Older people, we often hear, have too much power. They are hoarding homes, money, and jobs to the detriment of younger people who can’t get their lives started. They are hoarding political power as well, helming a state that is of, by, and for them.

These arguments have been made since at least the 1980s, which saw a major—and unsuccessful—push to make “intergenerational equity” a rallying cry. Today, they are coming back into fashion. Many see the COVID-19 pandemic through such a lens, arguing that we abandoned the education of the young in order to protect the old. Since the pandemic, the economic prospects of younger people have only grown direr, while older Americans continue accruing wealth from a booming stock market. And the 2024 election, which initially pitted two declining senior citizens against one another, symbolized for many the perils of gerontocracy, a term that seemed to rise to prominence in response to Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s campaign trail blunders.

The great virtue of Samuel Moyn’s important new book, Gerontocracy in America,is that it takes these issues seriously, grounding the debate in data and offering concrete prescriptions. Moyn is a distinguished historian and public intellectual at Yale Law School—full disclosure: he also served as my doctoral adviser—and Gerontocracy is the best case I’ve seen both that elder power is a real problem and that we must take significant steps to address and weaken it. Some of the measures Moyn suggests already have mainstream support: age caps to hold Congressional office, for instance. Others, like abolishing the Senate and placing more weight on the votes of the young, are far more radical.

If it’s true that elder power is a serious problem facing the republic, then solutions like these surely ought to be on the table. But precisely because the book’s case is so thorough, it allows us to see that the whole enterprise is flawed. We don’t live in a gerontocracy but an oligarchy, and a focus on age can only distract from that more existential threat.  

Gerontocracy in America makes three separate arguments, each of which needs to hold water for the book’s project as a whole to succeed.

The first is that older people have amassed an enormous, disproportionate, and historically novel amount of power in contemporary America. Decades ago, many industries had mandatory retirement policies, designed to clear out older workers and make room for their younger, more innovative, and less expensive replacements. Since the passage of landmark antidiscrimination legislation in 1986, however, such policies have been deemed illegal in almost every field. The result, when tied to the increasing longevity and healthspan of American workers, has been predictable. Older Americans earn much more than their younger counterparts, and in many workplaces they are refusing to make way for their replacements—contributing to the United States having the highest wage inequality, by age, in the world. Nor does hoarding positions correspond to better outcomes, Moyn thinks, as workers are staying on well past the stage when they are innovating. He points out that his own employer, Yale Law School, was most influential and productive when its residents were far younger than they are now. 

Real power in America, though, comes not from your pay stub, but from your assets. And here, we are a nation especially divided by age. According to one Pew study from 2011, the median senior citizen had 47 times more wealth than the median young adult (ages 18–34). This wealth primarily takes the form of housing. Home purchasing and home ownership is increasingly an old person’s game. In 1981, the median age of a homebuyer was just over 30 years old. In 2022, it was 53—an astonishing increase in a few decades, and the same decades when home prices in general soared. To add insult to injury, older people don’t tend to downsize when they become empty nesters. “Instead of moving out immediately to live more modestly,” Moyn chides, “many seniors prefer to stay for good”: enjoying asset appreciation while hoarding good housing stock from the young families who need it.

Moyn dispels one pervasive myth about this wealth: that it will be transferred from parents to their children, fostering generational equity. While it’s true that you can’t take it with you, you can at least keep it with you to the bitter end. And that is what most older people are doing: transferring assets upon their death to children who are well past middle age. While Moyn sometimes stigmatizes this as hoarding behavior, he’s also aware of the logic. Many Americans are rightly terrified at the gargantuan costs of long-term care. Many feel they are serving their children by saving inordinately for those costs and only liquidating assets to pay for care when needed.

Economic power translates, as ever, into political power. Moyn devotes a chapter to the AARP, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the country. Politicians are loath to cross the organization, which has no counterpart for younger people. Since 1990, American political leaders began to grow older, too, culminating in the debacle of 2024. In the absence of term limits (which happen to be supported by a large supermajority of Americans, including older Americans), and given the power of incumbency, there is precious little incentive for politicians to give up their seats. Congress today is among the oldest ever, as is the judiciary, which is of course appointed for life.

Those old politicians are put in place by old voters. Older people vote more frequently than younger ones, especially in local and primary elections. The numbers here are shocking: in 2024, the median age of a primary voter was an astonishing 65 years old. In New Mexico, it was 71. And it’s not just voting. The median age of Americans is 39; in the House of Representatives it’s around 57, and in the Senate it’s around 64. Fewer than 6 percent of Congress is under age 40, compared to about half of the U.S. population and a bit over a quarter of U.S. adults. Of course, the House and Senate have minimum age requirements set by the Constitution: 25 in the former chamber, 30 in the latter. Still, this is a big demographic disparity, comparable to gender disparities in Congress and larger than racial ones. Black people represent about 14 percent of the U.S. population and about 12 percent of Congress.

The weight of the evidence is clear: older people have amassed a great deal of public and private power in the last few decades. Thus far, the book is faring well.

We enter shakier ground, though, on Moyn’s second argument: that this situation is prima facie problematic. It’s not obvious that the relative privilege of older people is limiting the rest of us. After all, a century ago, older people were, in the aggregate, disenfranchised and impoverished. Maybe we should celebrate the statistics above as a victory for them. And maybe older politicians are wiser than younger ones, and maybe in the age of AI we should be especially desirous of older modes of thinking and acting.

Moyn would find all of that to be overly sentimental. He offers two basic reasons why the current situation is untenable. First, the power and wealth of the older generation is actively holding back the power and wealth of the younger. In other words, this is not a situation where we can simply make the pie larger. “The reason you’re poor,” Marshall Steinbaum has argued in these pages, “is that they’re rich.” While Steinbaum is referring to the wealthy of all ages, Moyn thinks the same logic applies to the elderly. The only way to address the affordability and employment crises of the young, therefore, is to wrest power and resources from the old. If older people are living in all of the houses on the block and refusing to sell them, they are freezing out younger homebuyers. If older people are refusing to retire, their employers are unable to hire replacements. And so on.

Moreover, older people are allegedly using their power unwisely, and even selfishly. “If Americans deserve a society that is oriented to innovation and problem-solving,” Moyn writes, we are “heading in the wrong direction.” Older people have less stake in the future, he thinks, and are therefore less likely to invest in that future. Older voters tend to oppose property tax hikes to fund schools, for instance, and they are less invested in the issue of climate change, the worst effects of which they will not live to see. And because political preferences are relatively stable with age, older people are more likely to be stuck in the politics of the past. Older voters and politicians are more likely than younger ones, Moyn points out, to be obsessed with the issue of terrorism.

There is clearly some truth to all of this, but not as much as first appears. For starters, the image of a relatively fixed housing stock and labor pool, with older people claiming too much of each, is misguided. If older people left their homes, they wouldn’t live on the streets: they would live in different homes. It is not obvious that this would help much with the housing crisis for the young, especially given the increasing number of intergenerational households. And if older people left their jobs en masse, it is far from obvious, especially as AI fuels layoffs and automation, that jobs would generally be “freed up” for younger people. There is not a static number of jobs available. In my own university department, I have seen many departures that did not free up jobs for anyone.

The impact of aging per se on the political process seems overblown as well. It is not true that older people are reliably conservative voters. In the 2024 presidential elections, the 65+ population was significantly more liberal than Moyn’s own age bracket (50–64). Moreover, there is scant evidence that people over 50 use their disproportionate presence at the polls to pursue their own interests. If older people have one obviously shared interest, it’s the salvation of Social Security, yet the system is headed for a crisis in about six years—one that will affect many millions of older people. Nothing, though, has been done to address the challenge. (I wrote about this three years ago in these pages, and the politics are just as frozen now as they were then.)

Or consider the conventional wisdom, repeated several times in this book, that older voters tend to vote against educational spending. This feels true, and it would even be rational, in some sense: older people don’t have children in school and are the most directly impacted by property tax increases. But do those preferences in fact translate into political action? It’s not so clear. The precise effect of older voters on educational spending is hard to parse, and nobody does exit polling on local bond referenda. It is likely the case that proportionally older districts are less likely to support tax increases for education, but no research that I’m aware of, or which Moyn cites, has shown that the effect is very large. If an older electorate in general was going to translate into less educational spending, you would expect to see a decrease in per capita student funding since the 1990s, the years Moyn pinpoints as the beginning of our gerontocratic crisis. But you don’t—in fact, those numbers have gone up significantly. After all, older voters might support school spending that serves their grandchildren, or because of affection for the schools their children went to, or because they want to support education generally. Besides, plenty of liberal, even wealthy, voters support tax increases.

In short, there is not compelling evidence that the preponderance of power in older age brackets is seriously distorting our political system, our labor market, or our housing market. It would be absurd to claim that age is irrelevant to those sectors: of course age inflects and impacts them, as it does everything. But that’s not the claim of this book. The claim is that we live in a gerontocracy, and that we are ruled by the elderly in ways that are severely impeding the flourishing of younger generations. And this the evidence fails to bear out.

Strangely for a book so concerned with wealth and power, Gerontocracy in America doesn’t have much to say about class. Is the problem with wealthy old people that they’re old or that they’re wealthy? Clearly the two are related, insofar as older people tend to be in a higher class. The book focuses on elite older people—university professors, physicians, CEOs, and the like—but it doesn’t follow from their disproportionate power that we should address age as an independent variable, seeking to restrict the power of older people in toto. Many older people are not wealthy at all, and in fact the poverty rate for Americans over 65 is almost identical to that for Americans 18-64. Here’s a thought experiment. People who attend the Metropolitan Opera tend to be higher class than those who don’t. We don’t, though, live in an Operacracy, and depriving opera lovers of economic power would be a roundabout way to address class injustice. It would also harm those opera lovers who are not wealthy at all. It would, in short, be a mistake.

Attacking “gerontocracy” commits a similar kind of mistake: it would do some good, but it is not the most logical way to attain those benefits, and it would cause regrettable amounts of collateral damage. The reason that older people have amassed so much economic power is not primarily because of social insurance programs or because they refuse to retire (less than a quarter of older people are in the workforce). It is because our economy rewards the possession of assets more than it rewards the performance of labor. Most wealth derives from homes and stocks, not from getting a raise at work. This general shift in our economy has necessarily redounded to the benefit of older people, who have had more years to accrue assets and who happen, in 2026, to be Boomers who had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to buy assets on the cheap. There is a correlation between age and asset ownership, but there is not causation, nor is it likely that the situation for Boomers will be replicated by the coming generations of aging Americans. Moyn, though, wants to treat age, rather than class, as the primary category of analysis.

Moyn would probably reply that my example is a red herring. He nowhere says that class is irrelevant; he is simply pointing out that older people are, like white people and like men, one of the privileged groups in this country, and we ought, in the interest of equity, to challenge that power where we can. But the analogy is specious, and these categories are not alike. For one thing, old age is something that most of us will inhabit one day, and in this regard it is a fundamentally different social variable than race or gender. Even more fundamentally, white supremacy and patriarchy have long and violent histories. Progressives have long been laboring to unravel those structures, which are deeply baked into our cultural and legal worlds. Even according to Moyn’s own evidence, old age is not like that: by his own lights, gerontocracy is only a few decades old. There have never been political parties or armed vigilantes calling for elder power or seeking to disempower the youth, who as a class have enjoyed a good deal of cultural prestige and civil rights protection, including a constitutional amendment (the twenty-sixth) designed to increase their electoral power.

This brings us to the third prong of Moyn’s argument, and in my view the weakest: that a series of legislative reforms targeted at older people would effectively combat gerontocratic rule and create a more just society.

Moyn does provide a creative array of policy solutions—most of which, as he well knows, would currently be illegal or unconstitutional. He suggests age limits rather than term limits for Congress, because the latter could still allow for many older politicians. (There’s a vast bipartisan majority that favors both.) He thinks there should be a sort of affirmative action for younger politicians to ensure a decent age representation in Congress (such a thing has been tried in other countries, including Kenya and Uganda). He also thinks that there should be some kind of mechanism to weight the votes of younger people, either by simply counting them more or by allowing parents to vote by proxy on behalf of their children. Outside of politics, he wants to reinstate mandatory retirement in many fields, including in universities. And he wants to close loopholes like the homestead tax exemptions that help older people limit their property tax payments, which would encourage them to find more appropriate housing.

Some of these proposals, like Congressional and judicial age limits, are good ideas, and they might help to address the genuine disregard of our political process for the issues that face the young. The problem with the others isn’t that they’re unrealistic, as some reviewers have pointed out. Social Security seemed unrealistic in 1925; everything about the Trump presidency seemed unrealistic in 2015. Realism is not a requirement for books like this.

The problem is that these solutions address symptoms rather than causes. Given the particular political landscape we inhabit, with its very low tolerance for substantive policy debate, focusing on constitutional amendments, Senate abolition, and the rest would be a decades-long distraction from the forces that are truly tearing our common world apart, for young and old alike. In a small and indirect way, they might deplete the power and influence of both the Warren Buffetts of the world and the millionaires who refuse to quit their jobs and live in houses that are too large. But they would have the same effect on the much larger group of middle-class or working-class older people: those who are working a modest job, maybe because it brings them pleasure or maybe because they want to give money to their kids; those who are living in the modest house they raised their children in and devoting their spare time and energy to democratic politics. Those people, in this policy regime, would face higher property taxes, restrictions on their voting power, and mandatory retirement (and if they didn’t, through some form of means testing, it would only prove my basic point that class, not age, is the issue deserving attention). It would hurt them, financially and psychologically. And for the reasons I gave above, it’s not clear it would help the rest of us.

The truth is, we do not live in a gerontocracy. We live in an oligarchy where a disproportionate number of the oligarchs happen to be old. That’s a different social problem, requiring a different policy response: one focused on affordability and economic justice, rather than intergenerational equity. And while Moyn is surely right that there are some areas of elder privilege that should be addressed, he is both intellectually and strategically wrong that a wholesale assault on gerontocracy is in order.

Though I am not persuaded by many of the arguments in this book, it still has much to teach us. Old-age politics affects us all, and it has been woefully ignored in recent years. Hived off from the overall thesis, many of the book’s ideas are important and would be beneficial. As Moyn recognizes—unlike so many—achieving a world where all people can thrive requires serious attention to age, even if not of the sort that he proposes.

In particular, Moyn is laudably committed to the entitlement programs that make old age as secure as it is, from Social Security to Medicare; he even advocates for their expansion, reasoning that older people would be less likely to hoard resources if they felt more security. He is laudably committed, too, to a renovated ideal of old age, which would allow older people to embrace the limits of their minds and bodies, finding ways to draw down activity and labor in their twilight years. No doubt, we should be building more age-appropriate housing for older people and encouraging them to downsize when they’re ready. And it is certainly the case, too, that older people should have the freedom to quit work if they want to, and to transition more easily into part-time work if they desire and as their capacities allow.

The age contract in the United States does need to be renegotiated, and Moyn’s book is symptomatic of the ways that the current contract is becoming illegitimate. Our basic model—“Education, then Work, then Leisure”—was forged in the 1930s, when the lifespan and the economy were completely different than they are today. Developing a new contract will involve questioning some of the privileges that have accrued to older people—privileges that were granted in an era when they truly were a class in need, which they are not any longer (in the aggregate). Moyn is right about that, but he’s wrong about how to address it.

The stakes of this debate are more than theoretical. A vulgar form of anti-“gerontocracy” sentiment has gained steam in recent years, often expressed as thinly or not-so-thinly veiled ageism. In this climate, Moyn’s argument risks giving the wrong impression and fueling the wrong fight. Renegotiating the terms of our society’s age contract cannot be conducted in a spirit of generational warfare. Like it or not, we’re all growing older, and the America of the future is going to be demographically older than the America of today, let alone the America of yesterday. We can and must find ways to work together, across barriers of age, in clear recognition of where the real problem lies and who our real enemies are.

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