Samuel Moyn makes at least one cogent argument in Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. We are experiencing something unprecedented in human history. The Boomer generation is perhaps the first generation to survive into its seventies and eighties almost entirely intact. Surely this occurrence has economic, political, and social consequences with which we must grapple. Add to this the dramatic decline in fertility, and we get a rapidly aging population. What are we going to do about it? This conundrum is ripe for thoughtful, sober, and incisive analysis.
Gerontocracy in America does not represent such analysis.
Moyn has written a book defined by snark, sloppy reasoning, arrogant assumptions, and sophomoric insults. The book makes little attempt to persuade anyone who does not already share his views.
For Moyn, aging is the omnicause for nearly every pathology facing America. Moyn treats with contempt the notion that age might have any connection to wisdom. He cites Thoreau’s claim that he had “yet to hear the first syllable of valuable . . . advice from my seniors” and favorably quotes Aristotle to the effect that age is no guarantee of wisdom.
To be sure. Yet this is the same Aristotle who, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics, says: “Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life . . . since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be in vain and unprofitable.” Plato says something similar in the Republic (Book V, roughly 474–475 in the Stephanus numbering).
In our own day, the evidence is overwhelming that most violent crime is perpetrated by the young, mostly males. Depending on the offense, somewhere around 60–70 percent of the most serious violent crimes are committed by people thirty-five and under.
These are precisely the kinds of factors Moyn might have reflected upon, but he does not. He might also have considered the fruitful dialogue between Thomas Jefferson, who argued that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living” and that each generation should be freed from the claims of the past, and James Madison’s defense of stability, typified by Federalist No. 49 (“[T]he most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage to have the prejudices of the community on its side. The danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions, is a still more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decision of the whole society.”).
Instead, Moyn is dismissive of Madison, largely because Moyn is dismissive of the Constitution. He characterizes Publius’s defense of the Senate as stemming merely from “conventional stereotypes about the correlation of age and wisdom,” as if Publius had no substantive arguments.
Yes, “senate” derives from the Latin senex, meaning old man. But this has little to do with Publius’s defense of the Senate or with the constitutional age requirement of thirty. Moyn inexplicably characterizes thirty as “gerontocracy,” even though thirty was hardly considered old even in 1787.
Madison makes a convincing argument in Federalist Nos. 62 and 63 that stability is an important virtue in government. People depend upon knowing today what the law will be tomorrow. An ever-changing and “voluminous” body of law confuses the people and empowers the “monied and sagacious few”: in our own day, lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants. The Senate also recognizes the residual sovereignty retained by the states. And its greater age requirement reflects the fact that the Senate possesses additional powers—such as considering ambassadors and treaties—that might reasonably require greater life experience.
Yes, the Senate is intended to be a more sober body. But there is no evidence in Publius or the Convention debates that it was intended to be a gerontocratic oligarchy.
You would never know any of this from reading Moyn. It says a great deal about the level of argumentation in the book that Moyn offers a more sustained analysis of the television show Succession than of the Federalist Papers. This is especially striking because Moyn is quite explicit about what he wants to do: eradicate the Senate, eliminate the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, abandon “one man, one vote” in order to give greater weight to the young, and, almost offhandedly, ensure that in Samuel Moyn’s America, “old people would merely lose the right to vote.”
You would think Moyn, a law professor advocating significant constitutional reform, might grapple seriously with the meaning and purpose of the American constitutional order, or at least give its defenders a fair hearing. You would be wrong.
The rhetorical method of the book is, above all, snark. Ronald Reagan was a “diabolical genius.” The Supreme Court envelops itself in “priestly trappings” and “mystical rituals.” The elderly are “oligarchs,” “hoarders,” and “misers.” Seniors who move to the Sunbelt are “carpetbagging freeloaders.” He approvingly quotes descriptions of the elderly as “beset . . . by greed, cowardice, and resentment” and Boomers as “a generation of sociopaths.” Americans supposedly live under a “tyranny” of old people who “hold society in chains.” He even derides his older Yale colleagues as “crusty old professors.” Moyn must be a gas at department meetings.
Okay, perhaps the tone is off. But maybe there is a unicorn hiding beneath all this manure. Not really.
Consider Moyn’s political argument. The problem with the elderly is that they vote (that’s why we have to take their vote away, says Samuel Moyn, who also argues democracy should be our “highest ideal”). Voter turnout among the elderly is higher than among virtually any other demographic. At first, one might think that is a good thing. Moyn even concedes that seniors have “modeled civic participation.” Yet that is precisely the problem: they vote too much.
Moyn never grapples with the complexity of voter turnout. What he identifies as “tyranny” is in many cases simply the result of generational demographics. There are a lot of Boomers, while declining fertility means there are fewer Millennials and members of Gen Z. The political and economic power of Boomers is therefore, to a significant degree, simply a product of population ratios.
More importantly, if one wants to understand generational politics, one has to consider what is happening among the young as well as the old. Political scientists have known for decades that voting is highly correlated with religious participation, having children, homeownership, marriage, and income. These factors all correlate with age, as well. In short, what we are seeing is not some conspiracy of blue- and gray-haired geriatrics. It is common sense. People who have these characteristics have more at stake in society and therefore have greater incentives to pay attention to elections.
Moyn complains that voter registration is harder for young people because they are mobile. He also argues that seniors find it easier to vote because they do not have to work.
Yet since the motor-voter laws of the 1990s, voter registration has become remarkably easy. And never in American history has it been easier to vote. In my state of South Dakota, for example, voting begins a month and a half (forty-six days to be precise) before Election Day. Some states mail ballots to every registered voter. Moyn and I agree that Election Day should be a holiday, but it is difficult to maintain that voting is simply too hard for young people.
Young people do not vote because they are less invested in public affairs. Their lower turnout is not the product of some nefarious intrigue. It is axiomatic.
That lack of investment has become more serious in recent years. Young people are delaying marriage, careers, and children longer than ever. Christian Smith coined the term “emerging adult” to describe the large numbers of people in their twenties who, while no longer adolescents, were failing to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Why is this?
Again, Moyn needs to consider what has gone “wrong” with the young as much as what has gone “right” with the elderly. Perhaps Jonathan Haidt is correct that we have coddled young people too much and that they have consequently failed to acquire the key habit of maturity: willingly taking on and fulfilling responsibilities. I am not sure whose “fault” that is, but I am pretty sure it cannot be explained by Moyn’s geriatric omnicause. Moyn doesn’t bother considering any other factor than old people are jerks.
There are also likely structural barriers to the advancement of the young. I can think of at least three: college debt, rising housing costs, and a hyperregulated economy that makes entrepreneurship difficult. It has arguably never been harder for a young person of modest means to go into business for himself or herself.
Moyn considers rising housing costs, but, consistent with his myopia, blames them largely on greedy seniors. He never seriously considers, for example, how environmental and building regulations contribute to housing shortages and drive up construction costs.
Elections provide another example of Moyn’s tendency to posit a vast, greedy geezer conspiracy. I have already noted that the primary reason for elder political power is their relatively high turnout, combined with the lower turnout of the young. Moyn also describes America’s campaign-finance system as “libertarian.” I encourage Professor Moyn to run for federal office without hiring a team of campaign-finance lawyers and see how he does in this “libertarian” finance system.
One reason our governing class has become a kind of political walking dead—Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and others—is the power of incumbency. That power is itself partially caused by an overly regulated campaign finance system. Congress, in a perfect example of rent seeking, has created a system in which a young, unconnected person with no personal wealth cannot compete. Campaign finance regulation represents a high barrier of entry, forcing challengers to raise money drip by drip, while incumbents, who already have all the connections and the attraction of power, can raise money with much more ease.
These are only some examples of the weakness of Moyn’s argumentation. Another is his claim that tenured professors can remain in their positions “no matter how incompetent or useless” they become. As someone who has been involved in the removal of multiple tenured faculty members for incompetence, I can say that this is simply not true.
Moyn claims “the evidence suggests that those most likely to vote are homeowners interested in exemption from taxes or protection from higher ones.” But his citation (which you can read here) makes no such claim. The study merely states that age and homeownership are positively correlated with voter turnout. It says nothing about anyone’s motivation for voting.
This kind of slipshod reasoning and bad citation reflects the value of the work as a whole. Samuel Moyn’s argument ultimately amounts to little more than the claim that old people are “tyrants” because they vote, because they save money, and because they have the audacity not to die. Moyn is not bereft of intriguing ideas. He has made me ponder the wisdom of mandatory retirement laws, which Moyn favors. But the polemical, vituperative tone of the work and sloppy argumentation seriously detracts from what value is there.
I first came across this book through Ross Douthat’s podcast. On the podcast, Moyn says that he wants an “honest and open conversation” and advocates for “intergenerational solidarity.” But this book does neither. It is written almost exclusively for people who already agree with him. Everyone else is treated either dismissively or contemptuously.
The Douthat podcast demonstrates that Moyn is capable of reasoned argument. If only the book had adopted the same tone as the interview. One suspects that Moyn has succumbed to the Ivy League phenomena of exclusively talking to people with whom he already agrees. Perhaps one reason he was more balanced and moderate with Douthat is that he knew Douthat did not share Moyn’s leftist prejudices.
Moyn claims that Yale “maintains a distinct reputation for intellectualism.” Not if this book is any indication.
