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"It's an extraordinary thing that we can now expect to live long lives—unless we're extremely unlucky—and more than that, to be relatively high functioning," said Yale Law School's Samuel Moyn. "I'm interested in, let's say, the dark side of that. What are the unexpected consequences of having longer lives?

The answers to that question are the basis for his new book, "Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It."

What Moyn calls "the great aging" has, he says, transformed America into a society in which older people control a disproportionate amount of political power and wealth and "hoard" jobs and housing, depriving the young of opportunity and political say.

Some of the statistics Moyn cites: The median age of congresspeople is more than 60. The median age of voters is 52; in some campaigns, donor ages average as high as 70. Workers over the age of 55 now comprise nearly a quarter of the workforce, compared to 10% in 1990.

Wealth is increasingly concentrated among the old, as is homeownership.

"If Americans deserve a society that is oriented to innovation and problem-solving, and equips and launches the young into the prime of life, the country is heading the wrong direction," Moyn writes.

His book prescribes a host of possible strategies for wresting control from the aged, from making voting mandatory and boosting public funding of elections to reevaluating age-related tax breaks and bringing back mandatory retirements. Finally, he suggests that a more socialistic model of elder care in America would help reduce the angst around aging that compels older workers to cling to jobs and wealth.

Moyn (who—it's worth noting—is in his mid-fifties) is the Kent Professor of Law and History at YLS and in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and head of Grace Hopper College at Yale. His previous books include "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (2021), "Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World" (2018), and "The Last Utopia" (2010).

He sat down with Yale News to talk about how the gerontocracy has alienated younger voters, why he supports abolishing the U.S. Senate, and his own plans for retirement.

You say that older people are 'hoarding' jobs and wealth. One of the examples you devote considerable attention to is the concentration of political power in the older generation—including who is in elected office, who is funding those campaigns, and who votes. What are the ramifications of this?

I'm trying to shift the conversation a little beyond the very real and—I think—widely appreciated problem of the elderliness of our political class to also consider the age of the electorate. It wouldn't change much to just have younger politicians because the electorate is so old and the money going into campaigns is so old.

The ramifications are that as we age, there are things that we are likely to want more than we did before, and things we are less likely to want, such as addressing long-term crises like climate change or national debt. Of course, there are going to be exceptions—I'm not saying that all younger people are Democrats and all older people are Republicans. My bigger claim is that younger people are less conservative with a small c, and older people are likely to be more backward-oriented than future-oriented, more set on preservation than renovation. I'm most concerned about those general patterns.

You hold special disdain for the U.S. Senate, in which the median age of members is currently around 64. You would like to see it abolished. Why?

I argue that our founders really did have a conscious agenda of giving power to old people, adopting a Council of Elders like the one that ruled in Sparta, in which all members had to be 60 or over. My beef with the Senate is that in the name of stability it actually impedes progress and reform. And I'm upset that it's kind of a holdover from our archaic past, which is about having old people in power.

One way to deal with the impact of the lopsided proportion of older voters, you suggest, is to reduce the weight of the elder vote in elections. Peoples' votes would count for less the older they get. Why not a concerted effort to mobilize more young candidates and young voters instead?

I'm for all of the above. The spirit of the book is to tote up all the different solutions one might consider. In the electoral domain, I also have more modest ones, like relaxing voter registration requirements to avoid punishing mobility, or mandatory elections, or giving everyone the power to leave work to vote. We could also consider correlating our votes with our stake in the election, which in my opinion is greater when you have a longer time to live under the policies being chosen. Take climate change, for example. We have documented that the older you are, the less you care about it, for the very understandable reason that you'll be less affected by it.

I don't doubt that there could be a conjuncture in which youth get excited about politics again. But I think we should start with the observation of how alienated they are under gerontocracy.

You must have these conversations with your students. What do you hear from them?

I have two college-aged daughters, and they are alienated and resigned from the political system. I think that's true of GenZ and those younger. I reference the John Mayer song "Waiting on the World to Change," about disaffection and the indignity of being forced to wait your turn to wield power and then getting criticized for abstention. I'm all for shaming the youth—everyone can be more civically-minded. But there's a striking lack of empathy for how clear it is to them that they don't have a big part in the country's democracy. They're not wrong to think our system is broken. The question is whether we just say the only remedy is for them to do better. What about the rest of us?

One of your suggestions for getting more older people to retire, thereby freeing up jobs for younger people, is bringing back mandatory retirement provisions. Not across the board, but in some professions. Could that be considered a form of ageism?

No, I think we first have to determine what's fair for all. If it's fair, it can't be discriminatory. I'm concerned about ageism where it's discriminatory. I'm not concerned about undoing privilege when it's real and unfair.

You make the association between age and wealth—as of 2019, Americans over the age of 54 held nearly 72% of the country's wealth. Some of the reviewers of your book have argued that that wealth inequity is less generational than oligarchical, that wealth among the old is greatly concentrated among a minority. What's your response?

I don't think we can choose between taking oligarchy seriously and taking age seriously because the oligarchy is old. You have to combine both factors. I wouldn't be caught dead saying, "Men make more money than women, but that's not on account of sex or patriarchy. It's because of oligarchy." That's insane. Oligarchy and patriarchy go together and always have. Gerontocracy is a new phenomenon, but it explains the kind of oligarchy we have, which is older.

My response to those kinds of claims are that they don't really understand what class is. It's affected by gender and race as well as age. And we acknowledge that freely when it comes to gender and race. I'm interested in why there is this resistance to doing so with age when the evidence is so powerful that age helps constitute class ascendency or oligarchic power.

You end the book with a vision of a future in which seniors don't feel so nervous about letting go of their jobs and their wealth because there is a better social safety net for them. Would you talk about that?

Absolutely. I think that as a matter of moral principle, our welfare state is scandalous. Older people are not given enough benefits, especially when they're not oligarchs and they're poor. I emphasize throughout the book that among the worst victims of gerontocracy are older people who are not wealthy. We need to increase care, including the long-term care that is now excluded from our Medicare program. I envision a kind of grand bargain where we accept the stages in our lives, and in our last one, we're given not just care, but the chance to reinvent ourselves one last time. In exchange, we relinquish our power, including the forms of wealth that we've accumulated.

At what age will you retire?

I've had conversations with colleagues about this in response to my book. I would be very happy to retire any time once I get my kids through college. I'm hoping to retire before 70.

I'm sure the book is sparking lively conversations in many corners.

I hope there are some useful conversations in the mix. It's a consciousness-raising book: "Here are the grim but undeniable facts. Here are some proposals." If we don't take age seriously as a factor in politics, we really can't reform the country in the ways that are needed.

More information

Samuel Moyn, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (2026)

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Citation: Q&A: Unforeseen consequences of the 'great aging' of America (2026, July 11) retrieved 11 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-qa-unforeseen-consequences-great-aging.html

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