The story of today’s gerontocracy is ironic, insofar as it begins, in the eighteenth century, with the idolization of youth. “It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s meteoric rise from nothing,” Moyn writes, “that inspired the first widespread hopes that young people could finally disregard their elders and rule worlds.” The term “gerontocracy” was coined by an admirer of Napoleon’s, Jean-Jacques Fazy, who protested the resurgent Bourbon monarchy, which ruled partly by means of a legislature with a minimum age of forty. Arguably, the “revolt against gerontocracy made the modern world,” Moyn writes. To some people, “the very idea of progress implies a turn against ancestor worship and those aged elites who prize continuity over change.”
This attitude found its fullest expression in America, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Americans were in love with the idea of youthful, upstart dynamism; they agreed with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who characterized “the forms of old age” as “rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward.” Young people wanted to stay young; older people wanted to reverse time; and so “anti-aging practices,” including new regimes of diet, temperance, and exercise, “swept the land.” Feminism was anti-gerontocratic, too, striking blows against old men and their old ways. By the turn of the twentieth century, Moyn writes, “the last remnants of the old respect for old people were shredded.” It became possible to call an old person an “old fogy.” Moyn quotes Randolph Bourne, a young radical journalist, who proclaimed, in 1913, that “old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them more or less—usually more.”
The pursuit of youth involved a lot of sham science. (There was a long period during which breakfast cereal was understood as a key to longevity.) But in the twentieth century, real medical progress resulted in healthier life styles and extended lifespans. “Giving up smoking and taking statins,” Moyn writes, “along with beta-blockers and blood-pressure pills, and coronary bypass surgery if all else fails, not to mention commitment to diet and exercise—all this has been normalized for vast numbers of people.” The Age of Youth culminated, oddly, in the inauguration of a renewed Old Age.
At various points during this process, observers speculated about the political and economic consequences of a great aging. They noticed that many aspects of our society seem to have been designed with shorter lives in mind. Judges, for example, are often appointed for life—and as lives have got longer, so have terms of judicial service. (The average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice has risen from fifteen years before 1970 to twenty-six years today.) For all but a few professions (airline pilot, air-traffic controller), Congress eliminated mandatory retirement in 1986, deeming it age discrimination; between 2000 and 2010, the number of college professors over the age of sixty-five doubled. (During this period, Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences had more tenured professors over sixty than under fifty.) Academia is now just one of many professions in which younger participants regard their elders “much as a nation of serfs on the brink of the French Revolution saw the noble lords.”
Today, the A.A.R.P., which helped end mandatory retirement, would presumably oppose its return. Yet Moyn believes that it’s possible to reverse the tide on that front, and on many others. “No law prohibits disparate treatment of people at the younger end of the age continuum,” he notes—so why not concede that age does matter, and resume ushering older workers out the door? “Age limits for political office are a must,” he contends; so are reforms to taxes and campaign finance. He contemplates various schemes for “amplifying the political voice of younger voters,” such as requiring everyone to vote (Australia does it) and lowering the voting age, and raises the possibility of “proxy voting,” in which young people are allowed to vote twice, once for themselves and once for those even younger, who aren’t yet allowed to vote.
Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old: he argues that Americans also need to expand entitlements for seniors, so that they can more comfortably and confidently retire. If seniors are “hoarding” jobs, houses, and income, that reflects the entirely logical fear inspired by the possibility of decades lived on fixed incomes. “Which is where socialism comes in,” Moyn writes. In his view, it will take big changes to create an “intergenerational utopia” in which, to choose just one example, older Americans have access to government-funded long-term care in their homes. In 2060, I’ll be one of the quarter of Americans who are over sixty-five; if you’re not yet part of the gerontocracy, you’ll be joining before you know it. Maybe, instead of inveighing against boomers, the younger half of Americans need to start making common cause with the older people they will soon become.
Is gerontocracy the right diagnosis for what ails us? In an essay titled “Old People Aren’t the Problem,” Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. Not all older people are wealthy and powerful; in fact, in 2019, seventy per cent of the wealth owned by those over sixty-five belonged to just ten per cent of American seniors. “Wealth is not actually concentrated among old or young people,” Robinson writes. “It’s concentrated among rich people.” He points out that, in modern America, the politician who has done the most to advance progressive ideas is Bernie Sanders, who is now eighty-four years old (and, to all appearances, totally with it). Would the world be a better place if Sanders were mandatorily retired? “The class struggle overlaps a bit with age, but the policies we should adopt have to be aimed around redistributing wealth and power, period,” Robinson concludes—otherwise we’ll just be “exploited by a younger ruling class.”
It could also be that, in a youth-obsessed society, we haven’t learned how to make the most of the perspective that comes with age. Last month, in a paper titled “Aging and the Narrowing of Scientific Innovation,” a group of researchers analyzed the work of more than twelve million scientists who’d published between 1960 and 2020. There are, they explain, two main theories about how scientists age: one holds that they improve, being better equipped by experience to shoulder the “burden of knowledge”; the other sees them as inevitably less creative and disruptive. The analysis revealed a more nuanced picture. While older scientists do grow less likely to produce entirely new discoveries, they also get better at “combinatorial innovation” through the linking of “previously unconnected ideas.” And though a “nostalgia effect” can take hold, with aging scientists citing older and older papers, this isn’t necessarily a problem: in fact, it creates “continuity” within science, introducing younger scientists to old ideas that deserve currency. Science as a whole might skew too old, the study suggests, but rebalancing requires not just empowering younger scientists but better connecting them with older ones. (The authors recommend “intergenerational, flat collaborations.”)
There is no widely accepted word for being ruled by the young. (Juvenocracy?) And yet, for many people—even many young people—the gerontocratic reality that Moyn describes now unfolds alongside the sense that the rush of technology in general, and the überdisruptive potential of artificial intelligence in particular, have put the kids in charge. The project of building A.I. stretches back at least to the nineteen-fifties, but today’s version seems to be helmed largely by people who are in their forties and younger. There’s almost a glee with which the most A.I.-forward thinkers proclaim that the old world, with its requirements for thinking at human scale and speed, will be rendered obsolete by the proliferation of automated reasoning. One of the promises of A.I., of course, is further progress in science and medicine. If artificial intelligence does what it’s supposed to, then people will be living and thriving even longer. We’ll live even further suspended between accelerating technology on the one hand and the conservative impulses created by lengthening lifespans on the other.
The fault lines between young and old are real. I’m in my mid-forties, with two small children, and I live in one of only a few school districts on Long Island where the school budget failed to pass; most of the people I know reasonably assume that it was older voters, wary of even modest tax increases, who voted it down, happy to risk the drastic cuts to programs like tutoring, music, and sports that will occur if a new budget isn’t passed. (On Facebook, there are arguments between parents who want services for their kids and older residents who say those services didn’t exist “back in my day.”) There are vacant lots and empty buildings in town where new housing could be built, but residents, defensive of their property values, keep nixing new development. The status quo rules. And yet it’s not just older people who cling to the past. A mood of retrospection seems to have settled everywhere. In conversation, almost no one will express hope for the future. Maybe one sign that we’re living under gerontocracy is that so many people yearn for the old version of America, in which dynamism abounded and everyone was young.
To defeat gerontocracy, an embrace of the future is necessary. Older people must care about it and want to participate in shaping it, even as they acknowledge the right of those younger than them to take the helm. Those younger people, in turn, have to understand that their own futures include old age; they need to learn from the old, who, when they were young, were the architects of our present. If gerontocracy is a burden on our society—and it seems to be—then one obstacle is that the resistance to it can too easily take on the form of a fight between the generations. But progress can’t, in fact, be reduced to the overthrowing of the old by the young. It depends on the realization that we’re all moving forward in time, separated only by a few decades, and that we all want to leave behind a world that’s better than the one we found. ♦