I think there is a distinction to be drawn between
Gerontocracy: Rule BY old people
and
Gerontocracy: Rule FOR old people
I'm personally fine having older more experienced leaders, but I dont want them catering to a myopic electorate dominated by whichever group has the most free time.
It also seemed to me that you defend SS and Medicare primarily by saying "they poll well". This is not a good argument imo. Earlier in the piece you point out that most people misunderstand housing economics and have unreasonable opinions about developers. Is it possible that people like SS AND its a bad program?
This is my issue, and why the photo of the elderly folks at the city council meeting in SF resonated so much - the elderly are an important constituency, but they are not the only constituency, and in some issues their desires are contrary to the good of the general populace. The elderly population in my town hate change, hate growth, and have the time to organize to stall out developments. Meanwhile they are living in a house they bought in 1990 and paying $1,000 a year in property taxes.
On a national level, there is something fundamentally wrong to me about politicians making decisions where they will be long dead before the negative impacts fully hit.
These are fairly new programs in the scope of human development. There are people living today who were born before Medicare and Social Security! Nothing is forever
No quibbles with the technocraric analysis here, but I think it's pretty bloodless. The real problem with gerontocracy is spiritual. I really wonder what is wrong with people well into their geriatric years who still desire to be doing their jobs? It is the obligation of the elderly to raise the young, train them to take over, and then step aside, remaining as friends and advisors as they enjoy the fruits of their labor. I think it's a social spiritual sickness that leads to the old clinging desperately to their positions. What is missing from their personal lives that compels them to stay? What is the damage of forcing the young to wait longer and longer to assume positions of responsibility and authority? It's not good! I want my healthier, longer-living elders to be living fulfilling lives of leisure, not remaining at their working posts until they literally can no longer function.
"I really wonder what is wrong with people well into their geriatric years who still desire to be doing their jobs?"
Why must something be wrong with such people? Maybe they just enjoy their jobs! My paternal grandfather retired at 85. It's not like he waited that long because he needed the money; he just enjoyed his work.
Counter point: studies have shown that men often experience rapid cognitive decline after they stop working. It suggests their work is mentally stimulating and good for them. Why be in such a hurry to exit that setup?
Don't we encourage people to find jobs doing something they love? Then why would we be surprised when they continue working while they are able?
I even see many people retire into things that would be vocations if they were getting paid for what they do - gardening, volunteering, and even getting more into political activities.
A lot of older people work because they have to, or because their 401K’s and Social Security might have supported them for a 15 year retirement but not a 30 year one. Very few retirees get pensions anymore, which means, yes, working longer.
And if the “birth dearth” is really what it is claimed to be and not replacement-theory hysteria, we might not have enough younger taxpayers to support retirees in “fulfilling lives of leisure” without either: raising taxes on everyone including the middle and working classes (cue howls of We Are Overtaxed To Pay For Greedy Geezers), or, raise the retirement age - which has already happened - and cue the howls of Greedy Geezers Are Hoarding Jobs.
Alternatively there is always the Carousel or the Quietus, but I hope we haven’t arrived at that point just yet.
I increasingly find polls, like the one on Social Security and Medicare, are useless. In the abstract, almost everyone wants to increase funding, but is there any willingness to pay more? Also, the US has greatly increased its social spending, but almost all of it has been for the elderly and very little for young and middle-aged. If people saw the numbers, I think they would split the social spending pie much differently.
The IRS should do everyone's tax returns, and they should send every taxpayer a basic breakdown of where their tax dollars go along with those returns in a simple bar chart. You paid $15k: here's how much was social security, Medicare, VA, defense, etc. I think very few people understand that nearly half their taxes are spending on the old. Maybe we would all agree that that's the right priority! But at least we would be having the real conversation, as opposed to the fake one Republicans like to have where half the federal budget is sex change surgeries for endangered marmots.
Yeah, if we were building our social welfare system from scratch using a society-wide cost-benefit criterion, we would be focusing a lot more on kids and less on the elderly. So much of this is downstream of old people actually voting at higher rates than young people.
My recollection is that it's wealthy people driving the improvements in elderly health, so you have the problem of working class people in more physical jobs who actually do need to retire at the current set ages.
So you might need to think about policies that would get high-earners to keep working while still allowing low-earners to retire.
I understand your intuition here, but I'd encourage you to look into the "lump of labor" fallacy. This logic is similar to the "immigrants are stealing our jobs" or even more reactionary ideas about how women should exit the labor force.
People are not taking each other's jobs so much as jobs beget jobs - people earn and then spend, and the spending creates other jobs.
To the extent that it's true at all, we're talking about leadership positions.
I don't know how we would manage it as a society, but I wish there were more "emeritus" positions where older people can retire from being the in charge top level decision maker to a senior advisor position where they can share their deep experience but also can nap in the afternoon if they want and aren't letting anyone down.
I feel like more professions need the "Of Counsel" style title that the BigLaw world has. That title isn't always used by older people, but it's often a way for equity partners to step back from being fully involved in that part of the firm and still be able to be useful.
I remember a paper that said, yes, “lump of labor” is a fallacy, EXCEPT for jobs where demand is high and turnover is low, where there can indeed be some kind of blocking effect. Since there can only be 100 US Senators, and a lot more people want to be a Senator than there are job openings, this might be one of the few “lumpy” markets.
But most workers are not senators nor do they have political aspirations. There are, absolutely, “glamor” fields (in the arts, media, some very shiny nonprofits) but even with them there is more churn than there is with a “lumpy” career market.
Normally I appreciate a good contrarian argument, but this one really rubs me the wrong way.
There are a lot of wealthy seniors and current gerontocracy is doing a great job of redistributing even more wealth to them, at the expense of working class and middle class younger folks. This is the antithesis of progressive politics. Why should the government be in the business of helping those who are already doing so well?
The world needs more research scientists? In the sense that this would be broadly beneficial to society, yes. In the sense that there is unmet market demand, no. The last four years have decimated the job market for science. It's not as bad as academic historians, but a deep and prolonged biotech recession, combined with the de facto impoundment of research funding, make this a really bad time to be starting a career in science
This is great. Another dimension of the core dynamic that's going on IMV has to do with broad demographic trends. That is, the Baby Boomers were called the Boomers because there were a lot of them. There are comparatively fewer GenXs, but then the Boomers had kids and so there are resultingly comparatively more Millennials. Coupled with even a marginal trendline increase in Boomer lifespan, this dynamic would create exactly the effects you'd expect — basically (in general) a transition from a Boomer leadership class to a Millennial leadership class as the broad distribution of top-tier talent weights towards the latter age group at leadership age.
Baically every power structure in America is overrepresented by old people who use these structures to suppress efforts to raise the salience of issues that matter to younger voters. Things like student debt, climate change, housing and even health/wellness concerns are much more important to young people but are dismissed as niche.
There are also obvious examples where older politicians are out of date. AI is an extremely salient issue right now and yet Jim Clyburn is admitting he didn't even know what Chat GPT was until earlier this month. Can you imagine a 30 year old representative who admitted they didn't really look into Medicare or social security or retirement benefits until recently? It would be an outrage. Meanwhile, Clyburn gets to stay as a leader in his party.
Maybe on the way to taking down the gerontocracy we can take down the yglesiastocracy with it.
This essay landed in my Inbox from “Kelsey Piper”; I read with increasing puzzlement at “her” rhetoric before realizing it was from Matt Yglesias. Matt correctly identifies a range of large systemic problems in America that arise from demographic shifts and somehow uses that as an excuse to #wellactually complaints with nuanced objections. Some of those debate points (e.g., Congress isn’t too old, it’s too incumbent-ized) contradict his positions elsewhere (80 y.o. Ed Markey must go). Matt does make the important point that “gerontocracy” is a risky *political* meme. Bad essay on an important topic; I hope you publish a better follow-up.
I think the way you're framing these data points is dangerously misleading. Many 85 year olds are entirely capable of performing everyday tasks while keeping a firm grip on reality. That's fantastic relative to the alternative, but it doesn't mean they have the mental acuity they had 20 years earlier. The demands of elected office set the bar significantly higher. Aside from legacy positions of power, no 85 year olds are expected to constantly learn and integrate new information about complex topics so they can make extremely high stakes decisions. James Clyburn gave an interview on Today Explained recently that demonstrates he would absolutely pass the litmus test for being "sharp," but it also revealed striking limitations on his ability to be good at his job. His ability to articulate his position on modern, relevant political issues falls apart when subjected to extremely straightforward softball questions. It's a byproduct of aging, and it's okay to talk about it.
Thank you for this. It's a revelation in some respects. The Sam Moyn excerpt I read in Harper's made me think about my own possible complicity in outstaying my usefulness as a worker/facilitator in some positions. I may be an outlier, in that I was planning on retiring at 68, but was let go from my arts institution years prior to that age: the people who were raising funds did not wish to write grants for my position any longer, and I had no institutional protection, so was just out of a job. I chaired a summer school program, but left in order for my very able co-chair to take over, only to have her not be hired for my position. The board hired a man instead. I mean, it just seems like the statistical numbers are an anomaly for some of us, and there are probably other teaching artists/artists/designers et al, who do not have normal jobs. I was - and am - so grateful for medicare and social security. I had little to no retirement other than a 403b (my institution was slow to provide a retirement plan at all until 10 years into my employment), so it's been a means of physical survival. I still need to work, and can, whenever someone asks me to work. I fear not being able to work, as it's the only way to eat/drive/pay for this subscription, beyond paying the mortgage.
I would take claims of my generation more seriously about old people if they actually engaged in the politial system at similar levels to older people. It's hard to get things done that help younger people when we are the least likely demographic to even vote unfortunately.
I agree the youth voter turnout is a problem, but younger people don't have the time to organize and go to city council meetings like retired folks because we are working and taking care of kids or elderly parents. Most of the super politically active people I know are over 60 because they have free time to spend being politically active.
I am compelled to point out that the best way to make community meetings more representative is for young people to show up to community meetings (not, as some unhinged commenters believe, to get rid of old people so they can't show up to community meetings). The sense I get is that these keyboard warrior ageists would rather have something to complain about than be bothered to work on a (in this case, really simple) solution.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn between
Gerontocracy: Rule BY old people
and
Gerontocracy: Rule FOR old people
I'm personally fine having older more experienced leaders, but I dont want them catering to a myopic electorate dominated by whichever group has the most free time.
It also seemed to me that you defend SS and Medicare primarily by saying "they poll well". This is not a good argument imo. Earlier in the piece you point out that most people misunderstand housing economics and have unreasonable opinions about developers. Is it possible that people like SS AND its a bad program?
Along these lines, I note that Bernie Sanders being 84 rarely seems to come up in "gerontocracy" discussions online :)
“He’s one of the good ones”
This is my issue, and why the photo of the elderly folks at the city council meeting in SF resonated so much - the elderly are an important constituency, but they are not the only constituency, and in some issues their desires are contrary to the good of the general populace. The elderly population in my town hate change, hate growth, and have the time to organize to stall out developments. Meanwhile they are living in a house they bought in 1990 and paying $1,000 a year in property taxes.
On a national level, there is something fundamentally wrong to me about politicians making decisions where they will be long dead before the negative impacts fully hit.
It seems your right ✅️
Wish I could survive long enough to see Gen Z become old and watch all of this play out again and again in an infinite regress
These are fairly new programs in the scope of human development. There are people living today who were born before Medicare and Social Security! Nothing is forever
That made me smile. True, true.....
It’s hard to find a defense for “cut property taxes specifically for old people”
No it's not
If you had a paid off house, but are living on social security
It's quite possible you might not be able to afford those property taxes
And it seems really wrong to force someone to move from their family home Because they can't afford the property tax bill
People act like social security is a fixed income. It is not.
No quibbles with the technocraric analysis here, but I think it's pretty bloodless. The real problem with gerontocracy is spiritual. I really wonder what is wrong with people well into their geriatric years who still desire to be doing their jobs? It is the obligation of the elderly to raise the young, train them to take over, and then step aside, remaining as friends and advisors as they enjoy the fruits of their labor. I think it's a social spiritual sickness that leads to the old clinging desperately to their positions. What is missing from their personal lives that compels them to stay? What is the damage of forcing the young to wait longer and longer to assume positions of responsibility and authority? It's not good! I want my healthier, longer-living elders to be living fulfilling lives of leisure, not remaining at their working posts until they literally can no longer function.
"I really wonder what is wrong with people well into their geriatric years who still desire to be doing their jobs?"
Why must something be wrong with such people? Maybe they just enjoy their jobs! My paternal grandfather retired at 85. It's not like he waited that long because he needed the money; he just enjoyed his work.
Counter point: studies have shown that men often experience rapid cognitive decline after they stop working. It suggests their work is mentally stimulating and good for them. Why be in such a hurry to exit that setup?
The pathology here is work being the last remaining source of meaningful stimulation
I think "pathology" is a bit strong!
Don't we encourage people to find jobs doing something they love? Then why would we be surprised when they continue working while they are able?
I even see many people retire into things that would be vocations if they were getting paid for what they do - gardening, volunteering, and even getting more into political activities.
It is in any case someone suffering from the form of Lump of Work fallacy. (typically directed towards immigrants, women entering the market)
That is your prejudice speaking
Spiritual?
Your characterisations read like... age prejudice.
Lots of people like work, lots don't as well.
Lump of Work Fallacy is economic innumeracy
Given labor short-falls more effective use of entire labor pool is needed, not shifting from gender prejudice to age prejudice
A lot of older people work because they have to, or because their 401K’s and Social Security might have supported them for a 15 year retirement but not a 30 year one. Very few retirees get pensions anymore, which means, yes, working longer.
And if the “birth dearth” is really what it is claimed to be and not replacement-theory hysteria, we might not have enough younger taxpayers to support retirees in “fulfilling lives of leisure” without either: raising taxes on everyone including the middle and working classes (cue howls of We Are Overtaxed To Pay For Greedy Geezers), or, raise the retirement age - which has already happened - and cue the howls of Greedy Geezers Are Hoarding Jobs.
Alternatively there is always the Carousel or the Quietus, but I hope we haven’t arrived at that point just yet.
I increasingly find polls, like the one on Social Security and Medicare, are useless. In the abstract, almost everyone wants to increase funding, but is there any willingness to pay more? Also, the US has greatly increased its social spending, but almost all of it has been for the elderly and very little for young and middle-aged. If people saw the numbers, I think they would split the social spending pie much differently.
The IRS should do everyone's tax returns, and they should send every taxpayer a basic breakdown of where their tax dollars go along with those returns in a simple bar chart. You paid $15k: here's how much was social security, Medicare, VA, defense, etc. I think very few people understand that nearly half their taxes are spending on the old. Maybe we would all agree that that's the right priority! But at least we would be having the real conversation, as opposed to the fake one Republicans like to have where half the federal budget is sex change surgeries for endangered marmots.
Yeah, if we were building our social welfare system from scratch using a society-wide cost-benefit criterion, we would be focusing a lot more on kids and less on the elderly. So much of this is downstream of old people actually voting at higher rates than young people.
My recollection is that it's wealthy people driving the improvements in elderly health, so you have the problem of working class people in more physical jobs who actually do need to retire at the current set ages.
So you might need to think about policies that would get high-earners to keep working while still allowing low-earners to retire.
Though we want high earners to retire to free up jobs for younger people, too
I understand your intuition here, but I'd encourage you to look into the "lump of labor" fallacy. This logic is similar to the "immigrants are stealing our jobs" or even more reactionary ideas about how women should exit the labor force.
People are not taking each other's jobs so much as jobs beget jobs - people earn and then spend, and the spending creates other jobs.
To the extent that it's true at all, we're talking about leadership positions.
I don't know how we would manage it as a society, but I wish there were more "emeritus" positions where older people can retire from being the in charge top level decision maker to a senior advisor position where they can share their deep experience but also can nap in the afternoon if they want and aren't letting anyone down.
I feel like more professions need the "Of Counsel" style title that the BigLaw world has. That title isn't always used by older people, but it's often a way for equity partners to step back from being fully involved in that part of the firm and still be able to be useful.
I think the “lump of labor” idea is a lot more true for senior and highly compensated roles, as these are much more scarce
I mean I guess it IS true for the Senate at least!
I remember a paper that said, yes, “lump of labor” is a fallacy, EXCEPT for jobs where demand is high and turnover is low, where there can indeed be some kind of blocking effect. Since there can only be 100 US Senators, and a lot more people want to be a Senator than there are job openings, this might be one of the few “lumpy” markets.
But most workers are not senators nor do they have political aspirations. There are, absolutely, “glamor” fields (in the arts, media, some very shiny nonprofits) but even with them there is more churn than there is with a “lumpy” career market.
Exactly. (lump of work being the other name for the fallacy)
Normally I appreciate a good contrarian argument, but this one really rubs me the wrong way.
There are a lot of wealthy seniors and current gerontocracy is doing a great job of redistributing even more wealth to them, at the expense of working class and middle class younger folks. This is the antithesis of progressive politics. Why should the government be in the business of helping those who are already doing so well?
Is that not the exact argument from the piece?
The world needs more research scientists? In the sense that this would be broadly beneficial to society, yes. In the sense that there is unmet market demand, no. The last four years have decimated the job market for science. It's not as bad as academic historians, but a deep and prolonged biotech recession, combined with the de facto impoundment of research funding, make this a really bad time to be starting a career in science
This is great. Another dimension of the core dynamic that's going on IMV has to do with broad demographic trends. That is, the Baby Boomers were called the Boomers because there were a lot of them. There are comparatively fewer GenXs, but then the Boomers had kids and so there are resultingly comparatively more Millennials. Coupled with even a marginal trendline increase in Boomer lifespan, this dynamic would create exactly the effects you'd expect — basically (in general) a transition from a Boomer leadership class to a Millennial leadership class as the broad distribution of top-tier talent weights towards the latter age group at leadership age.
Baically every power structure in America is overrepresented by old people who use these structures to suppress efforts to raise the salience of issues that matter to younger voters. Things like student debt, climate change, housing and even health/wellness concerns are much more important to young people but are dismissed as niche.
There are also obvious examples where older politicians are out of date. AI is an extremely salient issue right now and yet Jim Clyburn is admitting he didn't even know what Chat GPT was until earlier this month. Can you imagine a 30 year old representative who admitted they didn't really look into Medicare or social security or retirement benefits until recently? It would be an outrage. Meanwhile, Clyburn gets to stay as a leader in his party.
Maybe on the way to taking down the gerontocracy we can take down the yglesiastocracy with it.
I often think of Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin as being in the same category as Lionel Messi and LeBron James!
This essay landed in my Inbox from “Kelsey Piper”; I read with increasing puzzlement at “her” rhetoric before realizing it was from Matt Yglesias. Matt correctly identifies a range of large systemic problems in America that arise from demographic shifts and somehow uses that as an excuse to #wellactually complaints with nuanced objections. Some of those debate points (e.g., Congress isn’t too old, it’s too incumbent-ized) contradict his positions elsewhere (80 y.o. Ed Markey must go). Matt does make the important point that “gerontocracy” is a risky *political* meme. Bad essay on an important topic; I hope you publish a better follow-up.
I didn’t get the confusion about the author until I saw the top comment using “he” pronouns!
I think the way you're framing these data points is dangerously misleading. Many 85 year olds are entirely capable of performing everyday tasks while keeping a firm grip on reality. That's fantastic relative to the alternative, but it doesn't mean they have the mental acuity they had 20 years earlier. The demands of elected office set the bar significantly higher. Aside from legacy positions of power, no 85 year olds are expected to constantly learn and integrate new information about complex topics so they can make extremely high stakes decisions. James Clyburn gave an interview on Today Explained recently that demonstrates he would absolutely pass the litmus test for being "sharp," but it also revealed striking limitations on his ability to be good at his job. His ability to articulate his position on modern, relevant political issues falls apart when subjected to extremely straightforward softball questions. It's a byproduct of aging, and it's okay to talk about it.
Thank you for this. It's a revelation in some respects. The Sam Moyn excerpt I read in Harper's made me think about my own possible complicity in outstaying my usefulness as a worker/facilitator in some positions. I may be an outlier, in that I was planning on retiring at 68, but was let go from my arts institution years prior to that age: the people who were raising funds did not wish to write grants for my position any longer, and I had no institutional protection, so was just out of a job. I chaired a summer school program, but left in order for my very able co-chair to take over, only to have her not be hired for my position. The board hired a man instead. I mean, it just seems like the statistical numbers are an anomaly for some of us, and there are probably other teaching artists/artists/designers et al, who do not have normal jobs. I was - and am - so grateful for medicare and social security. I had little to no retirement other than a 403b (my institution was slow to provide a retirement plan at all until 10 years into my employment), so it's been a means of physical survival. I still need to work, and can, whenever someone asks me to work. I fear not being able to work, as it's the only way to eat/drive/pay for this subscription, beyond paying the mortgage.
I would take claims of my generation more seriously about old people if they actually engaged in the politial system at similar levels to older people. It's hard to get things done that help younger people when we are the least likely demographic to even vote unfortunately.
I agree the youth voter turnout is a problem, but younger people don't have the time to organize and go to city council meetings like retired folks because we are working and taking care of kids or elderly parents. Most of the super politically active people I know are over 60 because they have free time to spend being politically active.
I am compelled to point out that the best way to make community meetings more representative is for young people to show up to community meetings (not, as some unhinged commenters believe, to get rid of old people so they can't show up to community meetings). The sense I get is that these keyboard warrior ageists would rather have something to complain about than be bothered to work on a (in this case, really simple) solution.