Anti-Gerontocracy as a Trojan Horse for Socialism

A review of Gerontocracy in America, by Samuel Moyn

Imagine you are writing a book about white supremacy. You obviously believe that this is a serious issue that society needs to work on. Whites hoard too much wealth and set our political system up to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Now imagine that you are writing this in a country that has a colored tax. If you are black, Hispanic, etc., some part of your paycheck is taken away and given to white people. In fact, programs earmarked specifically for whites make up over a third of the federal budget. Moreover, these programs are projected to grow to the point that, in less than a decade, they will be impossible to maintain as is, and our society will have to choose some combination of tax hikes and spending cuts as a result.

I would think that in such a situation, cutting white entitlements should be your main issue. But Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America doesn’t take that route when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. Rather, despite pages and pages explaining how the elderly are too wealthy relative to the young, he believes that entitlements need to be expanded.

The reasons he gives for this highlight the extent to which his book about “gerontocracy” is not ultimately about redistributing resources and power by age, but socialism. When anti-gerontocracy and anti-capitalism conflict, as in what to do about Social Security and Medicare, hostility to individual liberty and markets tends to win, although YIMBYism is an exception to this. One must ensure that when we dispossess old people, it has to be done in the service of building a more collectivist society where government takes a larger role in providing care, meeting people’s needs, and placing limits on the control private individuals have over resources.

Moyn doesn’t hide any of this, though you need to get to the last few chapters in order to get the full picture. I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which Gerontocracy in America centers hostility to capitalism from listening to the author appear on podcasts with Derek Thompson and Ross Douthat. But the message is explicit, at least if you get far enough in the book. As Moyn writes, “Medicaid and Medicare are just placeholders for socialized medicine someday, and Social Security for the welfare state America has not built.” The following passage in particular sounds like a parody of a socialist intellectual one might find in Ayn Rand.

In this spirit, imagine an America in which the older citizens, instead of being cast aside, enter utopian socialism. They enjoy the promise of care to the end, in exchange for their worldly goods. And they would die, with full state support, on their own schedule. They would go through disempowerment, including the expropriation and socialization of property and wealth. But in the new utopia, elders would trade power for care as long as they needed it.

The passage above is only one of three in which the author uses the phrase “expropriation” to explain what he wants to happen to the elderly – and the well-off of any age, for that matter. As part of this new social contract, retirement will involve “high-status leisure, including new forms of work for those who want it, generally on a volunteer basis.”

But leisure without the money to pay for the kind one wants in effect means creating a system in which the state decides which hobbies and lifestyles are appropriate. I’m guessing Moyn’s utopian socialism won’t have room for Jimmy Buffett-themed retirement communities, but old people will have access to all the lectures by Yale professors they could possibly desire. I personally wouldn’t want to spend decades around those who believe that “Margaritaville” is the height of human artistic achievement, but, like most Americans, I know that once it is the state making those choices, paths to many of the pleasures that I get out of life are likely to be similarly foreclosed.

The American elderly are the richest age demographic in the history of the world. Moyn’s theory is that you can take away their money and power, and in exchange the government goes beyond providing Social Security and Medicare and makes them wards of the state, with fewer choices regarding the houses they live in and how they spend their time. Power is zero-sum, and you can maybe convince people to give it up as long as their material situation is not made substantially worse. But Moyn has little interest in making a case against gerontocracy that does not involve stripping Americans of individual autonomy, as doing so would involve granting some moral legitimacy to the capitalist system.

While Moyn actually presents data, arguments, and evidence in favor of the idea that gerontocracy is undesirable, he treats socialism as so obviously correct that one doesn’t need to justify it. It doesn’t even involve much in the way of tradeoffs, since there are no budget constraints, or they’re so easily solvable by taxing the wealthy that we don’t even need to bother checking the math.

When it comes to fighting gerontocracy, Moyn has a series of specific policy recommendations that will never happen. He wants youth quotas in Congress, age limits in American life, and the abolition of the Senate. Still, since this is a book about socialism, it is not unreasonable for a reader to wonder how exactly the end state is supposed to work. But we get nothing in terms of questions like what the marginal tax rate is supposed to be once we not only preserve entitlements, but expand them, and presumably provide comparable levels of welfare to the non-elderly portion of the public.

Moyn’s dislike of markets would be easier to explain if he were a degrowther. But he is certainly not, singing the praises of medical advances that help us live longer and healthier, and emphasizing the importance of a dynamic and innovative society. But how do we maintain this while raising taxes to a much higher level and creating less and less space for individuals to create wealth that they are ultimately able to control? Again, the book doesn’t even treat this as a potential problem for his vision, much less provide a solution.

A 2018 study showed that the US was responsible for about 80% of important biomedical breakthroughs. Even advances that happen abroad come about in large part because companies are incentivized to try to make money in the American market. If Moyn knows how to socialize by far the most innovative healthcare system in the world without destroying the incentives that make medical innovation possible, he does not share this secret.

Of course, this critique of socialized medicine can be made more general. Socialism doesn’t simply destroy innovation – and ultimately living standards – in the field of medicine. It does so practically everywhere. To ignore this means to forget the experience of the twentieth century, and also the fact that, while European nations are closer to Moyn’s proposed socialist utopia, they have seen slower growth than the US in recent decades. Moyn appears aware that European healthcare systems aren’t perfect, spending some time describing the horrifying portrayal of French long-term care facilities as presented in a Houellebecq novel. This is blamed on the facility being “malevolently run due to cost-cutting in neoliberal times,” since of course economic statism itself can never be at fault for a poor outcome.

In addition to not bothering to learn from comparing the US and Europe, Moyn also ignores the direct American experience with government-run institutions. He praises experiments in senior living undertaken in the Netherlands and Norway, which is the closest he gets to pointing to foreign models to be emulated. But Americans are clearly not Scandinavians. “Public housing” and “foster care system” are among the most horrifying phrases in the English language for a reason, though I suspect they don’t have the same connotations in Swedish. In practical terms, Moyn’s anti-gerontocracy and anti-capitalism are deeply intertwined, as old people will be more likely to give up their money and power if they can rely on the government to take care of them. As with every other potential obstacle to making socialism work, however, America’s poor historical experience with government-run institutions and programs is ignored in the book.

I agree with Moyn that elder power is a major problem in society, and even with some of his underlying policy suggestions. If disempowering the old leads to more housing being built, a relaxation of laws banning age discrimination, and an increasing number of immigrants coming into the country, these are reforms that will make society as a whole better off.

But there is simply no way to reconcile hostility to capitalism with an appreciation for human progress, which is what Moyn’s anti-gerontocratic cause has as its ultimate aim. Theory, empirics, and history all teach the same lesson. Set taxes too high, and you destroy incentives to produce and innovate. Try to engage in central planning, and it will soon once again be shown that no government can have a fraction of the knowledge necessary to improve on the aggregate outcomes of processes that rely on individual initiatives based on price signals.

I picked up Gerontocracy in America expecting to be sympathetic toward its message. Instead of strengthening my belief in the need for a politics that blames old people for modern problems, it showed me the limits of such an approach.

Gerontocracy may be an important issue, but it is nowhere near as fundamental as the debate over capitalism versus socialism. Which groups should have power? How should our voting system be set up? How should institutions stay vigorous and ensure healthy transitions across the generations? Under certain conditions, these are all questions worthy of serious consideration.

But if a society or movement doesn’t understand that capitalism is superior to socialism, then we are better off not wasting too much time on higher-order debates about the distribution of power and resources. Suggesting socialism for a society while worrying about how to allocate resources and political representation is like giving a young man advice on estate planning after encouraging him to go into a career that will leave him living near the poverty line.

Of course, capitalism versus socialism isn’t a binary but a spectrum, and we know that it is possible to have countries with more expansive public sectors than the US that nonetheless do not collapse. But to say that Moyn wants to make us like Scandinavia would be to downplay the radicalism of his views. He embraces socialism, not social democracy or capitalism with a more expansive welfare state. Nordic countries, despite the size of their public sectors, are on labor issues quite market-friendly by world standards, and responsible in budgetary matters in a way that Moyn suggests Americans not be when he discounts the need for serious cuts to entitlements.

Wealth cannot be taken for granted. Few questions are as important for humanity as understanding the causes of technological and economic growth, which are the basis of improving living standards. The lesson of the last few centuries is that we in developed nations primarily have markets to thank for our lives that are, by historical standards, long, healthy, and characterized by material abundance. Many intellectuals dislike the fact that capitalism is responsible for growth, so they avoid the fundamental questions about the causes of wealth. They dream of cashing out on human progress by redistributing the gains, no matter the implications for future generations.

This is the ultimate irony of Gerontocracy in America. Moyn argues that old people are robbing the young of their futures due to selfishness, a focus on short-term gains, and a desire for power. But however valid this critique might be when applied to boomers, it much more strongly reflects the truth about the socialism that the author argues for.

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