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.
