staying in office past their prime. Boomers are reluctant to relinquish control — from political offices to corner offices — to the detriment of their juniors. In a society where the elderly hold so much power, should younger generations revolt?
My guest today is Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, and he argues that American democracy is distorted by the power of the old. We discuss how seniors have hoarded wealth and influence and how Americans can renew an intergenerational compact.
- 0:00 The Tyranny of the Elderly
- 2:01 From Joe Biden to Mitch McConnell
- 4:19 Europe's Anti-Gerontocracy
- 5:15 Politicians are the ‘Tip of the Iceberg’
- 7:07 The Dark Side of Longevity
- 9:40 How Age Impacts Policy
- 15:10 The Age Wealth Gap
- 20:21 How About Millennials?
- 23:28 Age Limits and Youth Power
- 38:14 Care Hoarding and Family Burdens
- 44:54 The Assisted Suicide Debate
- 50:14 Personal Stakes
(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)
Thoughts? Email us at interestingtimes@nytimes.com. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.
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