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Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth―and What to Do About It
Not yet published
Expected 16 Jun 26288 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication June 16, 2026
About the author
Samuel Moyn
38 books127 followersSamuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
As life expectancy increases and the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age, it feels like the population of many countries is part of a giant experiment.
Retirement is one of the great innovations of the XXth century. Nobody should have to work until they die, especially in a society that benefits from abundance. Scientific progress completely transformed our lives, including how long we live. This is not an entirely good thing.
Samuel Moyn dives into the history of aging in Western societies, starting from antiquity. His work is extremely documented. The result is a very academic book, which will delight readers interested in hard data and raw facts. Sometimes, reading him feels very harsh. Samuel Moyn does not dwell on the usual arguments (mostly emotional). He constantly connects the demographic facts (centered on the US) with potential solutions. His main preoccupation is to mitigate the concentration of weath and power into the hands of people who reached retirement age.
This book will probably lead to infuriated articles in the press. By definition, people do not like hearing that they are privileged (even when it is true) and try to rationalise their position. The real estate situation is especially worrying, with elder citizens living alone in large houses purchasee decades ago, and families of four piling up in small apartments. I am an engineer in my thirties, married to another engineer, both working full time jobs with lots of responsibilities. Our standard of living is lower to the one of my in-laws - none of them studied beyond high school and my mother-in-law worked part time. One of the reasons is housing costs.
Greying voters are massively defending their interests, even if it means that their children will never be able to buy a home or their grandchildren end up in underfunded schools. I was depressed to read the facts confirming what has been happening before my eyes. I am baffled to witness a whole generation doing away with the future. Reforms could mitigate those effects. Sadly, it is unlikely that a majority of voters (again, because of demography) will support such a change. Just like the aging tenured academics gatekeeping access to stable positions for the younger generation, I do not see baby boomers applauding measures that deprive them of power. Generational fairness is out of reach, because the people with the weath and power are the ones benefitting from the imbalance.
Overall, this was an excellent book that provided me with valuable sources. I am sure the people with the power to fix the situation will brush it off with disdain, though.
Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. Thank you Samuel Moyn for this book.
Retirement is one of the great innovations of the XXth century. Nobody should have to work until they die, especially in a society that benefits from abundance. Scientific progress completely transformed our lives, including how long we live. This is not an entirely good thing.
Samuel Moyn dives into the history of aging in Western societies, starting from antiquity. His work is extremely documented. The result is a very academic book, which will delight readers interested in hard data and raw facts. Sometimes, reading him feels very harsh. Samuel Moyn does not dwell on the usual arguments (mostly emotional). He constantly connects the demographic facts (centered on the US) with potential solutions. His main preoccupation is to mitigate the concentration of weath and power into the hands of people who reached retirement age.
This book will probably lead to infuriated articles in the press. By definition, people do not like hearing that they are privileged (even when it is true) and try to rationalise their position. The real estate situation is especially worrying, with elder citizens living alone in large houses purchasee decades ago, and families of four piling up in small apartments. I am an engineer in my thirties, married to another engineer, both working full time jobs with lots of responsibilities. Our standard of living is lower to the one of my in-laws - none of them studied beyond high school and my mother-in-law worked part time. One of the reasons is housing costs.
Greying voters are massively defending their interests, even if it means that their children will never be able to buy a home or their grandchildren end up in underfunded schools. I was depressed to read the facts confirming what has been happening before my eyes. I am baffled to witness a whole generation doing away with the future. Reforms could mitigate those effects. Sadly, it is unlikely that a majority of voters (again, because of demography) will support such a change. Just like the aging tenured academics gatekeeping access to stable positions for the younger generation, I do not see baby boomers applauding measures that deprive them of power. Generational fairness is out of reach, because the people with the weath and power are the ones benefitting from the imbalance.
Overall, this was an excellent book that provided me with valuable sources. I am sure the people with the power to fix the situation will brush it off with disdain, though.
Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. Thank you Samuel Moyn for this book.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The premise of Samuel Moyn's gerontocracy book is that "an aging society is more set on preservation than on renovation," which is not an original idea and potentially not an accurate claim, but does sound like a good excuse to push the olds aside. You would think this means Moyn is full steam ahead on slashing federal deficits, reforming the sclerotic welfare state on which the elderly draw so heavily, investing in R&D, and clearing a path for the young and energetic to build, but you would be wrong. Instead of being pro-human, pro-individual, pro-autonomy, and pro-dynamism, Moyn thinks tired socialistic thinking can save American vitality despite having nothing ever to do with American vitality in the first place and being responsible for the burdens of today. Not to mention the youth today are already quite a bit more socialistic than the old yet are politically impotent and incompetent... Are these your saviors, Moyn?
Let's be fair, Moyn is actually able to recognize the problems with simply championing the young bloods, though his reasoning is wrong. He tries to split the difference and imagine some "intergenerational communion" in which utopian everything-bagel thinking figures prominently. Whoever believes we can somehow balance our current levels of "care and welfare" with new goals of "progress and renewal," I've got an nice and expensive NFT to sell 'em.
For anyone who picks this up, it'll be easy to see that everything Moyn proposes would do absolutely nothing to change the concentration of economic, cultural, and political power among older Americans. The concentration of power is a material reality for which there are many causes and none of which are easy to reverse, and it is hard, to the extent incentives are shaping relevant behavior here, to motivate anyone to rewire these incentives short of some emergency. Maybe we'll get that with entitlements in the 2030s, but we'll see, and it will probably just mean raising taxes. The big hurdle is that there simply aren't enough young people to rejuvenate any society anywhere. In America, Boomer parents didn't raise their Millennial children to have enough children nor did they themselves have children are the same rate as their parents. The demographic pyramid is already inverting, and there is no fix short of pilfering the youth from the rest of the world, which is going to make for a lot of angry people. It's part of why we got Donnie from Queens twice. So the proposed tinkering to taxes, campaign finance, retirement age, pensions, etc are not going to move the needle, and the Boomers are already enjoying "fully automated luxury communism" because of poor policy choices in the past by FDR, LBJ, and their supporting casts.
Ultimately, the problem isn't gerontocracy, though having a largely very old leadership class isn't ideal. The problem is that Americans stopped believing in the American project and shirked their duty to posterity. The future will belong to those who show up, and I know who to bet on when it comes to fulfilling a duty to posterity. It won't be those with Moyn's proclivities. It'll take awhile for this future to materialize, but in the meantime we should do what we can to speed-run technological innovation. Human capital and labor will need supplementation as we grey and shrink.
*Disclaimer: Read and reviewed as an ARC from NetGalley.
**Will return to review to expand it.
Let's be fair, Moyn is actually able to recognize the problems with simply championing the young bloods, though his reasoning is wrong. He tries to split the difference and imagine some "intergenerational communion" in which utopian everything-bagel thinking figures prominently. Whoever believes we can somehow balance our current levels of "care and welfare" with new goals of "progress and renewal," I've got an nice and expensive NFT to sell 'em.
For anyone who picks this up, it'll be easy to see that everything Moyn proposes would do absolutely nothing to change the concentration of economic, cultural, and political power among older Americans. The concentration of power is a material reality for which there are many causes and none of which are easy to reverse, and it is hard, to the extent incentives are shaping relevant behavior here, to motivate anyone to rewire these incentives short of some emergency. Maybe we'll get that with entitlements in the 2030s, but we'll see, and it will probably just mean raising taxes. The big hurdle is that there simply aren't enough young people to rejuvenate any society anywhere. In America, Boomer parents didn't raise their Millennial children to have enough children nor did they themselves have children are the same rate as their parents. The demographic pyramid is already inverting, and there is no fix short of pilfering the youth from the rest of the world, which is going to make for a lot of angry people. It's part of why we got Donnie from Queens twice. So the proposed tinkering to taxes, campaign finance, retirement age, pensions, etc are not going to move the needle, and the Boomers are already enjoying "fully automated luxury communism" because of poor policy choices in the past by FDR, LBJ, and their supporting casts.
Ultimately, the problem isn't gerontocracy, though having a largely very old leadership class isn't ideal. The problem is that Americans stopped believing in the American project and shirked their duty to posterity. The future will belong to those who show up, and I know who to bet on when it comes to fulfilling a duty to posterity. It won't be those with Moyn's proclivities. It'll take awhile for this future to materialize, but in the meantime we should do what we can to speed-run technological innovation. Human capital and labor will need supplementation as we grey and shrink.
*Disclaimer: Read and reviewed as an ARC from NetGalley.
**Will return to review to expand it.
December 7, 2025
Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the Advance Reading Copy.
This book explores the role of older adults as an oligarchy that stymies political, economic, academic and workplace mobility and progress. It's a timely topic; I can still remember the sinking feeling of watching the infamous Biden/Trump Presidential debate in 2024 and seeing the harsh reality of President Biden's cognitive decline in real time. Moyn illustrates how older Americans and their interest groups have had the effect of perpetuating the affordability crisis and stagnation in our financial and workplace realms. As a volunteer in local MA politics, the sections describing older Americans' overrepresentation in elected office and interest group dynamics rang true. I agree that "the more boring the election, the more likely it is to turn out only older voters" interested in protecting their home value (and leading to anti-growth NIMBYism) and preventing new taxes. This becomes especially dangerous and anti-small-d-democratic in local politics, "where land use decisions are shaped by political objections."
I found Moyn's exploration of AARP particularly enlightening, especially as I look forward to AARP eligibility in less than 90 days (gulp). Did you know one in ten Americans are AARP members? This most powerful of lobbies is primarily a "market maker" for insurance and travel services, but wields unreasonable power, particularly in our sclerotic Congress (itself an extreme gerontocracy).
The book also describes how the older adult oligarchy prevents dynamism in the corporate and academic realms, and in personal investments. While Moyn's prescriptions for age limits, youth quotas, and Scandinavian-style social aging communities are big lifts in our current fiscal and political environment, this book is worthwhile for anyone interested in understanding how generational divides occur and persist to our political and economic detriment.
This book explores the role of older adults as an oligarchy that stymies political, economic, academic and workplace mobility and progress. It's a timely topic; I can still remember the sinking feeling of watching the infamous Biden/Trump Presidential debate in 2024 and seeing the harsh reality of President Biden's cognitive decline in real time. Moyn illustrates how older Americans and their interest groups have had the effect of perpetuating the affordability crisis and stagnation in our financial and workplace realms. As a volunteer in local MA politics, the sections describing older Americans' overrepresentation in elected office and interest group dynamics rang true. I agree that "the more boring the election, the more likely it is to turn out only older voters" interested in protecting their home value (and leading to anti-growth NIMBYism) and preventing new taxes. This becomes especially dangerous and anti-small-d-democratic in local politics, "where land use decisions are shaped by political objections."
I found Moyn's exploration of AARP particularly enlightening, especially as I look forward to AARP eligibility in less than 90 days (gulp). Did you know one in ten Americans are AARP members? This most powerful of lobbies is primarily a "market maker" for insurance and travel services, but wields unreasonable power, particularly in our sclerotic Congress (itself an extreme gerontocracy).
The book also describes how the older adult oligarchy prevents dynamism in the corporate and academic realms, and in personal investments. While Moyn's prescriptions for age limits, youth quotas, and Scandinavian-style social aging communities are big lifts in our current fiscal and political environment, this book is worthwhile for anyone interested in understanding how generational divides occur and persist to our political and economic detriment.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
the blue print our country needs right now. i wanted more practical insight on what specific steps we need to take now toward making forced retirement and social services/community safety net programs for our rapidly aging population. overall, though, a very compelling, well researched argument. thank you to netgalley for the ALC!
June 3, 2026
Amazing book! The short chapters made it a very enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews