Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth―and What to Do About It, by Samuel Moyn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $29.18)
We are living in the midst of what writer and entrepreneur Jeff Giesea calls the “Long Boomer Farewell”: the slow retreat of the Baby Boom generation from positions of power. The long goodbye provides ample time for commentary.
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Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America is the latest in a series of books and articles examining the role of Boomers in American culture and politics, with titles from Yuval Levin and Helen Andrews to Christopher Caldwell and Jill Filopovic. Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, looks deeper than Boomer politicians and culture, however. Instead, he examines “gerontocracy—the empowerment of the old.”
Even under a President J. D. Vance or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “American gerontocracy would remain,” Moyn says. The real problem is American seniors’ disproportionate economic and political power. No single election will fix that.
Gerontocracy in America invokes Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. “At the dawn of modernity,” Moyn writes, “Tocqueville commented that a new political science was needed for a new age; in the twenty-first century, an even newer political science is needed for the new aging.” Moyn’s science is practical and oriented toward action. He suggests numerous policy changes, ranging from the reasonable (legalizing mandatory retirement ages) to the fantastic (abolishing the Senate).
One change that Moyn does not seriously consider—and in fact rejects—is cutting senior benefits. Instead, he recommends that America commit even more resources to seniors, to encourage them to retire sooner.
In his chapter “Why Neoliberals Are Wrong About Entitlements,” Moyn presents his case for expanding the retirement system even further. But it’s not just “neoliberals” who believe America transfers too much wealth to the richest generation. Moyn cites, for example, Richard Rorty, the progressive philosopher who advocated cutting his own benefits. As Rorty wrote in the New York Times, “I would like Congress to use the Social Security taxes I’ve paid over the last 45 years to promote the general welfare.”
Moyn dismisses Rorty’s proposal. He shares American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner’s view that Rorty was “politically innocent and self-defeating because, while Social Security is an antipoverty program, it is crucial for Americans to believe it is an ‘earned right.’ If means testing were implemented . . . ‘the broad popular support for Social Security would simply evaporate.’”
What does it say about Social Security that its continued popular support depends on Americans believing a noble lie? In fact, Social Security already has a progressive benefit formula, replacing 90 percent of the first tranche of average indexed earnings but just 15 percent of the final one. Why, then, must we treat the current numbers as sacred?
Moyn further accuses entitlement reform advocates of hiding the ball:
Elder power in America primarily serves those privileged and rich enough to think they do not need the state. By identifying welfare state entitlements for an aging population as their bugbear, entitlement foes only masked the reality of that power.
What does Moyn propose instead? In a word, taxation: “Reforms to the tax system should have pride of place in any attempt to curtail gerontocracy.” These “reforms” include wealth taxes, higher income taxes, “age-correlated taxes,” and taxes on “annuities and pensions.”
Strangely, Moyn recommends Senator Bernie Sanders’s Social Security Expansion Act, which “seeks to remove the current wage cap of $176,000, beyond which income is not taxed, to fund the benefits.” Sanders’s bill, though, would raise payroll taxes dramatically, including on young people, to fund even more generous benefits for older people. Somehow, this is supposed to dismantle gerontocracy.
The net impact of Moyn’s policy agenda would be to discourage seniors from working, thus encouraging them to retire sooner. He laments: “People come to the end of their working lives without the adequate retirement they were promised—even as fewer and fewer are promised it in the first place. The result is that too many Americans are still denied retirement’s pleasures. It is not that they die young as often as they once did. It is that they cannot afford to retire, exacerbating decline with hardship.”
This diagnosis is misleading. First, it is primarily better-educated Americans who are working longer and delaying retirement. Seventy-six percent of graduate degree holders are still working at 67, compared with just 39 percent of Americans with a high school diploma. Many seniors are working longer because of greater health and opportunity, not financial pressures.
Moyn acknowledges that many older Americans are choosing to work longer, but he regards this mainly as a problem. It may be a problem in certain constrained and competitive fields such as politics and academia, where less capable seniors are crowding out younger talent. But senior work also produces more economic product and lowers the relative tax burden for younger Americans.
Second, American seniors are doing very well, on average. Government surveys understate senior income because they overlook money drawn from retirement accounts. Yet American seniors enjoy record levels of private retirement-plan coverage as well as Social Security benefits. As American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Andrew Biggs has explained, “the US median disposable income of $38,920 for residents age 65 and over in 2019 is the highest among 24 highly developed OECD countries . . . and nearly 60 percent higher than the median OECD country retiree income . . . in real terms, the typical US retiree has the highest standard of living in the world.”
Moyn refers to “the absence of state-funded longterm care” in America. Yet nearly 6 million Americans receive Medicaid Long-Term Services and Support, including about 2.5 million seniors. This seems inadequate to Moyn, who asks us to “imagine . . . utopian socialism” for retirees. In exchange, they merely must give up everything they own, which Moyn describes as “care in exchange for expropriation.”
Parts of Moyn’s prescription may appeal to libertarians and conservatives: his call to end special property-tax breaks for the elderly, for example, and his criticism of senior NIMBYism.
It will take a broad coalition to counteract senior power. And it took courage for Moyn to challenge gerontocracy from within academia—one of its strongholds—as the angry responses to his recent Chronicle of Higher Education article indicate.
Moyn’s big-picture vision is broadly appealing. In his conclusion, he delineates where the American Left has gone wrong: prioritizing care and compassion over creativity. This argument echoes his introduction, in which he envisions an America “oriented to innovation and problem-solving” and that “launches the young into the prime of life.”
It’s an attractive ideal. But will Moyn’s agenda deliver?
Raising taxes to fund earlier retirements will leave even fewer American workers to support each retiree’s benefits. These remaining young workers will also be forced to pay ever higher taxes to fund not just Medicare and Social Security but also Moyn’s “utopian socialism.”
The result will be more government spending and less growth and dynamism. The United States devotes far more of its GDP to public social spending than China, yet far less than European welfare states. Moyn’s agenda would move America further in the direction of France and Germany. Making America more like Europe is an odd way to restore its youthful vigor.