Why Won’t America’s Aging Elite Retire?

Source: Why Won’t America’s Aging Elite Retire? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, 51:50, uploaded 2026-07-30.

The programme opens with a montage of reports about Mitch McConnell’s health, the death of Lindsey Graham, and Donald Trump defending his health. It then gives the complaint a wider form. Older Americans appear to have kept control of political offices, companies, universities, houses, and wealth whilst younger people wait for a future that never arrives. Ross Douthat speaks with Samuel Moyn, a Yale Law professor and the author of a new book called Gerontocracy in America, about whether the concentration of power among older Americans has become a structural problem for democracy.

The power to remain

Moyn begins with the psychology of retention. Power gives a person a sense of significance, especially when their work places them in the news or lets them shape public policy. Leaving that position means giving up a powerful source of identity. Age adds the knowledge of decline and death, so remaining in office can become a way to deny both. Moyn treats this as a human problem before it becomes a generational one. The boomers benefited from longer lives and from medicine that keeps people functioning close to death, a development he calls the “compression of morbidity”. They happened to reach positions of influence during that change.

American institutions then make the impulse harder to resist. Western Europe has similarly long-lived citizens, yet its political class is generally younger. Moyn attributes part of the difference to the way European parties organise competition, finance elections, and govern. European judges also tend to face mandatory retirement or age limits, whilst the American Constitution gives federal judges life tenure. Incumbency and the absence of a planned succession let people remain in positions that younger colleagues have spent years waiting to inherit.

The pattern reaches beyond politics. Moyn says American chief executives have aged despite the mythology of the young Silicon Valley founder, and he gives universities as a field he knows directly. The older people at the apex are not simply incompetent. Life extension can let people keep doing valuable work. The structural question concerns the succession that their continued presence postpones, along with the chance to use a long life for a different kind of work, retirement, or time with grandchildren.

Policy shaped by age

Moyn’s argument concerns older voters as much as older officeholders. A gerontocracy is a government shaped by the interests and dispositions of older people, even when its elected representatives are formally accountable to everyone. He says that people tend to become more conservative with a small c as they age. The change concerns a preference for stability, the protection of what one has acquired, and a shorter personal horizon rather than a simple movement from left to right.

He uses climate policy and immigration to make the point. Older people are less likely to prioritise climate change, and they tend to become more hostile to newcomers. Immigration has a material irony in an ageing society. Older people need care, and a smaller younger population leaves fewer people to fund and provide it. Moyn therefore sees a credible case that immigration would help older Americans, even as older voters oppose it. The resulting politics can favour continuity and restriction whilst undermining the conditions that old age requires.

The same tension appears in welfare policy. Older people across the political spectrum defend Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlements, which have become the third rail of American politics. Moyn wants to preserve and expand these protections, including care that Medicare leaves out, and argues that they should be funded through higher taxes. He links the gerontocratic era to the era of American tax revolts. Age can therefore produce a demand for generous protection alongside resistance to paying for it.

The historical comparison matters. Older people once faced high poverty because physical work pushed them out of employment and left them without support. Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935 changed that arrangement when relatively few older people depended on a large working population. Moyn says that older people still live in poverty, yet their poverty rate is no higher than that of other adult cohorts and they are far better off than children. In his account, concern for elderly poverty has remained politically strong whilst child poverty receives less protection.

The age wealth gap

The material centre of the conversation is the age wealth gap. Moyn says older people, especially at the upper end of the class structure, have gained from asset bubbles, tax privileges, and the abolition of mandatory retirement. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act, revised between the 1960s and early 1990s after campaigning by the AARP, made mandatory retirement illegal in most sectors apart from occupations such as air-traffic control and airline piloting.

Property tax rules form part of the same story. Older Americans can hold houses that have risen sharply in value whilst paying less tax on them. Moyn accepts that a person who has lost their income may need protection, yet says the asset boom changed the meaning of that protection. Wealth remains tied up in houses that their owners do not want to sell, while opposition to new construction keeps housing expensive for everyone else, including older people who need suitable homes.

He rejects the idea that boomers are uniquely selfish. Their wealth reflects the time and place into which they were born, together with the good fortune of asset appreciation. Their position still makes them the standard bearers of gerontocracy, and each later generation inherits the arrangement. Moyn says that 90 percent of the world’s billionaires are over 50 and 45 percent are over 70, figures he presents as evidence of the age concentration at the top. The problem concerns when a person receives resources and influence, not only whether they receive them eventually.

That timing also affects organisations. Moyn argues for a balance between the experience and habituated judgement associated with older people and the creativity, innovation, and dynamism that younger people can bring. He does not treat either quality as sufficient on its own. A society that keeps one age group in the strongest positions for too long loses the benefits of succession as well as the people waiting for it.

A politics of succession

Moyn’s first response is institutional. Political bodies could use age limits, mandatory retirement, or quotas that ensure representation across age groups. Elections could become easier for younger people who move often or cannot leave work as readily as retirees. He also raises more provocative ideas, including giving younger voters additional weight or letting them cast proxy votes for children who cannot vote. He admits that these proposals are constitutionally and politically difficult. Douthat points out that the United States already has forms of weighted voting through the Senate and Electoral College, while Moyn suggests that this makes experimentation less fanciful than it may sound.

His more immediate economic proposals concern tax and housing policy. The state should protect older people who need entitlements and recognise that many other older people are well off. Tax rules should reflect that difference. Moyn also wants to remove restrictions that prevent new housing from being built. His aim is to transfer resources and opportunity without turning elderly people into a disposable class.

This is where Douthat presses the argument from the left and the right. A left-wing critic could say that Moyn is scapegoating people who benefit from a welfare state built by liberals, handing arguments to budget cutters who want to weaken it. A right-wing version would use the age wealth gap to argue for means-testing Medicare and Social Security, deregulating housing, and reducing benefits for older people who can pay for themselves. Moyn accepts that his description could be used to hurt the wrong people. He says that class advantage in the United States is already age-inflected, so talking about class without age leaves part of the structure invisible.

He also accepts the need for economic growth and deregulation where they release useful capacities. He rejects the idea that growth and a generous standard of care are rival projects. A society needs economic energy to fund care, and it needs taxes on some wealthy older people to repair the fiscal picture. The politics becomes harder because both tasks have to be carried out together.

From youth to everyone else

Moyn does not call for generational warfare. He worries that millennials may eventually do well while remaining trapped in a waiting game for resources and political influence. His aim is intergenerational solidarity, which would include older people who recognise that they have remained inside an unjust structure. He compares this possibility to transracial movements against racism and imagines a coalition that treats succession as a shared political problem.

The younger constituency may be harder to form than the rhetoric suggests. People in their twenties can experience the weight of a world made by older Americans, yet people in their thirties and forties are absorbed by work and family life and may struggle to see themselves as a group with common interests. Moyn revises the conflict from age versus youth to age versus everyone else. The broad middle of working-age people has often received too few resources from its elders and remains under-resourced at the point when it could use those resources to build a more creative society.

He sees younger people’s alienation from politics in his own college-age children, who think they have inherited a world beyond repair. That despair needs to become political anger, followed by a coalition that includes older people. The political promise would run in both directions. Older people would release resources and power, whilst younger people and people in their prime would build a form of old age worth entering.

Care and the end of life

Douthat gives the strongest defence of older people’s hoarding. Someone who expects to live longer than any previous generation needs resources for a long period of care. Before Social Security, old people often moved in with their children, shifting the burden onto younger workers. Holding on to a house and savings can therefore look like responsible preparation rather than greed.

Moyn accepts the force of that argument. The United States gives people an appalling standard of end-of-life care, and the pandemic made that failure visible. Someone who can afford a house worth $1.2 million may still face care that consumes their assets without offering dignity. A person can rationally save against that future. The answer, in his view, is to make care good enough that people can pass resources forward without fearing abandonment. Age-segregated housing and the loss of intergenerational community make the problem worse, since younger people feel less obligation towards older people in society as a whole.

He proposes a form of tough love for the middle-aged conversation with their parents. Older people have had their turn and can use the later part of life to reinvent themselves. They should release some of the resources that keep everyone else waiting. Younger people would have to offer something in return: public and personal commitment to good care and a worthwhile retirement. The arrangement would use the elders’ resources whilst making old age a shared project across generations.

The final question concerns assisted suicide and euthanasia. Moyn calls an autonomous decision to end one’s life legitimate, while insisting that a decision made under depression, neglect, or psychological pressure may not be free. Douthat identifies a middle zone in which an older person feels pressure to exit early so that their children and grandchildren do not carry the cost of care. Moyn accepts that this is a credible nightmare. He says it would also betray his position, which asks a wealthy society to care for people until the end rather than quietly encouraging them to become cheaper.

Moyn is willing to be a burden on his own children. He jokes that they already object to his hoarding books and want him to remove the work of clearing them out later. He regards dependence as part of the intergenerational relation, provided that a person retains some capacity to create or explore. He has discussed these questions with his mother, with his late father-in-law, and with older people at his father-in-law’s synagogue. The conversation ends there, with the problem still open and with the expectation that more people will have to face it personally.

Limits

This note reconstructs the claims made by Ross Douthat and Samuel Moyn in the programme. The figures about billionaire ages, older people’s relative poverty, tax advantages, immigration, and end-of-life care appear in the conversation without a full account of their underlying datasets. The programme’s description names Moyn’s book and links to a New York Times transcript, yet it supplies no bibliography for the historical claims about Cicero, Aristotle, the AARP, or the development of mandatory retirement. Those claims remain attached here to the speakers rather than presented as independently verified facts.

Further reading / references

• Full transcript of the conversation, The New York Times, 2026-07-30.