A Harper’s essay and forthcoming book by Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, arguing that the United States suffers under a gerontocracy in which the elderly hold disproportionate political power, economic resources, and housing stock at the expense of younger generations, drew strong reactions from Morning Answer listeners when previously discussed. Moyn returned to Chicago’s Morning Answer to join Dan Proft in a fuller conversation about the argument of his book, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It, available June 16th.
Moyn said he understands why people bristle at the suggestion that public policy should move resources away from seniors, and acknowledged that the political dimension of the argument, the cognitive decline of aging politicians, the deaths in office of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein, is actually the less important part of his case. There is currently one member of the House of Representatives under thirty and only thirty-seven under forty. An entire branch of government is named after old men. But the representational problem extends beyond who holds office to who they serve, and that question is answered overwhelmingly by which voters show up, who funds campaigns, and who attends the local zoning meetings where housing policy is actually made. He said the elderly disproportionately dominate all three categories, which produces policy outcomes that reflect their interests regardless of the age of any individual officeholder.
The housing market is his most concrete illustration. Older Americans are staying in homes that exceed their space needs at historically unprecedented rates while young families trying to form households in major cities are priced out. The same older residents who occupy those homes are the only people who reliably show up to local zoning board meetings, where they consistently vote down new construction that would both provide housing for younger families and create senior-appropriate alternatives for downsizing. The result is a self-reinforcing system in which the people controlling the existing housing stock also control the political process that determines whether new housing gets built.
Proft challenged him on the redistributive implications of the argument, asking whether what Moyn is proposing is a centrally planned system that times people out of their jobs, homes, and accumulated wealth at some government-determined age and income threshold. Moyn said the framing misses his actual argument, which is that the United States already engages in massive redistribution through its welfare state, and that redistribution currently flows overwhelmingly toward older Americans. The recent reconciliation bill Proft referenced cut welfare programs broadly while protecting benefits for older recipients. His point is not to build a new redistributive apparatus but to ask whether the existing one distributes fairly across generations.
He acknowledged recent research from Federal Reserve and Duke University economists showing that millennials have achieved median household income roughly twenty percent higher than the previous generation, comparable in trajectory to Gen X and not dramatically worse than the gains made by baby boomers and the silent generation. Moyn said the picture is genuinely complicated and he does not want to claim younger Americans have no hope, but that the relevant comparison is not a snapshot of where different generations stand at a given moment, since older people will always have accumulated more over a longer working life, but rather the extraordinary gains older Americans made relative to younger ones in the three decades before the pandemic. He said the result is an oligarchic concentration of wealth that cannot be accurately analyzed without throwing age into the equation alongside income and other variables.
On the transmission of that wealth, he noted that because Americans are living longer and holding assets later into life, inherited wealth now typically flows to children who are themselves in their sixties or seventies rather than to young adults with decades of productive years ahead. He said this undermines the argument that wealth accumulation by the old is simply a natural stage in the lifecycle that younger cohorts will eventually reach on the same terms.
On specific policy proposals, Moyn said the book is intended as a conversation starter rather than a legislative blueprint, but his suggestions cluster around several areas: public financing of elections to reduce the influence of older donors who currently dominate political giving, land use reforms to give broader representation to non-homeowners at zoning meetings, higher marginal income and estate taxes, and incentive structures that encourage older Americans to downsize out of prime real estate and into senior-appropriate housing without forcing any outcome at what Proft called the point of a gun. He said he is skeptical of means-testing Social Security specifically, because the program’s political durability depends on its universal character, and removing higher earners from the benefit creates a constituency with no stake in defending it.