Transcript
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Speaker: Hello, hello, and welcome back to Deaf as a Photograph. Today we've got Samuel Moyne with us. Samuel is a professor of law. I'm not going to read the full title of the professoriate, but he's a professor of law and history at Yale University and the author of books including The Last Utopia, Human Rights and History, Humane, How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, and one of my personal favorites, Cold War Liberalism.
Speaker: His latest book, which is, I think, fits very well with our sort of general podcast theme, Conway, why invite him on to the show, is called Gerontocracy in America, How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and What to Do About It.
Speaker: And he also, I should i should plug Sam's podcast, he also runs a podcast called Digging a Hole with a colleague from Yale, which is very enjoyable, especially if you're into political thought or legal theory, which some of our listeners might be, some might not be.
Speaker: But it's it's very good. And he recently had Anton Jaeger on, so that there's a crossover for you. Right. um Who we also had on about two weeks ago. But ah Sam, yeah, thanks for coming on to talk about the book. It's a very timely book. I think anyone under the age of 50...
Speaker: fifty And people over the age of 50, as the case may be. I'm over. So you're you know you're taking one of the team here. Yes. Our thinking about this question, you know, in 2008, we were discussing oligarchy, were discussing the 1%.
Speaker: And in 2026, we're discussing gerontocracy and the 1% of the aged. So yeah, I think it's it's a very, very timely book. And I'm just wondering, i sort of my first question is,
Speaker: how you would define gerontocracy. Because obviously there's a dictionary definition of it, but specifically you know within your book, i mean how do you think gerontocracy operates today? And how is it different or similar to sort of older models of gerontocracy? Is it qualitatively different or is it quantitatively different? There's a lot more old people, as your book discusses, there's a lot more old people kicking about.
Speaker: So is this just ah ah a sort of difference in quantity or is there a difference in quality in how you are reading gerontocracy, 21st century? Well, it's ah it's a big opening question. So clearly the word you know is is calling on the Greek origins of political thought.
Speaker: when those old guys themselves, Plato and Aristotle, defined various regimes in politics. And they disagreed about a lot, but they basically said we should figure out who rules.
Speaker: If it's one person, it could be a monarchy or tyranny. If it's more than one, it's an aristocracy or oligarchy. And then there's democracy, which they rejected completely. so Yeah, I think when gerontocracy didn't exist as a term back, you know, in Greek political thought, although there were gerontocratic models like Sparta, um which Plato and Aristotle discussed,
Speaker: The person who coined the term um is actually only in the 1820s. And he basically says, like, power is is exercised in a new way in the modern world.
Speaker: We have elections. Even in kind of under monarchy, there were like at least, you know, elections that happened that even if they didn't amount to much. And above all, he said, power is about who has money.
Speaker: And so he he basically says we should think about gerontocracy in a new way. And I think that's the way it applies today. Gerontocracy should be defined just in terms of who can exercise effective power through whatever means. Those could be formal governmental power, like holding a political office, or indirect political power, that like being a voter who dominates the electoral system.
Speaker: But mainly, you know, my book is about following that author in the 1820s who said we should mainly look at who has wealth in its various forms because that's the effective power, especially in a capitalist world. And that could include things like jobs and housing, not just like how much is in your bank account.
Speaker: Yeah. um if the If the book has an enemy, it might be Cicero, the great old man of Rome, who's writing about the benefits of old age and leadership. But I think, and this is sort of piggybacking off of UK Sam's question, right?
Speaker: One of the the really the the merits of the book, and I very, very much enjoyed reading it, it felt like um what many think but few would dare say, is that it when we use the word gerontocracy so often, at least in my mind, we pair it with thinking just about I don't know, the ailing Soviet Union or something. Like the idea of just the political class yes being sort of out of touch, right? It's Joe Brandon, if I can you know call us back there for a minute.
Speaker: But your book is much more interested in the concept, it seems to me, almost as a... It's called a political economic ah problem. Rather, it's who rules, but rules in the most capacious sense possible. Yeah.
Speaker: I was going to say... go ahead, UK Sam. Your book foregrounds the sort of structural change right at the very start. And I think this is an important thing to pin down is that prior gerontocracy is be that Sparta or the sort of Senate in Rome or the one that sort of keeps coming to my mind is the Porphyriato in Mexico, which was ruled by, you know,
Speaker: an 82-year-old general who wouldn't retire and a bunch of 70-year-old administrators who also wouldn't retire. These were sort the minority rule of the old, because most old people had died by the point that they could get to the age of 70 or 80. So the 80-year-olds who were in charge were a minority of population, whereas the kind of inverse is is is true now in modern Western democracies and even some non-Western democracies, which is we have an inverse where we're beginning to have an inverse population pyramid, right?
Speaker: And I think your book, it is very interesting, it it opens the aperture beyond the sort of discussion around Brandon or Nancy Pelosi towards a broader consideration of the electra and structural um forces, right?
Speaker: And I'm wondering, yeah, like how how much weight you think we as a sort of public should be placing on our understanding of gerontocracy around the sort of individuals who rule versus the sort of individuals who choose who are yeah who sort of shape the normative environment we're actually in?
Speaker: I think those are great questions. and And I think it's really important to keep some of the distinctions you made in mind. i mean, it's not like we don't still have a problem with our like Leonid Brezhnevs brena son his successors.
Speaker: ah You know, more than half of humanity today lives under... formal political leaders who are over 70. And of course, Americans have lately, but they're far from alone.
Speaker: ah It's just that that topic is getting a lot of play in part because of what Joe Biden went through and in 2024. But I also want to kind of broaden the frame as as you're both saying. I agree that The extension of life is kind of the predicate for what I talk about, and i I even have a whole chapter narrating how life has been extended. But I'd still want to say it's a case of oligarchy, age-inflected oligarchy, like in prior societies.
Speaker: It's just that the few are more numerous. um There's still a minority. It's still a case of minority rule over the majority. But it's just that we're dealing with a much ah bigger number.
Speaker: And then I want to insist that unlike in the usual discussion, whether you know old school or you know when it came to the Soviet Union or to like the Democrats in the United States, we shift beyond just like you know, who's directly involved in holding political office to see that power comes in many forms in the modern world. And that's where we really need to assess the consequences of the extension of life. And as you say,
Speaker: It might matter a lot that the minority, though still a minority, is much bigger because there are more older people absolutely and relatively than ever and fewer young people, which affects everything about how power is allocated.
Speaker: Yeah, to the I suppose this is in a way a recapitulation of what I said earlier, but one of the things that I find striking about the book is that it it wants to, and I think successfully, makes an argument about the way in which we're dealing with a never-before-seen issue. that That, in other words, it's perhaps, you know, it's not a new mode of production, right? These more normal categories we use to think about moments in history. It's ah it' it's ah it's a medical revolution, essentially, that has fundamentally changed the composition of society and therefore requires a full rethinking of what it means to to do politics, right? And we're operating with a system that, you know, even decided to name one of its institutions, of the Senate. Yeah. Right. So obviously we have not, ah we have not caught up to that change. It's as if we're in denial of a sort of a basic reality that's difficult to face.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, you know Sam Ulster, UK, whichever, you know got it right that there was a Roman Senate. But in in absolute fairness, though, there was this thing called the Corsus Honorum, which basically guaranteed you were pretty old when you got to the Senate. They actually had an age maxima after a certain point, and there were no formal age minima.
Speaker: to serve. Whereas like Sparta, the Americans basically said, no, we're going to say it's formally a body for old men when they created their knockoff version of the Senate. And at that point, there were very few Senates. I think there were two others in the in the world at the time the Americans did what they did. And then now their achievement went viral because it was associated with conservatism and stability. And a lot of you know folks around the world have wanted to do that. So I definitely talk about institutions, not just aging individuals in politics, but you're absolutely right that you know my main concern is with what's new and with what it means to be living in the kind of
Speaker: let's call it elderly society. It's been called aging society, but um that's a little nicer, but let's call it elderly society that no one's had because you know old men ruling you know and even having a lot of wealth were term limited by mortality you know much more regularly and much sooner than our old men and women are today.
Speaker: Term limited by mortality is is is a bar, so to speak. But there's also just that, of course, you know to kind of unpack what that means, Cenex is probably going to make it to be, I don't know, maybe 60 in a really good run, right? Maybe a little bit older than that.
Speaker: Now, someone who follows the equivalent of the American cursus honorum, I don't know, they do the Ivy League undergraduate experience. They you know become an aide-de-camp for some sort of Democratic senator.
Speaker: By the time they achieve the sort of apex of that office, they're, I don't know, getting elected to the Senate at 63 years old. and Now they get to hold on to it until um you know until that fiefdom can be pried out of their cold, literally dead hands.
