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The word becoming implies it isn't one as of now.
The median age of the population in the US is 39. The median age of the Senate is 65. In other countries 65 is retirement age. So you could say, yes "America" (the US) is a gerontocracy.
The Latin word "senate" originally mean "council of elders", and is transparently related to "senex", meaning "old man". It's pretty ordinary in human society for the decision-makers to be primarily comprised of old people who have lived a long time and seen a lot.
Roman senators were 40-50
Most of the civilised world is becoming a gerontocracy.
With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
> With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
Millennials received kick in their teeth when entering adulthood and around the time when was the moment for a last (or the first, finally) child. Real estate market had never been cheap either. Exactly overlaps with falling birthrates over the last twenty years.
Looking at other countries, "interestingly" Russian invasion of Ukraine basically wiped out childless millennials on both sides. Putin noticed that's the last chance to monetize the demographic opportunity and hopefully that was his last fart.
> Millennials received kick in their teeth when entering adulthood and around the time when was the moment for a last (or the first, finally) child.
X doubt. I partially agree but at the same time what I see with my eyes does not really align with this usual rhethoric/narrative.
In my age group I see a lot of childless men and women that did manage to build their own stability (have a stable job, buy a house and whatever). Those people aren't having kids either.
OTOH I have a number of friends with pets that are essentially glorified substitution of children.
> Wealth Accumulation: Older Americans hold a massive share of the nation's assets, often choosing to retain their wealth rather than pass it down early, largely due to the terrifyingly high costs of late-life healthcare.
So having good social security helps everyone. Unfortunately my country ( IN) does not prioritise that part.
Not entirely, you can see the mayor of NYC who is very young, thats entirely dependent on voters, for instance, my country's PM and most of the ministers this time are at the age of around 35-40.
> entirely dependent on voters
A phenomenon otherwise known as democracy...
Most countries are facing similar problems. In the US, it's the millennial problem. In France, it's HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet). In Korea, it's the '20-something male' issue. In Japan, it's the 'geneki sedai' (working generation). In China, it's 'neijuan' (involution).
The common thread is that these are generations that climbed the class ladder early on, when infrastructure was lacking and there were opportunities. They had many children, jobs were plentiful, and medical advances delayed death, which meant that upper-level positions never opened up and the older generation just stayed put.
The Boomer generation naturally worked hard when infrastructure was scarce, and they succeeded under harsh physical conditions, so they find it hard to understand the generations below them. Meanwhile, the younger generations are despairing over the fact that the class ladder has been pulled up. Success is a universal desire, after all.
The older generation was in a harsh environment, but they were seated in the front row of a growing pie. The subsequent generations have better consumer goods and education, but the entry price for core assets and status has gone up, making success much harder to achieve
At the core, the real issue is the need for wealth redistribution. But in that process, the people who failed to climb the Boomers' class ladder are left behind. And crucially, as societies modernize, people tend to have fewer children, which shifts voting power away from the younger generations, making the problem even worse. In other words, everyone knows the future needs to support the youth, but doing so would cut into their own pensions and make their old age harder. And since most people are unwilling to give up their vested interests, the situation becomes even more difficult.
Denmark does not have a problem with age. It has gone the other way: members are younger today than in the old days. Graph: https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...
Average age is 44 years !!!
The oldest is 72. Youngest is 23. Majority is 30-54. https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...
source: https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/danmark/det-nye-folketing-...
Boomers may have had harsh conditions growing up, depending where they were. But once into adulthood they had a fairly easy time of it. Jobs were plentiful, costs of essentials like housing and further education were relatively low, and they had significant disposable income.
The fact many of them assume the modern economy works the same way when in fact it's a much harsher environment is a curious phenomenon.
you're right to mention the Boomer generation: gerontocracy == boomers hanging on to power. as they've always done, I might add.
Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further.
What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been almost constant since 2001. I know that millennials are irresponsible and unreliable brats, but c'mon... they're over 40 now.
I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of younger people.
This is a massive change from the situation of most of human history, where your life was extremely likely to be substantially similar to that of your grandparents, so anything useful they had learned and could pass on to you was likely to continue being useful. The rate of change in human life really started to accelerate with the industrial revolution, now some three centuries old; but humanity is now in a state where massive changes are happening much faster than the passage of human generations.
Not really. Medicine, engineering, law all are a sum of intergenerational knowledge.
Yet everytime I deal with healthcare I encounter some <30 years old kids who learn medicine from scratch and have only 5 minutes of their time for me. Reading about medicine fells like reading science fiction. We seem to know everything about a human, yet in practice you might die or become crippled even from a trivial problem.
i see lower voting rates for young people as a nihilistic reaction to gerontocracy. i.e. if they are blocked from upward mobility, they see power protects assets and have no clear path to this, isn't it a natural reaction? let's say they all organized and had higher voter turnout - they'd still lose on the wealth front, which is what counts. the aged would defend their power vociferously and probably win through PACs, lobbying, etc.
Bush Jr was born '46. Obama (literally the next president) was born in '61.
Not much of a pattern there
Would you look at that. Clinton born in 46, Bush Jr 46, Obama 61, Trump 46 and Biden 42.
And this why immortality is bad and death is not to be cured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
America may be become a gerontocracy but it’s far more likely to be a plutocracy first and that will cause more long term harm. Old people die eventually, but the ultra rich keep it in the family.
It already is a plutocracy
And it already is a gerontocracy, from the two dementia patients who fought for the presidency through to the geriatrics in charge of congress.
In the 1970s and 1980s we used to make fun of the geriatric Kremlin leaders, most notably satirised in Whoops Apocalypse where they wheeled a new one out several times in a scene. Now the US is the same...
I mean, a billionaire runs the country. First thing he did was to invite another billionaire and give him access to quite extensive data of every US citizen.
He was even able to successfully campaign with stopping corruption which is kind of funny tbh. That's like "corruption is when billionaires bribe politicians. Just have the billionaires also being politicians - problem solved, you can't bribe yourself, right?"
The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.
As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.
I'm not sure how I feel about this article, looking at the government, yes, it does resemble a gerontocracy given who the most powerful are. But I don't think that translates to the rest of society.
how about: the funding cuts imminent to SS affecting younger participants; howard jarvis, prop 13, and the '70s tax decrease in CA; homeowner resistance to upzoning and building housing; muted action on climate change due to limited personal impact?
Biden, Trump, Schumer, Feinstein, McConnel say: "What's that, sonny? Ask me again after my afternoon nap."
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Anyway, the article's author seems to be quite the hard-line capitalist:
> "The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent... is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does."
So, even though society's productive capacity is incredibly high, having risen and risen over two centuries of industrialization and mechanization - supposedly the problem is that older people are slacking off. This is (mostly) false. Most of the basic material wants we face today are artificial. That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc. That's not to say that there are never shortages of materials or of trained professionals; but what the author is essentially saying is that working people need to shed blood, sweat, and tears more so that the insufficient share of the fruit of their labor, that actually goes back to them (= us), becomes sufficient.
This is not dissimilar from a feudal lord, who takes most produce as tax, telling his tenant farmer that if he wants to have enough to feed his children, he should get some of them to also work the fields so that there's enough to go around.
> That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc.
People don't actually starve today, because food scarcity is now a problem humanity has almost-entirely solved (the exceptions are war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not anywhere in a developed country). But there are many people who are homeless who would be if housing costs were somewhat cheaper because the housing supply was bigger; and there are many people who don't get enough medical attention because the time of doctors and nurses is scarce and therefore expensive - this is why there's so much interest in using AI for medical questions and examinations.
It's The Economist promoting the party line, as usual.
"The economy is precarious and someone has to pay for that. This is a you problem. Don't look at us. Nothing to do with decades of neoliberal piracy."
A little late no?
Economist has a global audience. The report about locally specific things are outdated as they are other countries to report about.
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people.
That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
Are we calling 40s old now? There are 2 countries where the median age is above 50 [0] and the US is 38.9. I suppose under 18s aren't in the voting pool but if a country has a median age of 50 they probably don't have that many under-18s running around. And old people don't vote as a totally unified a block, it'd be like saying countries are run for women because the median voter is a woman.
I'd suggest the main issue is that the world is so complicated that the younger voters just don't know what to organise and vote for. In the US in particular, they seem to basically be running an experiment every single election to try and figure out who they need to vote for to get some sane economic policy and stop getting involved in stupid wars. No success so far but you have to admire the process. The only people not getting the message are the people paid off to ignore it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.
Aside: Do older populations vote for older candidates? Like, pick a house district, what is the average age there, does that correlate? I suppose you can do the same for states and senate candidates too. And I think we have good historical data too, so does it work going backwards?
If it does correlate to some 'strong' degree [0], then i think we could use it as a bit of a prediction going forward.
[0] It's population stuff so really anything above r>0.35 is good enough
The median age in America is about 40, so depending on how you define old the majority could go one way or the other.
"We are going to call the current situation anything but class warfare."
boomers vs millenials, reds vs blues, south vs north, city folks vs country ones
Maybe a political conflicts are more complex than a guy 150 years ago thought.
None of those things are classes in the sense of the times the notion of class warfare was first pitched, and many of them cross classes.
There's plenty of poor/impoverished boomers, blues, reds, city and country folk
This article’s thesis is far too simplistic. For one: let’s agree that USA is ruled by the elites who are pushing AI and technology broadly. How does this reflect gerontocracy? Old ppl like tech and AI? What am I missing as a non American?
What about - the sacrifice of job stability and earning power in service of higher stock prices and profits for asset holders?
You can write about these issues all you want, but the fact remains the young do not vote (period).
When I was young, the voting age became 18, me and all my friends could not wait until we could vote and we kept it up as we aged. Many in my generation were that way. Then all of a sudden the young stopped voting.
So if young people want to change things, get involved with politics get off your phones and make noise. But it seems there almost is a conspiracy is going on these days to distract the young from "real life" to keep them out of politics :)
When you've seen social movements fizzle out and understand that wealth outweighs turnout (the aged have both), how can you motivate people in that sort of environment? It feels rigged at that point
No, it is currently a temporary gerontocracy. The Boomers were such a big generation that everything bent to their will. When they were young, the government catered to what young people wanted. When they were in their 40s the world catered to what the 40-year-olds wanted. And now that they are old, the only industry that is doing well is the medical industry, keeping them alive.
> And now that they are old, the only industry that is doing well is the medical industry, keeping them alive.
It's not like healthcare is particularly cheap and available, even in European countries with stereotypically good public universal healthcare. There is significant number of elderly receiving miserable service.
So it's the rich boomers sucking up all resources?
America has become a wealth-ocracy, otherwise known as plutocracy.
There are plenty of young wealthy people that are contributing to fucking the place up.
I'd trade an elon or a suckerberg for a Bernie any day...