Willfully provocative ... Inadvertently shows how other forms of youth obsession can also be a dead end: What makes an idea good and worthwhile isn’t simply that it’s new.
Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old: he argues that Americans also need to expand entitlements for seniors, so that they can more comfortably and confidently retire ... In his view, it will take big changes to create an 'intergenerational utopia' in which, to choose just one example, older Americans have access to government-funded long-term care in their homes.
The great virtue of Samuel Moyn’s important new book, Gerontocracy in America, is that it takes these issues seriously, grounding the debate in data and offering concrete prescriptions ... Strangely for a book so concerned with wealth and power, Gerontocracy in America doesn’t have much to say about class ... Though I am not persuaded by many of the arguments in this book, it still has much to teach us.
While Gerontocracy in America draws arguments and framing from the long-standing and ongoing American fight for multi-racial democracy, its heart is elsewhere ... Though the book claims to stand on the side of youth and progress, it often seems oddly conservative—and oddly disconnected from our current crises ... Moyn’s failure to engage with race and disability, and his refusal to assign Republican blame, make Gerontocracy in America feel divorced from our current moment and needs. It is not a book that will age well.
It is a safe bet that the AARP will not be promoting Gerontocracy in America to its 38 million members. Its depiction of the great aging as an orgy of elder egotism is so dark that it casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it ... For Moyn, returning the country to a state of vigor and dynamism requires questioning every widely held assumption about aging, life extension, and death ... We can only learn so much from a book that understands and scolds the old as fundamentally a housing and labor problem.
The author’s style is fact-filled and straightforward; Gerontocracy in America is basically a reported essay. But Moyn does occasionally surprise us with the philosophical. For example, he notes that societies which truly venerate the elderly — native ones in particular — also tend to let the very old die with little or no intervention when it is their time ... Perhaps if we took on the existential issues of mortality and the meaning of life more directly, we would, as a society, find better ways to live, die and share the wealth.
For those with a morbid interest in America’s decomposing political elite, it is a little disappointing that Moyn never gives a more targeted theory as to why they are so unusually old ... Much of Moyn’s broader analysis is accurate enough, but familiar and underdeveloped ... A good few of Moyn’s proposals for reform are inelegant, trifling or have the disconcerting flavour of measures almost certain to misfire in unintuitive ways ... Many of the social problems posed by demographic change are acute and interesting. Unfortunately, Moyn’s heavy-handed socialist solution is somewhat tired and analytically underpowered. I fear the book will not age well.
