An Ageing World: The Problem of Gerontocracy

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1:00Hello, my name is David Runserman, and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today in our series on living in an aging world, I'm talking to the historian and political scientist Samuel Moin about gerontocracy in America and elsewhere. Gerontocracy is the rule of the old. What does it mean to live in societies where old people increasingly have the money and the power? What are the causes of that? What are the consequences of that? What potentially is the cure for that? Sam, I think we should probably start with what for most people is the most visible sign of an aging politics, a gerontocratic politics, which is the age of politicians,

2:01and it seems to be a more acute issue in the United States, possibly because people are aware of the ones who really cling on a long time. We don't in the UK have the non-agenerians. We have a lot of elderly politicians, but it doesn't quite go right up the scale. Is it an acute problem in the United States? Is it not just visible, but a real issue with American politics? I think it's extremely real, and I'd say if we look globally, it turns out that America has more in common with the rest of the world, and Western Europe is the outlier. According to the data, much more than half of humanity has a political leader over 70. In their defense, most of those guys are authoritarians, like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or close to it, like Narendra Modi, many African heads of state. But American politics is such that once you're in the seat, you can keep it, and I think Western Europeans are more enlightened in the way that they organize politics,

3:06so it's true that while they have other forms of gerontocracy, they're political leaders trend younger. I was going to say, is it really a symptom? Not, I think, of the preference of voters for older politicians. I'm not sure voters actually do prefer older politicians. It's a symptom of a political system in which people can cling on. So it's not a coincidence that autocratic systems produce very elderly leaders. And therefore, is this, we're not just talking about the presidency here in Congress, is this a symptom of a political system that's not just gerrymandered, and it's hard to budge politicians, but actually this is in itself a symptom of a democracy that's becoming more autocratic. Let me suggest it could be a little of both, because it's pretty central, at least to my way of thinking, and I could be wrong, that gerontocracy is as old as the world, and there does seem to be a very ingrained preference for older leaders, maybe older men as leaders, and maybe the baseline shifted a bit.

4:09It's still the case that all other things being equal, you vote for someone your own age. And if it turns out, as I assume, we'll discuss that the electorate is elderly, then it should follow that anywhere we will have a pressure towards older leaders. But all that aside, I totally agree that there are these distinctive features of American politics, and I think the two biggest are the polarization, which means that in fact very few seats are actually contested. And most of the selection is done in primaries. Now again, there, those are dominated by older voters, but it's not like a lot at stake, because in many places, it's just the one party will win, and the other, it doesn't have a chance. And then there's in-compancy advantage, which I think is on paralleled, at least across the Atlantic, where if you get in once you basically can stay,

5:10you know, barring some big disturbance. I'd throw in the judiciary where those are definitely political actors by any sane definition. And of course, we have a unique system there too, where there's life tenure for judges at the federal level, and as you'd expect with the aging of the population, you're getting judges staying indefinitely. So in a way, it is in part a life tenure problem, and political systems, it's not complicated to design political systems in which you don't have a version of life tenure. In fact, you'd almost instinctively feel that a democratic system would recoil against the idea of life tenure, but these extremely old representatives in Congress are almost like federal judges. It seems like no one can tell them to stand down. That's right. So functionally, we've got a problem that once you're selected, and you could be, you know, there could be an imperative to select you young

6:11as there is in the Supreme Court when presidents intentionally choose younger jurists on their ideological team, but mainly because they know they will leave their biggest mark as those jurists will then stay decades. In fairness, compared to them, the data show that Americans are running for office later and later in life so that politicians are are tending to begin their political careers later than in earlier American history. The trouble is they're staying so long compared to that earlier a period that their careers are still getting longer and longer relative to the past, and that's because they're safe and sound. We're going to come onto the age of the voters, and as you say, people are getting older when they start doing pretty much everything, including having children. I just want to ask you about another comparative field in which there is often a form of life tenure, which is the university system in the United States.

7:11Is something comparable going on there? If you don't have term limits or the equivalent of term limits, which in a professional system is called the retirement age in the British university system, there is a retirement age in the American system there isn't. Are we seeing something similar? Non-agenarian professors? Oh, absolutely. I was inspired in part in writing this book by my own colleagues because in part the easier the job is and the higher paid it is, even within academia, there's just less and less incentive to leave. I noticed in moving from a tiny step within the academic sociology from a history faculty to a law faculty, just that the average age was so much older. Then I looked into it, and the faculty in all of these departments have been aging since the abolition of mandatory retirement in the 1990s.

8:14It's fascinating to go back to listen to the warnings of those who said that what has happened would happen, which is that with next to no incentive to leave, academic tenure, which basically it protects you from all but the most horrendous crimes as causes for expulsion, there would be a kind of set of lifers. We do have so many, not just in their 70s but 80s across the fields of academic inquiry. Arguably, that's not just bad for intergenerational justice. It's also bad for a university that in the end, its defense is creativity. That's why we organize a training of young people and creativity for social purposes. I think that's arguably that suffering in both the political realm and these other realms where you do see life tenure effects like academia, as you mentioned. In a way, it's not surprising if jobs are, as you say, well paid.

9:17I don't know if they moved from history to a law faculty. The elder leaners of the faculty was a reflection of whether the two categories you gave were better paid and relatively non-ardewous. I'm assuming it's better paid rather than relatively non-ardewous. No, it's both. It's much easier because there's less teaching. I would say it's more that because the pay differential is probably not that great. At the places I've taught. So it's the demands that are placed if they're aren't great demands on you and you're in a well-paid job and you still have your cognitive faculties, why would you stop? Or even if you don't, I mean because you wouldn't, you know, sadly the big problem is that people don't know or refuse to register their decline, at least until it's just undeniable. So one office where there are, term limits, is the presidency of the United States. So I think we can be confident that absent that Donald Trump would at least try to run again.

10:17But I think we can also assume that he won't. And that means it is possible next time, not certain by any means, but possible that it might be a very young field strikingly young scenarios in which JD Vance is up against AOC or John Ossoff. These could be among the youngest candidates. Indeed, some of them could be the youngest candidates in American history. Say that word to happen. Say we got an Ossoff Vance contest, very much in contrast to when it was Biden Trump. Would that signal anything significant? Is that something that would suggest a change was underfoot or given the thing that we're going to go on and talk about, which is the age of the voters? The age of the politicians isn't actually the most important thing here. Well, I come down if we have to get to the bottom line to that last proposition that it almost doesn't matter how old the politicians are. That's why I'm saying they're just the visible face or visible part of a much bigger syndrome or the tip of the iceberg.

11:20I mean, it does matter in the end that those who make policy decisions are too old because even should they want to do the right thing or resist the gerontocracy of those who put them in office, they may be constrained by their own interests or the process of aging. I think that we should ask, well, what is the baseline? Kamala Harris came off as a youthful alternative to Joe Biden, even though she would have been 60 in January 2025. John Ossoff and JD Vance will be only at the median of American age. So half of Americans are still younger than 40. So they would be precisely at the median. And if you look at the Senate, Ossoff is the only one who's under the median right now. And the House of Representatives has barely anyone in their 30s, the judiciary, again, even fewer.

12:26So it sort of depends what you think counts as a big difference. I mean, if we really believed in what in your field, they called descriptive representation, we would expect representation for all age cohorts. And even your kind of utopian scenario where young people run for the presidency isn't going to provide that by a long shot. It's going to provide people at the median of the American spectrum rather than any kind of variegated sense that the politicians are matching the age of the population. Still, it would be progress and there's already signs of it in primaries lately. Of course, it's the median of the population, not the median of the electorate. It's well below the median of the electorate. And that's a set request that I've often talked about, which is how low the voting age should go. We might come back to that. What is the problem with an electorate getting older? So even if we have a scenario and we are only talking about the presidency here, and there is a danger of fixating on the presidency, these trends are much more striking if you broaden the frame of reference for it.

13:35But what is wrong with a society in which the voters are getting older? Where is the problem there? If we believe in descriptive representation or the representation of interest and the voters are getting older, should it not follow that the politicians, if they're not getting older themselves, should nonetheless be the responsive to the interests of those older voters? Where is the problem with an aging electorate? I think people can see the problem with an aging political class because it just looks wrong. Where is the problem with an aging electorate? It's interesting because I agree with you that the problem is, let's say, more morally obvious when it comes to politicians. Still the debate. What's really started the debate has been the incidence of cognitive decline or just outright death among politicians, not a broader sense of misrepresentation. Like if you had just slightly younger politicians through some kind of age or term limiting system, the American political class would still be far, far older than the meaner median.

14:45And you would have much of the population almost completely unrepresented. So I wouldn't, I'm not so sure that even though it is kind of obvious, and I think young people feel a kind of sense of passivity or resignation in the face of all the old folks who purport to represent them, I would still say there's not a lot of discussion of why it might be a problem leaving, you know, decline and death out of the picture. When it comes to the electorate, I like to use analogies with which, you know, which raise situations with which are more familiar. It's also the case, although at this point less flagrant that people of color vote less readily than whites in American elections. And when that data is reported, it's assumed to be a problem because it suggests that there's some systemic flaw and we could figure out what exactly the causes are, but we might want to object to a political system in which the interests of white voters do get preference.

15:53And they are likely to be enacted and not only because the politicians are also much likelier to be white, but they might follow the interests of those who put them in office. So I think it's, it's a pretty self evident problem in a self respecting democracy when large tranches of the population are not getting voice. Now we can get into like why they're not taking it and whether that's changed over time. But to me, if you care not just about inputs to the political system, but outputs, you should start to be concerned by an aging electorate. And now output dimension would take us into, you know, like policy areas, like climate change or immigration and, and the comparative preferences of older versus younger citizens in these countries. Before we get on to the policy questions, is it your view that the problem here is that young people could vote but don't or, which I tend to feel, even if they all voted, they would be outvoted in the sense that if all of the under 40s voted, if all of the under 45 voted, I don't know where the median point is in the United States in Britain, it's about 50 now in the electorate.

17:09So if everybody 48 and under voted, the 48 and over would still win if they all voted to, I'm not saying they're all vote the same way, but it is quite a stark divide, but it's sometimes framed as the real problem is if only young people would take advantage of the fact that they are allowed to vote and they just don't. Yeah, no, I mean, I've got an in trouble for my comparatively radical solutions to this problem, but I should insist that I went there because the conventional solutions, which involve things like mandatory voting or easing voting through national holidays for, you know, election day and so forth don't seem to me likely to make a difference. And if we take the demographic situation seriously as time goes on will just, you know, it will not be possible for young people on their own to shake the political system very much. Still, I mean, presumably it would make some kind of significant difference. It's not all or nothing. The more that younger people do vote, the more the politicians have to answer to that constituency.

18:14I guess I would say usually the debate is about whether given that voting is purely voluntary in a country like mine, it's just the fault of younger people that they're not going or we can identify various ways in which the rules disfavor their participation. And I generally say before getting to the more radical solutions that those rules need to be revised because they punish mobility, which is comparatively a younger phenomenon through registration requirements for exercising the franchise or just the power you would have either as, you know, having been in your job a long time or having retired from it to go to the polls easily isn't matched by younger people who are probably going to be more constrained. In the time they have to get off from work. And so we could change those rules, but in the end I agree with you that these are probably going to make small differences, not big differences.

19:15And so the radical solutions you do want to either change the number of votes or the age at which people could vote. Well, I follow you and thinking we should lower the voting age. And then I consider proxy voting, which has had an interesting, it's been memified at various points in American debate recently in part because Vance backed it before he was a candidate proxy voting doesn't yet tell us who the proxies are. And the usual right wing view is that it ought to be the parents exercising votes on behalf of their children. And I've responded that it ought to be the lowest, the youngest eligible voting cohort. And then maybe the biggest thing that's gotten me in more trouble is is arguing that we should abandon one person one vote and correlate the vote with your stake in the election as measured and expected life years. Do you think the older and the young are voting blocks so say your proxy solution, which is the youngest cohort represent by having extra votes, people younger than them.

20:23The implication is that there is a shared political interest there. And there is often an assumption that of course the elderly don't vote the same way, but that they can be identified as a block comparable to other blocks, the well off or men say. And as you've written the big difference is that young people will become old one day, these blocks aren't like more rigid blocks in which you see identities which are fixed. Do you think it makes sense to talk about the young and the old as voting blocks comparable to other ones? So not all voting blocks that haven't you know are defined by enduring characteristics are just set. And every member of that group votes with the block. So there's always a lot of messiness. And then age makes it very messy. I mean, no one can claim that age just anticipates preference in some simple way. There are correlations, but there are always a lot of exceptions.

21:29And we'd have to deal with a kind of big political science debate about age effects versus cohort and generation effects, which I mean, I think they're not that different in the end because what are called cohort effects basically have to do with how you were formed at a certain level. And that's formed at a certain crucial moment in the past and you therefore vote with your cohort rather than purely because of the age you happen to be and that accounts for why boomers can be liberal and might be some of those who are nostalgic and their liberalism but very ferocious in their opposition to Donald Trump as the no kings rallies demonstrated. I think in the end we have to look at just the patterns of how people express their preferences as they age. And I think the evidence is extremely powerful that we change our views as we age, you know, it just is a fact that we become certainly more small see conservative and often more conservative in the conventional definition.

22:40And on crucial issues, especially ones that involve the medium or long term future, I think we find very clear proof that the older we get the more we postpone for some future people big, festering problems. And so I don't want to deny that we should in the end aim for some kind of intergenerational coalition and intergenerational solidarity to combat these problems. But what we can't deny is that there are these patterns and that's what we're up against. In the British case, it was most striking in the Brexit referendum, the correlation was very strong between age and outcome. And the shame with that one is that we're not going to run it again anytime soon. So we can't test the question of whether actually cohort rather than age because we've aged since then, but there's a fair chance the outcome would be different. What in more detail do you think are the kinds of policy preferences that get shaped by an aging electorate. And as you say, it's small sea as well as big sea conservative, but do you think we really do and you've written about this and I thought one of the things that was so bracing about your book is you take this on head on human beings change the way they think as they age, not straightforwardly because they decline cognitively.

23:59But we do we know we know the older people in our lives and that may include you and me, may include me anyway become more risk of us. You have always think one of the key things about aging is you have more sunk costs. There is more behind you that you want to cling on to and so many of the cognitive biases that human beings experience get worse with age simply because with age there is more behind you to cling on to more to worry about losing. Do you think you can draw a connection between the kinds of policy preferences that we see in aging electorates and aging democracies and what you might think of as the mindset of the old absolutely and you know one has to avoid if one can the accusation of ageism and stereotyping on the basis of these proven facts, but the facts are undeniable. So then do we just pretend they don't obtain I don't think so and and it's not like I've discovered them. I mean I'm on team Aristotle here who really offered an amazing diatribe in the art of rhetoric about what happens to us and we age and I think a lot of it holds up.

25:14So what is the case it's I think first there are claims that revolve around the changing forms of our intelligence and it's not as if it's a young persons game to be creative and dynamic but it's just true that that kind of intelligence tends to arise first and peak earlier. That doesn't mean that people you know you're in my age or you know out of gas but and we can still make creative moves but we're slowly replacing that form of intelligence with what's called crystal and intelligence which involves know how and repetition but the risks there that we get in a rut and we know how to do what we know how to do not face circumstantial novelty. And you know to me that means that Aristotle was right that as we age we live in memory rather than hope just as a function of the way our minds work and even if we think changes necessary it's kind of restoration us.

26:16I mean Joe Biden and Donald Trump to me are very similar because they both hanker for some golden age actually it's around the same time of the 1950s in America and the boomers who've resisted Trump are deeply regressive in a certain way. And so if you think that any modern political system deserves a constant influx of experimentation and and zeal to try new things then you start to get very worried by the exclusion of young politicians and young voters from the policy formation. Then we get finally to I think the special facts about aging and acquisition as you say as we age were better off and that's probably the way it should be at least up to some point but I think Aristotle nailed it when he said older people are most fanatical when it comes to the protection of what they've accumulated.

27:18And we see that in attitude towards taxation especially around property but wealth more generally and so those are grievous for the political system which depends on you know the fisk having enough money to spend on things that matter including long term things and yet older people will indulge in in what I think is very risky behavior if it's not likely to hurt them. And so that's where things like you know climate change national debt come into play where it's not like those aren't well known features of the policies that gerontocracy is producing it's just their ones that aren't confronted because they're medium to long term in their ramifications so putting all that together I'd say it's very significant that aging has political meaning. This episode is brought to you by PayPal you know how a mom's bag has everything sunscreen snacks a stapler the new PayPal app is like that but for your money shop pay manager account and earn rewards all in one place and with purchase protection on eligible items biometric security and past keys you're protected at every step download the new PayPal app to get started see PayPal dot com slash protection terms.

28:47This episode is brought to you by born in Roma fragrances by Valentino beauty the iconic fragrance duo Donna born in Roma Ode to Parfume is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current central jasmine woody cashmurren and warm vanilla it's masculine counterpart woman born in Roma Ode to let has notes of fresh violet leaf aromatic sage green vet of her spicy ginger and mineral salt shop at macy's dot com. Do you think in the American case there is a more striking vicious circle effect going on than in other places as wealth is accumulated in a political system in which money really talks and money can shape policy policy can shape wealth accumulation which can then feed back into the system is that one of the things that has been going on and the eight we should be clear the aging of these populations is a relatively recent phenomenon of course it's been happening slowly in the long run but it's been happening quickly recently

29:50do you think the American political system really exacerbates this because of these feedback loops within the system. I think it does and I totally buy that aside from all the other things we talked about about the age of politicians the age of campaign donors in a privately finance campaign system is you know a very scandalous point of American uniqueness and that's a very very clear way in which America's different and in which these phenomena are building on on each other and creating a kind of unholy dynamic. I guess I'd say you know that it's interesting and we probably need to address this that in American debate most of those who've complained about intergenerational injustice have had their eyes set on stripping older people of entitlements and of course entitlements are better outside the United States and indeed the replacement rate is lower outside the United States notably in Western Europe in the United States.

30:58So there you might argue if you take a certain view that there are distinctive features in those places that make it worse namely there are fewer young people even in the United States barring immigration and the welfare state which then has to take care of more people is also taking care of them more. And so a certain view would say these are are ways in which every gerontocracy is having some kind of self reinforcing dynamics it's just that the American welfare state is so on generous that it may not have the same ones as other welfare states. We're going to go on and talk about possible solutions including the difference as you say between the Western European feedback loops let's call on that and the the American feedback loops but there are other distinctive features of American politics I mean one of which is so much of it is local and older people do congregate especially wealthy older people do congregate this wealth that is being held by older generations is being called the most important part of the world.

32:09So we're quite tightly held in particular places leaving quite a lot of places really significantly worse off because the tax base is just much lower so we have a local politics we have as we talked about before a gerrymandered politics a primary system in which older voters show up in greater numbers than younger voters. The gerontocracy is just worse in the United States I'm sort of circling back to where we started but now we're looking beyond the age of the candidates and looking at the whole thing in political terms that there are features of the American political system the economic system the fact that there is such a focus on philanthropy in the United States which means the people with the money don't just shape policy they shape often where their money goes you're allowed to give it to the hospital that just saved your life rather than the rest of the world. And the school to which your grandchildren don't go because you don't have any grandchildren is it worth is it just worse in the United States.

33:12I think so I mean you know maybe there have been political systems that have been outright gerontocracies like many sub-Saharan African political systems in the term gerontocracy for most of its history was used to describe such systems. And there we don't have the same kind of formal gerontocracy in the United States where there are literally councils of elders that rule and so in a sense America is better off because it's not decreed anywhere that the president has to be 80 and as you say we're looking into a future in which it's very unlikely that that particular trend as baleful as it has been will continue even as. And so I think that's the kind of trend that the president has to be in the United States and the United States and the United States and all these different ways campaign finance control locally over housing especially in land generally and and how it's used especially for public purposes.

34:25Older people having the upper hand through the private wealth they've been allowed to establish kind of uniquely in the last couple of generations in the United States and that is a point of distinction that's maybe the deepest and most grotesque one from other places I know about. And you might argue and really the Frenchman I talk about will Swiss you know French actor who coins the term gerontocracy in the 1820s I really follow him because his basic point in pointing the term was that gerontocracy may have been as old as the world in these formal councils of elders which go all the way back but America has done something unique in modernity which is a new gerontocracy that's privatized. Just as power generally as privatized in the modern world and so I really did agree with your point that it's worth studying one place if it's the Vanguard just as Alexis de Tocqueville did with my country in the 19th century when it comes to democracy I did think that America was worth studying once again as the Vanguard of gerontocracy in this new form.

35:41I'm sure some people listening to this will be thinking why are we assuming that older people have all this money have all of these assets there are many older people living in extreme poverty in the United States in in the welfare state systems of western Europe to age in modernity and before modernity to but in family cultures it might be different but age in modernity has often been associated with disadvantage poverty. And deprivation and the construction of welfare states particularly pension systems were designed to address this and now we're talking as though in the United States and elsewhere the old have the money and the power how recent is this are we really talking about something that is just a few decades old. Yes for sure and it's very important to correct any misimpression that may ever risen that I am talking about most older people in fairness that it's really a twofold phenomenon first the massive older people were made better off and save from the penury they experienced in the largest numbers before our time.

36:57And correspondingly the oligarchs just are now living out old age and in great wealth so the top of the kind of wealth distribution in the United States is just very old and the poor are less old than before so as scandalous as elder poverty is the poverty rate is no higher. For American senior citizens than for the rest of the adults and it's actually much lower than the poverty rate for children and so if one wanted to single out a victim class in the United States when it comes to disadvantage and poverty it's really children far far beyond adults generally and senior specifically. And you know what i'm saying then is not that different from the kind of parallel situation of African Americans like it if I complained about white supremacy which I think it's very legitimate to do even now in the United States it wouldn't be an answer to say that most of those in poverty in the United States are white which they are.

38:08And it's just going to be the same that I guess I didn't expect this form of pushback but i'm interested in oligarchy and of course that's going to be by definition not the rule of the many but the rule of the few it's just what's critically different now is that those few are much like layer to be old and they enjoy their ascendancy through being old and through policies that are benefiting them specifically. Do you think there's something comparable going on here to the political case with the economic case in the sense that say john or soft becomes president of the United States and everybody goes wow look we've got a young president gerontoxys older and they're not looking at the wider and deeper picture where it's entrenched. In the same way people know the richest human being in history is Elon Musk and all ages now he's some in term age but he's not he's not an old guy but there are lots of younger people than him who are extremely wealthy in Silicon Valley and they are a kind of face of new wealth in the United States if you conjured up in your head you see Mark Zuckerberg and yet that isn't the story any more than john or soft being president would be the story the story is if you look across the piece a much more tradition.

39:25The original accumulation of wealth in property in pensions in savings and investments from people who don't run new companies but run older kinds of businesses who've worked in in finance or property or whatever it is there is a deeper and more entrenched story and and we're missing it people are missing it because the zeitgeist of the culture when it comes to extreme wealth is young and that's not Silicon Valley is not the story here. I totally agree and it's it's really a failure of our journalism and the you know memification of our information that we make a gross error when it comes to class I totally agree with you that you know john ossoff is not going to be expected to change everything in the same way that john Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected and well what was his relation to the Cold War he inherited he continued it you know he escalated in Vietnam and so forth. And so younger politicians are not going to be a panacea and there are many ways in which the young could be dangerous including if JD Vance somehow succeeds Donald Trump in the next year through Trump's departure for whatever reason he would immediately be the youngest president in all American history but nonetheless dangerous if we look at the age of billionaires you know we're now lacking a trillion air whom we briefly had when must stock price was up.

40:50But if you look at the billionaires of whom there are many many across the world only 10% of them are under 50 45% are between 50 and 70 and the other 45% are over 70 so the mass of facts is so overwhelmingly against the idea that the rich are young it's actually completely the opposite. And it's through the kind of small scale and unnoticed that establishes the kind of general picture sadly and and if only we would focus a little bit more on it we would be more honest about the way class and power work in this country. I remember the New York Times it was a few years ago but they ran a piece about how people misunderstand where wealth is in the United States and it was pushing back against the idea that the startup is the vehicle. To acquire accumulate hold on to wealth and the line that I remember from it was rather than a startup imagine someone inheriting a chain of gas stations that's a much closer model somewhere in in the middle of the country that no one knows about but that's that's where the wealth is the wealth is in inheritance accumulation traditional forms of commerce and there's much more of that.

42:12And yet the culture and I want to ask you about the culture here because we're talking about the politics this is the diagnosis before we get on to the prognosis or cure but in the diagnosis is it a gerontocratic culture so we've talked about the ways in which as people age they think in certain ways that then you can see across politics. Do you see it across the culture is the other thing that's going on here that we are misled in some ways by cultural power and that draws a veil over the real power cultural power power but it's not it's not power power and we are missing the fact that you could have a relatively useful culture in a profoundly gerontocratic society. So one of my aspirations in this book was really to gather together all of the data you know creating some myself but mainly seeing what others had produced and had not been unified in one picture and I was struck from the evening of my work on this that I was often told that the acquisition that old people in America are enjoying is just kind of.

43:25And I'm going to have a compensation for feeling so culturally marginal and having to look on go to the movies and watch young people talking to other young people and doing what young people do. I'm increasingly less persuaded by this story although of course there's absolute truth to some of it and it's also absolutely true that the aging of our bodies leads to massive discrimination against the older people and social life. But the fact is that older Americans are some of the most fanatical users of cell phones and you know they engage in in doom scrolling and social media just as much and without any interruptions by comparison to younger people. If we look at some of the most popular movies who are their stars Tom Cruise and Merrill Streep who are by no means youthful however well they may have succeeded in preserving themselves and you know doing their own stunts and Tom Cruise's case and so forth so I think it's a very complex picture but if it were the case that culture is a domain for youth and the rest of power is a domain for us.

44:45And if we look at the older people it would be a matter of two wrongs not making a right and it would be worth correcting both domains. I don't think it's fair to say as Oscar Wilde did all those years ago that America has only one tradition and it's its youth because even to the extent there's a youthful presence and culture that's just a little piece of what America stands for both at home and as a kind of global icon and as one. As a one incarnation of what modernity should mean and as with all of these things so much of the culture in a fragmented landscape is hidden from the people who are not inside it and there are huge pockets of cultural energy maybe even dynamism among the old but the young don't see just as the old maybe don't always see what the young are up to but the young maybe in some ways more visible deceptively in that I think it is it is still probably true that the young people are not going to be able to see the young people. But quite a lot of the most visible forms of communication online are coming from younger people there's just as much of it among older people but it's somehow more self contained or harder for us to see people are often shocked when they stumble across their grandparents online life and they discover how rich it is.

46:05Well it would be consistent with the theory we're talking about earlier that consumption among older people of social media remains as high and as addictive and all consuming but production probably lags and so it is true that there are domains like tiktok where my daughters are deeply involved in it and I don't even have that on my phone compared to more age appropriate forms of social media. But then on those forms of social media older people consume a lot but the main kind of successful content creators do trend younger and that's absolutely true and that's consistent with the idea that recognizing the available means of self expression and doing new things in relation to them has always been a young person's game predominantly although I don't want to deny that older people can strike an occasional blow for novelty.

47:05I want to ask you about one more thing by way of diagnosis and again this is partly a question about the distinctiveness the exceptionalism of the American case and that is healthcare we haven't talked about healthcare and this is partly a story about longevity people are living longer but also increasing inequality in health provision not just in the United States but particularly in the United States. Is that another of the self reinforcing loops the feedback loops that we have going on here in a highly privatized healthcare system that the people with the money are living longer and the people who live longer are the ones who are holding on to the money. Absolutely so that's demonstrated in a paper by Rod Shetty a very well known economist that basically the older you are the rich you are and the rich you are the older you are of course that makes more sense to the extent that all of health care is fundamentally privatized except for the poorest Americans and that means that if you're rich you can buy better care and you're likely to therefore live longer.

48:16And then if you live longer you're also accumulating and likely keeping more through your power of the political system to immunize what you've accumulated from tax. So it's an unholy dynamic I think it would probably obtain everywhere to some extent but in a system where there's one form of health care in its state allocated and there is rationing however openly it's spoken about. Then you know there could be always the recourse of wealthy Britain's to fly to Swiss clinics or whatever but it's just going to be much more rarely use then in an American system where the health care you get is absolutely class stratified very openly and it's it's even accepted it's not even secret in the subtitle your book the word you use is hoarding how the old are hoarding power and wealth. And the hoarding is partly easily understood it's in a way it's rational in a world in which you can buy more life money will buy you health and it would may even buy you longevity and the opportunities for that are expanding all the time the market is getting bigger the things that are on sale are getting more various.

49:38The thought as you age that you can afford if you have quite a lot of money to give up any of it given that you know that this is the thing that's going to buy you more life it makes quite a lot of sense you can understand why you know will be there soon enough as people age it's really hard to persuade them that the biggest risk they face is losing out in the kind of health care battle. Well you know there's there's a fine line as you know David between reasons and rationalizations I do agree that it's a reason for people to save that they you know they might need the funds to buy the better rather than worse health care or just because they know that no one will help them if they don't help themselves and have the resources even if they just want. You know middle and care for their final years but there's also a lot of rationalization in the mix because if there weren't we wouldn't find very regularly that people hoard more than they could

50:47have imagined a bleed need for those very purposes and so we often find that there's just going to be a lot left over and the trouble there in my view is that we've created a system where there finally is intergenerational transmission of an enormous number of resources it's just a late in the day for the beneficiaries it's kind of like King Charles exceeding to the kingship when he's old facing a cancer diagnosis and that picture which you also saw in the home box office shows succession of middle aged children like ourselves waiting around is I think much more widespread than we would like to believe because it turns out that much of the wealth in the United States is not coming from startups and anyway founders of companies are themselves aging in place. Most of the wealth is coming from gifts from parents when they die with so much that they save for a rainy day and in the end it was more than they needed it's just that their children get it not society but at least their children do get it but there themselves older adults by the time they do.

52:05I think it is the case that among the relatively well off many more people die with the money that they've been holding on spent then run out of the money that they need and therefore end up with substandard care because it turns out you can find the money you can sell your house you can remogging your house whatever it is you're much more likely not to need the care and have ordered unnecessarily then you are of course they are going to be cases of people who will. Regret the fact they didn't hold on to more but there are many more who would regret the fact that held onto it but they don't because they're dead so they're not around to regret it. I know we're going to talk about solutions separately but you know the reason why I support expanding the welfare state in my country at least is that it would deprive those people of any rationalization. That they just need to hoard for the sake of potentially because of a potential shortfall in being able to pay for the care they need if their care was guaranteed then they couldn't appeal to this reason but it's already a rationalization in so many cases and people really don't need what they're keeping.

53:19What did COVID reveal about gerontocracy in the United States? A disease that struck the elderly the elderly were protected and it's quite hard to argue that the elderly shouldn't have been protected though there were some people who did argue that took a terrible toll on the elderly but particularly those who were in less well-apportioned care homes or less able to travel less able to get away from danger it made a big difference to the political world. The political economy of the United States where was gerontocracy before and after COVID? Did it reveal? Did it change? I didn't talk about this in the book partly because I am ambivalent I'm not sure what I think but also because it's so controversial but since we're among friends on a podcast I'll just say I think the first way in which gerontocracy clearly figured is that really beyond this country almost universally outside.

54:19Possibly the Nordic counter examples you had an almost un argued biopolitical commitment to the extension of life of those who were already their oldest with massive costs imposed on on everyone else and that's a kind of consensus that is is surprising and it demonstrates I think a cultural fact about these societies in which we're living which is that life extends to the world. The transition prevails over everything else in public policy and it's amazing that it would prevail even when those whose lives are being extended are at the very end of their lives begin with by any reckoning. Of course it also revealed in a place where the welfare state is so deficient like my country that older people have been relegated to some of the worst living situations in part because they can barely afford them or they can't afford them.

55:22And that's true even across the pond where their state funded care I mean I dwell a lot in the book on Michelle well back and his last novel which is supposed to be a takedown among other things of the state of our elder care except that he's talking about French state funded retirement homes and I think there too you got glaring but not so terrible revelations about European people. I mean in elder care but in the United States it was just scandalous how it turned out that our nursing homes actually function and the pandemic provided a brief window into that so I would say the pandemic was a moment when there were a lot of revelations about gerontocracy but they cut in different ways and I tried to take account of the fact that we just are committed to life extension I'm not arguing for changing that. I'm definitely committed to the extension of my life and so how could I hold it against others that they are the question is what do we do with power and with those who are not at the end of their lives and can we find some kind of intergenerational comedy that our society is currently lack.

56:42And that is what we will talk about next time we will answer or attempt to answer that question. That was primarily diagnosis of the problem of gerontocracy tomorrow on ppf plus we are putting out a bonus episode in which we move to prognosis and possibly even remedy. I talked to Samuel Moin about some of the things that can be done to deal with the challenge of living in increasingly gerontocratic societies. If you would like to hear that episode if you would like to know what the solutions are sign up now to ppf plus you know what to do click on the link in our show description go to our website ppf ideas.com you will get all of our existing bonus episodes you will get two new bonus episodes every month add free listening automatic sign up to our newsletter costs five pounds a month or 50 pounds for the year we would love to have you join.

57:45Next time in our regular slot the final episode in this series about living in aging societies it ties together many of the themes that we've been talking about but also themes from our previous series on the lives of the philosophers one of the most interesting of all writers on age and aging with Simone de Beauvoir and I'm going to be talking to the literary scholar and writer Lindsey Stonebridge about the remarkable insights in Simone de Beauvoir. And Simone de Beauvoir's writing on old age do join us for that this has been past present future. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Ode to Parfume is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current central Jasmine Woody Cashmurren and warm vanilla.

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