Gerontocracy in America: Samuel Moyn on Aging Wealth and Shifting Power

Welcome back to the Vlog. Today, we are joined by acclaimed legal scholar and historian Dr. Samuel Moyn (Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University) to discuss his critical book, Gerontocracy in America.

While the public focus on modern gerontocracy often centers on the visible, late-stage cognitive decline of celebrity politicians like Joe Biden or Donald Trump, Dr. Moyn argues that these figures are merely the tip of a much deeper, structural iceberg. The real-world data demonstrates that our entire legal, economic, and institutional architecture has been intentionally engineered since the 1970s to entrench an elder caste and restrict succession for the prime-age working class.

In this interview, we break down the explicit mechanics of this generational system:

The Inverted Demographic Pyramid: How changes in medicine and declining birth weights have historically squared the old population curves, concentrating absolute power within an aging, self-perpetuating class.

Constitutional Architecture & Veto Points: How the framers explicitly engineered the U.S. Constitution to blunt majoritarian democracy—imposing strict age minimums that historically excluded 80% of the population, and cementing lifetime tenure for federal judges.

The Housing & Tax Trap: How the destruction of the intergenerational home has led to acute, geographic age segregation. We analyze why elderly voters routinely assemble at town meetings to block new housing supply and pass local laws (like California's Prop 13) to permanently immunize real estate assets from funding the public education of younger generations.

The "Grand Bargain" Solution: Dr. Moyn outlines his provocative, counterintuitive policy path forward: establishing mandatory retirement caps, re-regulating campaign finance, and providing total state-funded long-term care in exchange for a massive, structural taxation on aging wealth to fund youth opportunities.

The Critique of Progressive Care: A macro-analysis of why the contemporary Left has abandoned its 19th-century commitment to creative dynamism and material freedom, retreating instead into a technocratic, namby-pamby moralism centered solely on managing a civilized decline.

Dr. Samuel Moyn's book, Gerontocracy in America, is available now across all major bookstore divisions.
 

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

C. Derick Varn 0:49

Hello and welcome to Barnbrog. And today I'm here with Samuel Moyen, who is a prominent legal scholar, historian, and author. He serves as a Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale, serving in both the Yale Law School and the Department of History. He's the author of several books. Some that I'm familiar with is Not Enough Human Rights in an Unequal World, Liberalism Against Itself, Cold War Intellectuals in the Making of Our Times, and the book we're talking about today, which we'll then have will be out for about a week when I release this. So gerontocracy in America. Hello, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02 1:34

How are you? Thank you for having me.

C. Derick Varn 1:37

Thank you. So there's been a turn on boomers that that's been noticeable in the culture since explicitly since 2019. I feel like it's been coming up for about 15 to 20 years. But it seems explicitly that we have established ourselves in a gerontocracy that makes a Brezhnev period Soviet Union look weather quaint. Since the average age is about 15 years older than anyone in the Politburo at that time. This really seemed to get on the map with the end of the first Trump administration that was exacerbated by Biden, and now Trump too has made it even more clear. Particularly, however, if you look at many institutions, both left and right, they are dominated by people who were well over the retirement age. What got you interested in this topic?

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Well, thanks for having me. A couple things. But have, you know, we've all created something that future generations will also experience when they get old, which is what I'm calling gerontocracy. And that's really less about the conflict of generations as a new social system in which the eldest among us enjoy too much power. And we get some power, but we have to wait around for it. And you're right about the timeline when it comes to the politicians. And I definitely, you know, started writing this book before Joe Biden's melodrama in 2024,

What Gerontocracy Means Today

SPEAKER_02 3:48

but that's mainly because, you know, the Democrats in general across the both houses of Congress and in the judiciary with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and so on were like, you know, early warning signs of what would we all kind of notice with Biden in the in the summer of 2024. So that was a big part of it. But I also thought that the politicians were the tip of the iceberg because, as you said, it's not just politicians, it's in a lot of sectors. So I began to do research and I concluded that it might not even matter how old the politicians are, given how old the electorate is, and especially how old money and wealth are in the country. And so that's what I focused on is kind of you know talking about politicians and what we can do about those facing a you know cognitive decline or death in office, but then kind of pivoting to the deeper sources of gerontocracy that have been basically not discussed.

C. Derick Varn 5:03

So in the beginning of your book, you point out that rule of the eldest is not uncommon historically. However, there's a couple of things that traditional societies had to keep in a check that we don't have, and a lot of that is death. But you mentioned changes in medicine, changes in the organization of all kinds of infrastructure, and so now we have almost not quite an inverted triangle, but it maybe we'll get there if things continue the way they're going. So, how do you think like what structures led to this and why is it so different than societies we've seen in the past?

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Well, in the grand scheme of things, you're right. Probably the default mode of human government has been gerontocracy, because so many places we know about had rule by council of elders or you know, kind of monarchy that was inhabited by the eldest. And, you know, in a sense, the monarchies we think of that pass the kingship down from father to son were a little revolutionary because they could even give young men ultimate power. My trouble is that, you know, in modern times we were supposed to have democracy, and yet it seems like we're heading back to the stone age almost. Not that America ever lacked its own councils of elders by constitutional design, and I talk a fair bit about the Senate, which is literally named after old men. But it it does seem that the big change in in the 19th and especially 20th century was the extension of life from more people. As you said, people were term-limited by nature, mortality. There were always old people, you know, people reaching 80s or their 80s or even beyond, but they were rare. Now they're common, and most of us can expect to live long lives. We think of early death as like an anomaly where it used to be the rule. So that's the big change. And as you say, it's our wealth has set up a society in which fewer and fewer children are being born, even as older and older people are being kept alive and high functioning. So you would expect power to shift generally upwards. What I try to document is just how far it's already gone.

C. Derick Varn 8:02

One thing I thought about reading your book is how the shifts historically kind of mess up our indicators. So in the past, when I read anthropological work, and I have a I have an undergraduate background in anthropology amongst my yeah, some of my training, it's all English and education beyond that point. But but when you deal with things like low birth weights, it's usually a sign of scarcity, disease, major transitions and modes of life, you know, the transition from hunter-gatherers to uh agriculture, and a lot of our estimates on like lifespans are kind of variable because we're basing it off of projections from contemporary societies and like some scant genetic evidence. But it's very clear that low birth rates and historically are bad. Uh it's hard for me to make that claim. I know some conservatives do today, but it's hard for me to make that claim today, given that part of the reason for low birth rates and whatnot is pretty clearly abundance, and and however, the cost increasing because of that abundance on the younger that seems to have been a generational trend since the 70s. But our democracy was not set up for that, you know. What how how does this change in in life expectancy really change like our legal institutions and their basic assumptions?

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Well, uh it's a really thorny question why our demography is changing at the back end. I mean, I focus mostly on at the at the tail end why it is that the old so-called demographic pyramid is becoming square in the sense that there are more old people and they're surviving longer. Of course, in the end, it it has a tip because even the boomers are dying, but they've survived much longer and at better levels of health than any generation, then there's there's like a lot of argument about why correspondingly younger people are having fewer children, which of course has gone even below replacement rate in some East Asian societies, not Americas. Yeah. I guess I reflect that what's kind of interesting is that even in the midst of the normal demographic pyramid, our framers of our constitution didn't want democracy. They they actually wanted to, you know, avoid it in certain respects. They they did a lot in in order to empower older people. And that goes beyond setting up a Senate, which was pretty novel at the time for some kind of like elite. The main thing they did is they put age minimums in the Constitution for federal office. And those were incredibly exclusionary in the context of the old

Founders Built In Elder Power

SPEAKER_02 11:35

demographic pyramid, where you know, the 35-year-old age limit for being president excluded 70 or 80 percent of the people around at the time. Now, of course, the aging I described earlier in a sense made those age minimums less, you know, less less exclusionary because that most people were now above 35, not below. I mean, it's we're still only barely in that situation where half of Americans are below 40 and half above. So an age limit of 35 is still excludes a lot of people from even running for or serving as president. But but I guess I would say what I think happened is that the the change in the in in our demography has meant that the framers got what they wanted by unexpected means, because they got old people in power in all three branches of government. It's just not because of these like age minimums, but just because there were fewer and fewer younger people and more and more older people. But, you know, your question is much bigger than that. And I think we don't know. I mean, I'm very worried that democracy didn't survive, and it's now a gerontocracy, and you find that young people are exceptionally alienated from the political system, and we don't know what will happen as the gerontocracy hardens even more as in the years to come.

C. Derick Varn 13:17

Hmm. Do you suspect it will continue to harden? I mean, we are going through the generation immediately after the baby boomers is smaller. It is. But do you think the trends are still heading in this direction despite that?

SPEAKER_02 13:38

I do. So that's why I said at the start, I don't want to scapegoat the boomers for something that you know, like I'm Gen X, and like my generation is inheriting as the boomers slowly die off. Not me personally, but you know, and yet the the Gen Xers will come into their inheritance in their 50s or even 60s or 70s, and they will then be the new gerontocrats. And I don't see any reason to assume that the voting patterns will change where older people vote more readily. And so, you know, you'll have the same picture of electoral gerontocracy and old money. It's true that, you know, absolutely the the number of older people will be smaller. We don't know if the whole society will be smaller because of the declines in birth rates that which could happen. But even if it's not, they the the the correlations that I uncover about voting and and money suggest to me that we're looking at an enduring phenomenon unless we all do something to counteract it, which I do I do hope happens.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

I don't think that's gonna be because of the size of the age cohorts. I think it's gonna be because of policies that transfer authority to younger people.

C. Derick Varn 15:11

I was wondering about that because you know, we do have a under Gen X, there's also a uh now the largest was the second largest demographic on most of the planet, the millennials. It seems like millennial politics does lean more concessionary to the kinds of policies it might mitigate against all kinds of uh inequality and gerontocracy. However, um, I do wonder if the structural things that you talk about, particularly when we get to things like housing and wealth and wealth accumulation, might complicate that picture by the time you know millennials would have access to power. And we're looking at a generation that's access to power might be in their 40s, 50s, maybe even 60s, as opposed to baby boomers who came up pretty much as as soon as they hit that 35 marker, they dominated politics from that point on. And in a way that was distorting too. I mean, like, for example, it took me a long time to realize that like the new left was not actually all that dominated by baby boomers, it was actually dominated by silent gen, but it's because that's when the baby boomers were in college, so it gets into their mythology. Totally right. Uh, I want to talk a little bit about you know, we'll come back to to some of this some of these political issues. I guess I do want to talk about the origin of geritocracy, which you trace back to James Fay Fay, who during the the Brabant restoration was describing reactionaries who were trying to like uh use voting laws to maintain conservative status. Why did you think it took so long for Jarantocker to become kind of a systemic critique? I mean is it just I mean, we we do have the you know the magical year of 1947 where like

How Gerontocracy Hid In Plain Sight

C. Derick Varn 17:43

three of our last five presidents are all born, not just in the same generation, but literally in the same year. That's incredible, yeah. But in the 1990s, that did not feel you know, and I'm thinking back to when I was in high school, but it did not feel like that was leading towards something gerontocratic. So, why do you think it took so long for that to be noticeable?

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Well, I think it's a it's a great question. So, you know, one issue which we can just mention and put to the side is the history of the word gerontocracy. I I focused on it just as a matter of interest, but in part because the young Swiss man you mentioned, Jean Fazi, who who coined it originally, you know, wanted th I'd say three things out of it. It wasn't like gerontocracy hadn't existed, as we said earlier, it was common, but he named it and he used Greek roots in his word to name it because I think he wanted it to be like a form of government of the kind the Greeks talked about, like oligarchy. And indeed, I think he thought, and I think that gerontocracy is a form of oligarchy. But then he also wanted to register how it was an it was new in the modern world to the extent it worked through elections and wealth. And so he kind of you know saw our modern version of gerontocracy, including the current American version, coming. Now, then you get to the present, and I agree with you. If you look at the history of presidents with the election of Barack Obama, certainly, and some other folks who've run for the office, including Pete Buttig, who's, you know, a little more seasoned and is surely going to run again, you're not talking about old folks. That said, you know, Kamala Harris was like the youthful candidate in the last one, and she would have been 60 by the time she took office had she won. So, you know, even at the level of the presidential candidates, really since Reagan, I'd say if we computed averages, we'd see rises. And the last two, maybe it's kind of accidental, but it's it's not accidental that it's in our time that these old folks can can kind of get get to where they are. I mean, previous to Ronald Reagan, we really had only one semi-elderly president, William Henry Harrison, and he died of short order of a cold, and he was nowhere near Biden or Trump's age. But I think the the my main answer is that it's snuck up on this, but if you look behind the main, you know, f you know, figure of the president, you will see the age of congressmen and judges, you know, ticking up over the past 30 years. And I think there it's been very clear if you were looking, but we weren't.

C. Derick Varn 20:59

I think one of the things that I remember being talked about that actually should have been an indicator, and maybe this will be a bridge into this section on like these uh not so obviously political structures was around the end of the aughts, people started noticing that adolescence was being expanded well into 25, 26, 27. Yes. Um, and I didn't hear a lot of questions that tied that to like everything else going up in age, but I agree with you. I agree with you, but I think about this even when I was, you know, I have an MFA, and I remember being told, you know, about young poets and young fiction writers, and we were generally talking about people in their late 40s, yeah. And that no one like really noticed like uh no, completely. So that got me thinking about the kind of structural changes, the expansion of credentialism. So yeah, as as the university expanded, things that didn't need that many credentials, maybe due to high school, maybe needed a BA. Started needing a BA, a master's degree. I was looking, I used to work in insurance, so I was looking at actuarial requirements in like the 1970s, and they just needed you to have like pass a math test and have a high school diploma. And now to be an actuary, you pretty much have to have at least a master's degree. Also thinking about it, you started seeing this change in like property relations, although that happened pretty quickly because one of the things that I do have to caution people when we talk about pre-20th century America, a lot of people lived in generational homes, not absolutely, yeah, yeah, not in you know, nuclear family housing. That's really a post-war development in any significant amount. But how do you think that shift from generational homes to to to nuclear family housing and the focus on housing as the prime holder of wealth that everybody and putting that in quotations for people who are listening though watching has access to? How did that start changing access to wealth and power in America?

SPEAKER_02 23:45

It's a great question. And I I myself, you know, dug uh pretty deeply into the housing story. You're adding a kind of historical dimension, which is really important because it's not just about who owns what, but who's who gets to live there. And I I think it's totally decisive that Americans and others move from a kind of intergenerational family scene to one where you know the nuclear family is is there, and you might, you know, park mom in a local senior center and visit on weekends. But that's kind of that that became the norm. And it had a lot of decisive consequences.

Housing Wealth And Age Segregation

SPEAKER_02 24:33

So in the book, I document that the the age group today most likely to own a home, and it's it's at a rate of 80%, is the age group of those who are 70 to 74. And the second highest, you know, the second, the age group's second most likely to own a home is the those older than that. Now, you know, if those people were living with their younger relatives, I think we would have a completely different America, but they don't. And the ramifications are massive because we know that older voters do not like to pay for the education of other people's children and grandchildren on average. And indeed, the the destruction of the intergenerational home has actually meant a lot of age segregation, mainly because older people have fled across town lines in order to avoid higher taxes where there are plentiful children. And so, you know, it's not absolute or anything like that. But America is increasingly, you know, a story uh of age segregation. Now, the housing story more generally is one in which, because they're practically the only people to go to the town meetings where America makes land use decisions, you know, older voters are not just choosing the politicians, but they're actually going and vetoing new builds and blocking supply of housing. And they have, as you said, benefited from you know uh like big periods of appreciation in their housing wealth without allowing more supply. And that then means that younger people can't buy homes very frequently, they can't put together the down payments, and and you know, that's a failure of supply. And so, so uh this is a long answer, but I think it's an absolutely fundamental part of the story and absolutely one of the best illustrations of what life under gerontocracy means. And really, from what I can see, the kind of life of of many of our cities has been profoundly affected because you know, the the most desirable and most expensive real estate is disproportionately held by older people, which means that you know families are less likely to live in in neighborhoods with with homes as opposed to rental units and so forth. So I think you know, there's an open question of whether and in what circumstances we could go back to the intergenerational home, which I think would solve a lot of problems. I don't propose that because I'm not sure we can go back, but regardless, I think the the bigger picture is one that's I think very tragic.

C. Derick Varn 27:49

Yeah, I mean it it's it's tough. I mean, because there's a lot of knock-on effects of this, not just in terms of like aging wells, but also like highly inefficient cities. We went from what we used to call the donut now to the inverted donut. So as pe as older people come back into the city, uh to take care of it, you know, to take advantage of its infrastructure, people have been pushed out. So now you actually have like the most vulnerable families in these line of concentric donuts of falling apart suburbs, a lot more like Europe.

SPEAKER_02 28:22

Um very similar, yeah. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 28:25

So I I've been thinking a lot about that. And one of the things you point out is even though there is beginning to be a great die-off that is gonna affect probably most of the planet, except for the places affected by climate change the most. But that's beyond the scope of your book.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

But we just mentioned that sub-Saharan Africa is the place where you know there's actually an a growing number of young people relative to older people.

C. Derick Varn 29:01

Yeah, well, I I remember that I I lived in Egypt for a while, which is yeah, and I remember like it really occurring to me, even though I'm a teacher, how little I see kids in America for a variety of reasons. It's not just because we don't have them, yeah, but like they're everywhere. Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

No, no, absolutely, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 29:26

No, I'm but this does seem to have like a very you know, it's gonna have some really weird effects. And there's ones that people have tried to seize on. You've talked a lot about and entitlement traps and deficit hawks, and the the way we have to deal with this actually is somewhat counterproductive, count not counterproductive, counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Yes.

C. Derick Varn 29:55

Yeah, you mentioned Pete Peterson who talked about intergenerational equity, but that he was using it to attack Social Security and Medicare. But you think that this is probably backwards for a variety of reasons, even though it does sometimes feel like when you look at the stats, if

Entitlements Voting And Intergenerational Equity

C. Derick Varn 30:13

you look at what we spend on a child versus what we spend on someone over 65, even in terms of entitlements, it's like an order of magnitude difference.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

So, like in federal dollars, six to seven times as much is spent every year on older Americans and on children.

C. Derick Varn 30:35

But you know, I wanted to to give you a chance to make the case. Sure, how does giving more state funded resources disempower an elder caste and maybe equalize things? Why would that be a policy worth pursuing?

SPEAKER_02 30:50

Well, so it it wouldn't all by itself, but but here's how I came to it. First, I noticed that the whole cause of intergenerational equity had been treated as radioactive because it was, you know, associated with folks who, you know, complained about how youth were being treated because they wanted to get rid of entitlements for older Americans. And the whole, in a sense, the whole case I wanted to make was risk being, you know, treated as a smokescreen for neoliberalism. And because, you know, I don't see that letting old people return to their very powerless state before the Social Security and Medicare acts is is of any help to anyone else all by itself. And then I thought, you know, we're not we don't have the boomers around among youth, a large cohort that can challenge you know the past on its own. And so we need some kind of intergenerational solidarity to create the coalition for change. Plus, I just you know want to do justice to the fact that a lot of older people are powerful, but others are weak. And we have one of the worst welfare states across the Atlantic, especially in the exclusion of long-term care, which Medicare doesn't cover because it's just for illness. So putting all that together, I came up with a kind of grand bargain. And it's true, it involves increasing entitles for older people. And that's to cover long-term care and also improve, you know, the last stage of our lives generally. But it's also to enable retirement as a kind of utopian possibility for more people. And my thought was that that would be like what older people get in exchange for divesting themselves from their power, including their wealth. And so there'd be enormous rises in tax, age, age kind of related or not, on wealth, which would mainly affect older Americans, at least those who have the resources to pay the tax. And that would not just fund the new welfare state, but it would also and mainly fund the creation of new opportunities for younger Americans, equipping children to launch into life and supporting people in their prime when it matters. So that's the kind of grand bargain I envision. But I got there both out of moral principle and because it doesn't seem to me that there's any other way to shake the gerontocracy than through an almost jujitsu type move.

C. Derick Varn 34:07

One of the things I think that that I think really concerns people around my age, and I'm in my 40s, is we don't see like the idea that there's going to be a whole lot of this, the the the benefits of just gerontocracy by the time we get through Gen Xers and get down to us, that we probably won't benefit in the same way at all. And you kind of imply this when you talk about you know this much vaulted 45 trillion dollar inheritance thing that's gonna mostly have Gen Xers and maybe older millennials in the next 10 years. But you argue that this isn't really gonna help the young. Well, calling them young is actually funny. Uh yeah, it's really this isn't really gonna help the middle-aged um in the same way that it that it looks like it might, because a variety of reasons, some of which have been reported on the news, like these properties actually aren't in good condition, uh blah blah blah blah blah. Like there might, you know, they might we we're we are looking at the down and then maybe a housing revaluation soon, but that's temporary, just like the 2007 one was temporary, so that might not actually be a structural fix. Why is inheritance not really going to fix the inequality here?

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Well, so so I mean there's a series of reasons, you know, for for those lucky Gen Xers who do get to inherit, my problem is that they inherit too late. Um, because they're the it's like I mentioned the case of like you know, Prince Charles becoming king after age 70. But you know, not that that's bad, but you know, it would it would be better to come into the resources you need at a time when you're still in your prime and and kind of you know you can use them to make a contribution. And that's why, you know, I think we're all kind of approximately in in the place of these characters in the HBO

The Grand Bargain For Renewal

SPEAKER_02 36:20

show Succession who are almost infantilized waiting around for the old man to die. But but then, you know, there are other objections, which of course is that not even all Gen Xers, let alone you know younger folks, are set up for inheritance, certainly not of the magnitude that some Gen Xers are belatedly getting. And then there's this question do we do we really want succession to be done only within families or at a social level so that you know younger people can expect at a birthright, as a birthright, a promise of good public education, which we don't provide that launches them into life. And, you know, people in their prime who don't happen to be heirs can access social resources for for social benefit. And so, you know, it's it's those variety of reasons. Now, if you're talking about houses in particular, you know, I think, you know, I know many families where like you, you know, they've raised their children on the outskirts in small, you know, small premises. And then when they're approaching their 50s, 60s, they get to take over the big house in a sense after they themselves need it. And that, you know, barring, you know, kind of some change in the pattern of our housing, I I've I don't see that changing unless we do something about it. And that could involve more senior builds. I call for like incentivizing downsizing among rich older people who have palatial residences they don't need, and so and so on.

C. Derick Varn 38:21

So, one of the things I was thinking about on your grand bargain is even if your grand bargain is fair, I I would think you'd actually have to convince people before 50 to make that bargain.

SPEAKER_02 38:35

Like, yeah, and it really interesting. Yeah. I was talking to a colleague, you know, about or because I also advocate mandatory retirement, and he he's an economist who agrees with me. And he said, you know, what we need to do is provide a buyout on hire so that you're basically taking in advance a kind of lump sum payment in exchange for a legal commitment to retire 25 years later. Now, I think it would be better if we just like change the federal law that prohibits mandatory retirement. But you get his idea because he thought we know from behavioral economics that people, you know, are more willing to make these kinds of rational decisions when they're not up against it, you know, and when when they're and also like when when they're remunerated long enough before that it doesn't seem like a uh it seems like a good deal to them. Yeah. So you're right that his point, you're you're kind of generalizing his point to all all sectors.

C. Derick Varn 39:48

Yeah, I mean, it just it it makes sense to me that like I would make that deal. Yeah. I don't know many people in their 70s who would make that deal.

SPEAKER_02 40:00

Yes, yes. Well, the the thing is a lot of them, you know, many, you know, I'm talking about a minority, but it's sizable, who have kept jobs and in a sense don't need the money, but they can't do without the sense of relevance and significance that their job provides them. And I think you could say something similar about houses that a lot of folks can't imagine giving up their house for a smaller, a smaller, you know, apartment and unless they just really had to do so, because their whole identity is so bound up in it. Whereas when they first move in, you know, you can imagine them saying, This is just a place to live. And like if I have to sign a you know a letter saying my my my you know property rights terminate at age 70, so be it. That wouldn't be as big a problem, I think, as people in their late 60s.

C. Derick Varn 41:01

Yeah, I was thinking about this because I have lived in places that had mandatory retirement ages, and also things like 100-year inheritable leases, stuff like that. So, like like you had to release your property down to the next generation at a certain point to restart the lease. That's a thing that I've seen and and in a few countries. I can't really imagine that being politically palatable here.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 41:35

But it does seem to be uh uh important. I was thinking about this uh in in terms of actually skilling and de-skilling so you know we can all go on about how meritocracy has never been true, but it it seems less true now than than the past, and and part of that is in politics in and high-level industry and in academia, there is a lot of nepoing going on, partly because a lot of the people in power are old enough to actually still be active when their children and maybe even sometimes their grandchildren are in not just entry age but prime age and can continue to aid beyond what was historically possible, and that that does create a gr a glass floor problem, like there's just yeah, so you have less and less competent elites in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_02 42:41

Yeah, you're totally right. I I I do report in the book on the amount of Nepo babies in Congress, and that's like in a sense a bright spot because often their parents will give their children their seats and thus retire, you know, but before their colleagues will, but it's only in a sense to perpetuate their dynastic power. And I I I kid you not, it at where I work at Yale Law School, there are multiple children of professors on the faculty, so it's and and it's not that big. So you're you're totally onto something.

C. Derick Varn 43:26

One of the things I was thinking about in in terms of your proposals for stuff you have to deal with, um, I was thinking about Article 5 in the Constitution, which literally is unamenable. It's the only thing that's unamenable in the entire constitution, which protects the Senate. And I was thinking about that, and you mentioned this as well, but there's been a lot of calls to abolish the Senate from more radical ends of progressives and leftists, uh, which uh I have pointed out is possible, but you basically have to have a constitutional convention to do it. So how is this architecture written into law? Are there other places this kind of protection shows up? You've hinted at one, which is like it's just illegal to have a mandatory retirement.

SPEAKER_02 44:23

Yeah. All kinds of ways. I mean, you know, and and it's really important to enumerate them. I mean, the Senate is in some ways the least of our worries. It it's still galling that it's literally a branch of government named after old people, but it's true it's protected, and anyway, like the main objections to it now have to do with the representation. Of small states. I will say that, you know, some legal scholars have proposed that what if we just transferred its powers to the House of Representatives and keep the Senate as like a shell of its former self? Would that be, would that violate Article V? Maybe not. But you're right that it's it's it's Article V is extraordinary, especially because most of the so-called eternity clauses around the world that say certain things can't be changed are about like human rights, you know, and ours is about this old man's branch of government. But no, the the main laws that matter have to do, well, if we're still talking about politicians, there's life tenure for judges, which is in the constitution and could be amended. But, you know, that's what would have to take place to get some of these older judges to retire. You know, in the electoral sphere, I think there, you know, I would say there are a lot of problems, but the main culprit is our privatized campaign finance system, which democracy doesn't require. And a lot of democracies like ours have public finance. And what that has meant is that older people control who's funded for elections. I mean, it's kind of the the statistics there that I report in my book are kind of remarkable. But then really, you were talking about, you know, jobs, housing, wealth, and there's all kinds of beyond kind of the age disc discrimination and employment act that abolish mandatory retirement. With respect to housing, there like there's Prop 813 and tons of laws that protect and entrench older people in their homes, homestead exemptions, many other things. Basically, you know, the main agenda of older people since the 1970s has been immunizing homes from taxation. So those are all laws that you know ought to be on the chopping block ASAP. I'd argue like our our collective decisions about how to organize pensions and basically the privatization of pensions in this country, which was kind of accidental, but it was due to a, you know, the creation of 401ks, basically, like an amendment to federal law, has had a huge effect as well. And so it's, you know, I'm a law professor. I don't I try to do it lightly, but you know, it really is a like we are it this is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but it was a series of choices that were made to have the law one way rather than another. I mean, the optimist in me says, though I accept your view, that like it's hard to imagine a lot of these reforms, but the optimist in me says, well, these are things that were made and could be remade.

C. Derick Varn 48:00

So one of the things that that hit me and explained a lot to me, actually, is even though the average age in America is really high worldwide, it's like 39-ish. Like the pinning, you know, I've seen a little bit of variance from area to area, but it's it's older. You know, New York is slightly younger than California, things like that, but it they're all over 35, from what I can tell. Even even my state, which uh uh Utah, which has a ton of kids, actually compared to the rest of the country, still has got a median age of above 35. Yeah. So and I think we might have the most kids per capita of in the country, uh, just because uh the LDS have a ton of children. Yeah, sure. Yeah, but even with all that, the medium voter is significantly older than the median eligible voter at 65 in 2004. And I there's every year I hear we need to focus on the youth vote. Every year the youth vote's actually doing a little better from what you know from what I've been seeing. It's been on an upward trajectory since that's true.

SPEAKER_02 49:19

That's true, that's true, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 49:21

But it doesn't matter because the imbalance is so great, it's extraordinary, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

And and it really depends on how many elections we're having, which is so many that you only get the youth turnout in in the presidential. So, like I think my data reports that you know the oldest election ever was in 2024 in a primary in New Mexico where the median age of the vote voters was 72. So it's it's it's really extraordinary.

C. Derick Varn 50:00

That's that's scary, but it does make sense why it's so hard to do anything about you know absolutely representative.

SPEAKER_02 50:08

I mean, one thing that people say to me is that like once you've described the problems, your solutions are not credible because they're not available, yeah. And and that's kind of true. And that's why I I I kind of shot for the moon with this kind of grand bargain idea, because only if older people were on board would anything happen. But like asking people to give up their power is a fool's, you know, a fool's errand. So it's it's a tough one.

C. Derick Varn 50:44

Since you've written this book, and I do want to get to some of the solutions, but it does seem like some of these older politicians are even turning on themselves because we see proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. There's even now some hints that the House Republicans want to actually start stripping away Social Security, and we have another Social Security crisis, although one that's actually probably not as hard to fix as they make it out. Do you think this will affect any of these trends?

SPEAKER_02 51:20

I'm not sure because you know, I th I feel like everyone predicts that Congress will do nothing until crisis is really at our doorstep, and the Social Security Fund is basically out of out of money, the trust fund, so-called. And at that point, there will be a kind of new negotiation, as there last was in 1983. And I think it probably will lead to fewer benefits, but they will save the program. So, like my question is more can we, you know, begin doing other things to like not just make it viable, but to lower the cost of health care and you know, raise taxes so that we can actually have a in a big enough federal budget that these kind of these entitlements are not seen as like this time bomb that will destroy the federal government if if it's not stuff, if they're not cut. That's like a big ask, but I I'm not sure. I think that like the crisis of Social Security, which is certainly going to happen, will itself lead to a big grand bargain on its own, unless we kind of think more broadly about the interests of other people than the elderly.

C. Derick Varn 52:47

Yeah. So it seems like you know, one of the things you pointed out is not only are they do you have a gyrnocratic uh government, you also have an elderly that is profoundly cut off from young people. Is this a more viable thing to tackle first?

SPEAKER_02 53:07

Or well, it would be if we could return to intergenerational housing as we discussed earlier, but I think you know, I I don't know. I mean, I I think I think I I I I in a sense lean technocratic in this book, even though I am not a technocrat and I strongly think that like cultural revolutions matter much more than anything else. I just couldn't exactly imagine the scenario in which you would have more intergenerational comedy just arising on its own. So if you have ideas about that, I'd love to hear them.

C. Derick Varn 53:50

Yeah, I I have floated some that were quite, you know, one of the things that's kind of quaint about living in Utah is because of the ward system of the LDS church and a lot of that, there actually is slightly more interaction between youth and elderly. I don't want to like make the LDS sound utopian because they are not at all. But but you do have things like old people being encouraged to go to the school uh to work in the schools and and stuff like that. The thing is, they have to do it, it's still voluntary. And so, yeah, plenty of them do, but more of them don't. And I, you know, ironically, or but maybe not maybe not surprisingly, it tends to be the less well-off ones, ironically, that volunteer their time to help the school, which I've always found kind of funny.

SPEAKER_02 54:44

Um, it's it's probably not that counterintuitive, but it yeah, that's I think that's the general pattern, actually, of in in elder volunteering of all kinds, not just um you know, in Utah. So it's it's a really important thing to observe. And you know, a mandatory retirement system would mean that some of the better off, you know, older people who really do get a lot out of work could actually, you know, maybe more likely get that what they they want to get out of work out of volunteering. But I'm not, I mean, we'd have to see.

C. Derick Varn 55:31

Yeah, one of the things you talk about in your book, uh, you mentioned Representative Marie Perez's proposed cognitive capacity testing after Biden. And I think about all those kinds of things proposed in business. I am terrified of these, obviously, because they would be uh and in the private sector a clear violation, I mean the public sector too, of the ADA. But you argue that it would just make a lot more sense to have a clean mandatory age cutoff, you know, both for people to be able to save face and also I think it would just be legally more viable and more humane.

SPEAKER_02 56:12

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the basic reason I back age limits over capacity testing, because who's testing, you know, what about all the people who claim they're not in decline but are, you know, the pain of the whole process. Of course, we'd if we had mandatory retirement, you know, at least in sectors where there's enough supply and therefore, you know, those who don't retire will block succession, then you know, we need to have a functioning welfare state for those who haven't saved over the course of their careers. But it just seems like the clean break is best for all concerned. And I think it would also make sense to connect it to like a cultural emphasis on like, you know, retirement as your last chance to reinvent yourself before the end. And you know, a society that sponsored that would be like a great society, I think. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 57:24

I was thinking about that. You you also mentioned the work of the bioethicist Daniel Callahan and setting limits, which argued the society has to have limits for medical spending and a wage. I was I have also been thinking about this in terms of socialized health care because I've lived in countries with socialized lead hair, and I live here where they're where we spend way more than they do. Not not not even, I'm not even factoring what people spend on insurance and on private just government payments for for tax breaks for hospitals outstrips most socialized medical systems, but we we live in a hyper-individualist and highly atomized culture

Limits Retirement And A Better Welfare State

C. Derick Varn 58:12

that seems to view death as a failure of technology more than anything else. How do we condition Americans to see to see power? And you know, I'm not arguing for death panels, obviously. In fact, I think I would like it for for there to be like, you know, maybe more poor people who make it to 80. But because I don't remember if this comes up in your book, but it that's something I think about is like if you look at the stats, it's not just that everyone's older, it's also that the more the more pe the more progressively incentivized people often don't make it old enough to have as much effect on these policies. Yeah, that's true. How do you how do you think we could deal with limits without it sounding like go off through the ice sheets, old man?

SPEAKER_02 59:11

Of course, I absolutely and and so you know the first thing is that you know governments make choices every day that affect how long people will live. And for that matter, non-governmental forces, notably corporations, are affecting our environment in so many ways that lengthen or or more often shorten life. So death panels are already on, are already meeting every day. However, they're very scary. And I'm not at all, I don't even like touch the issue of that Callahan did all those years ago, you know, of when and whether people should be cut off from catastrophic care. That is something faced in in you know countries with socialized medicine. And you know, it's a tough one because there's a there's a budget, and it's just true in in all countries that most medical expenditure is in the last few months of life. But all I want to take from Callahan is like years earlier, should we think about our lives as as transient and and and and lived in stages and accept limits to the power we enjoy over the younger and the future? And I think he said some really powerful things there, even if we decide that we want you know medicine to be able to perpetuate our lives as long as possible, and there's money to to cover it. Because I I'm not I'm just interested in power, and I think like his ideas and and like the idea of setting limits is a really useful one for all kinds of situations, not just the question of whether to ration care.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:28

So, one of the other things that came up in your book that I wasn't really expecting, but I do want to pick your brain about, is you talk about the modern political left overfocusing on caretaking and compassion as opposed to like bringing back vitality and creativity to people in their prime mind. I mean, when you think about this, like when you're talking about uh just to be reductively biological for a second, you know once you get even our age, you know, I'm younger than you, I think, but like you start hitting a wall where where you can because of the most people start experiencing declines in their in their lower brain around between 35 and 50, you start having an issue where you can think perfectly rationally or remember, but you can't really do both. And that's over-reductive, it's overgeneralized, but it's a general trend that we can talk about being biologically true, and that's that's for middle-aged people. Yeah, um, why do you think the modern progressive movement doesn't take these kinds of developments into account and overfocuses on care or at least as a framework? I mean, I don't have anything against caretaking, you know, children won't be. Yeah, completely. And I don't always have a problem with compassion. There are times I do actually, but um, but I do think that we need to think about what the welfare state, if we're going to have one, is for. And yeah, you you got me thinking about it because I think about this often in Marxist terms, but like it's not just for caretaking and nambi pambi feel-good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:30

Like absolutely. I mean, and and I think I I lose a lot of people here because we're so far into a shift of liberals and the left towards you know, like let's call it equality rather than freedom, and taking care of people who are suffering rather than launching them into you know creativity and dynamism. And it wasn't like that before. It was in if even the other way around. And I I think you know, part of the issue is that our experience of the 20th century was so atrocious that liberals basically said, let's not make sure nobody gets hurt anymore. And like they FDR showed the power of Social Security and the elderly coalition as it grew and grew and grew, that Democrats kind of reoriented to it in the United States. But, you know, for liberals back in the 19th century, the central institution was the school and not, let's say, the senior center. And I think I'm not arguing we should have less care, I'm arguing we should have more, but I also think that you know the the basic question is not how long did we live, but how did we live? And liberalism or progressivism should be about that question first and foremost, and like focus on giving people the chance when they're creative, which generally means younger, to make a mark and contribute to overall betterment. And so I'm just saying we need to kind of you know work to get back some of the commitment to creativity and and you know the qu let's say the quality of your life that we have kind of lost in focusing on the quantity of your years.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:56

We we've hinted on this. We talked about a little bit in academia and the way that this age, uh the removal of mandatory retirement changed the academy. I was thinking about the knock-on effects of that, which you know the relatively conservative historian Jacques Bazan pointed out way back in the 70s was going to become a problem, which was that tenured profess tenured professor was gonna have to over-rely on TAs, it was gonna have to overproduce for you know, it's necessary if you are doing that to overproduce people in each field. Then you also have other fields like medicine, which arguably have deliberate have systemically and deliberately underproduced graduates, so we'll factor that one out.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

That's super interesting, yeah.

Academia Business Ageism And Decadence

C. Derick Varn 1:06:44

But this largely has to do with trying to make maintain these systems which now last for very long periods of time. Like once you once you get tenure, you might have tenure for you know twenty, thirty years. In academia it looks like there's been a hollowing out of of that possibility though for for generations underneath yeah yeah you know chairs just don't get renewed more and more things are just kept in the adjunct sphere. If you do adjuncting for too long you're pretty much you're not entirely blacklisted but you're kind of blacklisted. Sure. How do these things contribute to the problem and is this replicated outside of academia?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32

I I think it it it it was one of my inspirations for the book that I witnessed in my you know time in in universities which is a quarter century as a professor the aging of the faculty and the grievous consequences for younger people, you know, millennials basically like my students who often didn't get jobs or couldn't and if what we were saying earlier is right about like the time of life in which you're likely to make the bigger contributions creatively is right. Not that you know there aren't like very high performing older faculty but they may be kind of high high performing and repeating the same things. And if that's all true I think it turns out that there's a lot at stake in your second question, which is how representative a sector is it? And of course it's different in a ton of ways, but I show in the book that American business generally, you know, if you hive off Silicon Valley, you have you know like aging chief executives and like we even have a study that says that like when a younger chief executive drops dead or you know is is like you know taken out by some scandal the stock price decreases. Where it if a very a very old CEO finally leaves the stock price increases. And so you know we we have retention of power in the same way that professors do in in kind of mainstream business entities.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:23

And so I think the problem is actually kind of emblem emblematic in the academic sphere and and so I tried to in a sense treat it as less exceptional than it may seem I have have two final questions so I'll ask the one on ageism first and that is you you critique you know a lot of the the discourse around ageism you talk about how it was originally coined by Robert Butler to define a particular kind of discrimination against the old but this has been expanded to all kinds of other areas it means that we really can't put any blocks on people staying in power with very rare exception I think like like when I think about like what fields have mandatory retirement and I'm like air traffic controllers is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Pilots also pilots also yeah but in general we don't we don't have that and also for those of us in my age cohort since we don't see how the hell we're gonna be able to get three or four million dollars saved up in a 401k fast enough we're also probably gonna have to do the same thing without a revigoration of the welfare state but I was also noticing what ageism doesn't protect. So for all this this scores around ageism it doesn't protect people getting laid off in their 40s and 50s where it gets harder and harder to find work correct but it does stop people from getting hit in their 60s 70s and 80s. Right um what why is it why do you feel like it's applied so inconsistently and what other things is it used to hide well I I think there are a couple of reasons.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:18

One is that at the time that the federal law the uh age discrimination and employment act was passed there it really was common for people to be seen in their 50s as kind of losing a step and for mandatory retirement to kick in and before they'd really had the chance to you know get to the top of their professions or accumulate a a you know a nice retirement or do everything they were capable of. And then there's the AARP which it kind of emerged in the same period as a kind of cause group for at that time old older people. Now it even changed its name which used to be an acronym for retired persons so that it's just called AARP. And of course many of these folks do not retire because they don't have to and there's no like under 50 cause group and you know the the the the level of membership and funding that the ARP has is like a staggering thing in the annals. So I think those are the two main reasons. Of course in theory a a prohibition of age discrimination should protect children too and protect young people and middle aged and not just older people. Now you know ageism is a difficult one because of course it's true that a lot of people are discriminated against on the basis of age or the appearance of age and we don't want unfair stereotyping but then you know we have to decide when discrimination is justifiable. And there I think like I try to put together a rational case for the fact that you know some change is necessary to contain the you know unfairness of elderly rule. And you know I I think of course these the my whole POV is is deemed age by some but that's because I think that as someone once said when you're powerful and someone purports to take your privileges it can still feel like oppression.

C. Derick Varn 1:13:49

But of course it's not the last question may be among the most controversial and I would also say like in a book that probably is going to be pretty controversial even amongst younger more progressive types you you actually argued that this gerontocracy really does lead to a decadent society and I also you know even though I'm a socialist I mention decadence all the time that that word yeah triggers a response of like you are moralizing this you will you know you're missing the point how do you define decadence why do you think it's relevant when it comes to the aging and what would you tell progressives and leftists about why we should care about a decadent society stemming from this well so I I really mentioned decadence by by that word in relation to Ross Douthit who takes his uh definition of it from Jacques Barzan whom you mentioned and I I just kind of point out that the one big reason for decadence is gerantocracy.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:59

But it's true that I kind of lean into the idea that if these age patterns of of creativity and repetition in in our intelligence are true as broad generalizations, then decadence can be very well explained by the fact that you know the the older the humanity is on average and the greater the power that older people have the more cyclical and repetitious our our society will become and I don't know I I don't think anyone left or right thinks America is going well right now. Now we have to debate why that is and on the left there's widespread agreement that it's oligarchy. I just don't understand why the people in that up you know on that flank would would disagree with the clear facts that class hierarchy is age inflected. But most of all I think socialists you know should care about renewal. I mean again it's not just about care or fairness it's about what kind of creative society do we promise?

C. Derick Varn 1:16:19

And from that perspective I think uh an attitude about decadence is really essential yeah I I I would agree with you I remember as our closing thought I once got in an argument with Bosh Kar Sankara where he was saying that like these generational markers have no relevance to class distinctions and I was like okay in the 19th century I may have agreed with you to some extent in the 20th century saying that you're saying class is solely based off of income because anything that involves the accumulation of wealth increases over time and thus age being a material condition that expands to wealth and it's not necessarily one that everyone's going to benefit from so we can't argue that it evens out. And I did not get good responses to this although I suspect why is cynical because the uh the that they know the same things that you know that you do that the average voter is you know over 60.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:28

Yeah yeah and and maybe as a strategic matter that is sensible but the as an analytic matter we can't you know just deny the the clear facts about the age correlation of wealth and it's not just a random fact it's because of our system. So that's what I purported to demonstrate and if that means it's more difficult to organize then so be it. It might be easier especially if you take seriously the grand bargain I propose.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:02

Mm-hmm well I'd like to thank you for your time uh your work is available in many such places but there is an is there anything you'd like my audience to look at other than the book?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:12

No, it's been exhaustive and really interesting and I really am grateful for your time too. All right thank you have a good rest of your day okay bye bye bye