An Ageing World: The Problem of Gerontocracy

Past Present Future

Historian Samuel Moyn joins David Runciman to diagnose gerontocracy—the rule of the old—as a defining crisis in modern democracies, particularly in the United States. They examine

Key takeaways

• Over half of global political leaders are over 70, but the US is uniquely entrenched due to unparalleled incumbency advantages and federal judicial life tenure.
• The abolition of mandatory retirement in American universities during the 1990s created academic lifers with minimal incentive to leave, stifling intergenerational turnover.

Main topics

• Gerontocracy and aging politics
• American electoral and institutional structures

Notable quotes

"Gerontocracy is the rule of the old."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a rigorous historical and structural diagnosis of how

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:09) Hello, my name's David Runciman, and this is Past, Present, Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today in our series on living in an aging world, I'm talking to the historian and political scientist Samuel Moyne about gerontocracy in America and elsewhere. Gerontocracy is the rule of the old. What does it mean to live in societies where old people increasingly have the money and the power? What are the causes of that? What are the consequences of that? What, potentially, is the cure for that? Speaker 2 (0:50) Sam, I think we should probably start with what for most people is the most visible sign of an ageing politics, a gerontocratic politics, which is the age of politicians. And it seems to be a more acute issue in the United States, possibly because people are aware of the ones who really cling on a long time. We don't in the UK have the nonagenarians. We have a lot of elderly politicians, but it doesn't quite go right up the scale. Is it an acute problem in the United States? Is it not just visible, but a real issue with American politics? I Speaker 1 (1:26) think it's extremely real. And I'd say if we look globally, it turns out that America has more in common with the rest of the world and Western Europe is the outlier. I mean, according to the data, much more than half of humanity has a political leader over 70. You know, in their defense, most of those guys are authoritarians like, you know, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping are close to it, like Narendra Modi, many African heads of state. But American politics is such that. once you're in the seat, you can keep it. And I think Western Europeans are more enlightened in the way that they organize politics. So it's true that while they have other forms of gerontocracy, their political leaders trend younger. I Speaker 2 (2:14) was going to say, is it really a symptom, not I think of the preference of voters for older politicians? I'm not sure voters actually do prefer older politicians. It's a symptom of... a political system in which people can cling on. So it's not a coincidence that autocratic systems produce very elderly leaders. And therefore, is this, we're not just talking about the presidency here in Congress, is this a symptom of a political system that's not just gerrymandered and it's hard to budge politicians, but actually this is in itself a symptom of a democracy that's becoming more autocratic? Speaker 1 (2:49) Let me... suggest it could be a little of both because it's pretty central, at least to my way of thinking, and I could be wrong, that gerontocracy is as old as the world. And there does seem to be a very ingrained preference for older leaders, maybe older men as leaders, and maybe the baseline shifted a bit. And it's still the case that all other things being equal, you vote for someone your own age. And if it turns out, as I assume we'll discuss, that the electorate is elderly, then it should follow that anywhere we will have a pressure towards older leaders. But all that aside, I totally agree that there are these distinctive features of American politics. And I think the two biggest are the polarization, which means that, in fact, very few seats are actually contested. And most of the selection is done in primaries. Now, again, there, those are dominated by older voters, but it's not like a lot's at stake because in many places, it's just the one party will win and the other doesn't have a chance. And then there's incumbency advantage, which is, I think, unparalleled, at least across the Atlantic, where if you get in once, you basically can stay. barring some big disturbance. I'd throw in the judiciary, where those are definitely political actors by any sane definition. And of course, we have a unique system there too, where there's life tenure for judges at the federal level. And as you'd expect with the aging of the population, you're getting judges staying indefinitely. Speaker 2 (4:36) So in a way, it is in part a life tenure problem. And political systems, it's not complicated to design political systems in which you don't have a version of life tenure. In fact, you'd almost instinctively feel that a democratic system would recoil against the idea of life tenure. But these extremely old representatives in Congress are almost like federal judges. It seems like no one can tell them to stand down. Speaker 1 (5:03) That's right. So functionally, we've got a problem that once you're selected and you could be, you know, there could be an imperative to select you young, as there is in the Supreme Court when presidents intentionally choose younger jurists on their ideological team, but mainly because they know they will leave their biggest mark because those jurists will then stay decades. In fairness, compared to them, the data show that Americans are running for office later and later in life so that politicians are are tending to begin their political careers later than in earlier American history. The trouble is they're staying so long compared to that earlier period that their careers are still getting longer and longer relative to the past. And that's because they're safe and sound. Speaker 2 (5:54) We're going to come on to the age of the voters. And as you say, people are getting older when they start doing pretty much everything. including having children. I just want to ask you about another comparative field in which there is often a form of life tenure, which is the university system in the United States. Is something comparable going on there? If you don't have term limits or the equivalent of term limits, which in a professional system is called the retirement age, in the British university system, there is a retirement age. In the American system, there isn't. Are we seeing something similar? Nonagenarian professors? Speaker 1 (6:32) Oh, absolutely. I was inspired in part in writing this book by my own colleagues, because in part, the easier the job is and the higher paid it is, even within academia, there's just less and less incentive to leave. And I noticed in moving from like a tiny step within the academic sociology from a history faculty to a law faculty, just that the average age was so much older. And then I looked into it and the faculty in all of these departments have been aging since the abolition of mandatory retirement in the 1990s. And it's fascinating to go back to. Listen to the warnings of those who said that what has happened would happen, which is that with next to no incentive to leave, academic tenure, which basically it protects you from all but the most horrendous crimes as causes for expulsion, there would be a kind of set of lifers. And we do have so many, not just in their 70s, but 80s across the fields of academic inquiry. And arguably, that's not just bad for intergenerational justice. It's also bad for a university that in the end, its defense is, you know, creativity. That's why we organize a training of young people and creativity for social purposes. And I think that's... I mean, arguably that's suffering in both the political realm and these other realms where you do see life tenure effects like academia, as you mentioned. Speaker 2 (8:15) And in a way, it's not surprising if jobs are, as you say, well paid. I don't know if the move from history to a law faculty, the elderliness of the faculty was a reflection of whether the two categories you gave were better paid and relatively non-arduous. I'm assuming it's better paid rather than relatively non-arduous. Speaker 1 (8:33) No, it's both. It's much easier because there's less teaching. And I would say it's more that because the pay differential is probably not that great at the places I've taught. Speaker 2 (8:45) So it's the demands that are placed. If there aren't great demands on you and you're in a well-paid job and you still have your cognitive faculties, why would you stop? Speaker 1 (8:54) Or even if you don't, I mean. Because you wouldn't, you know, sadly, the big problem is that people don't know or refuse to register their decline, at least until it's just undeniable. Speaker 2 (9:08) So one office where there are term limits is the presidency of the United States. So I think we can be confident that absent that, Donald Trump would at least try to run again. But I think we can also assume that he won't. And that means it is possible next time. not certain by any means, but possible, that it might be a very young field, strikingly young, scenarios in which J.D. Vance is up against AOC or John Ossoff. These could be among the youngest candidates. Indeed, some of them could be the youngest candidates in American history. Say that were to happen, say we got an Ossoff-Vance contest, very much in contrast to when it was Biden-Trump. Would that signal anything significant? Is that... something that would suggest a change was underfoot or given the thing that we're going to go and talk about, which is the age of the voters. The age of the politicians isn't actually the most important thing here. Speaker 1 (10:03) Well, I come down, if we have to get to the bottom line, to that last proposition that it almost doesn't matter how old the politicians are. That's why I'm saying they're just the visible face or visible part of a much bigger syndrome or the tip of the iceberg. I mean, it does matter in the end that those who make policy decisions are too old because even should they want to do the right thing or resist the gerontocracy of those who put them in office, they may be constrained by their own interests or... the process of aging. I think that we should ask, well, what is the baseline? Kamala Harris came off as a youthful alternative to Joe Biden, even though she would have been 60 in January 2025. John Ossoff and J.D. Vance will be only at the median of American... So half of Americans are still younger than 40. So they would be precisely at the median. And if you look at the Senate, Ossoff is the only one who's under the median right now. And, you know, the House of Representatives has barely anyone in their 30s. The judiciary, again, even fewer. So it sort of depends what you think counts as. a big difference. I mean, if we really believed in what in your field they call descriptive representation, we would expect representation for all age cohorts. And even your kind of utopian scenario where young people run for the presidency isn't going to provide that by a long shot. It's going to provide people at the median of the American spectrum rather than any kind of variegated. sense that, you know, the politicians are matching the age of the population. Still, it would be progress, and there's already signs of it in, you know, in primaries lately. Speaker 2 (12:08) Of course, it's the median of the population, not the median of the electorate. It's well below the median of the electorate. And that's a separate question that I've often talked about, which is how low the voting age should go. We might come back to that. What is the problem? with an electorate getting older. So even if we have a scenario, and we are only talking about the presidency here, and there is a danger of fixating on the presidency, these trends are much more striking if you broaden the frame of reference for it. But what is wrong with a society in which the voters are getting older? Where is the problem there? If we believe in Descriptive representation or the representation of interest and the voters are getting older. Should it not follow that the politicians, if they're not getting older themselves, should nonetheless be the responsive to the interests of those older voters? Where is the problem with an aging electorate? I think people can see the problem with an aging political class because it just looks wrong. Where's the problem with an aging electorate? Speaker 1 (13:11) It's interesting because I agree with you that the problem is, let's say, more morally obvious when it comes to politicians. Still, the debate. What's really started the debate has been the incidence of cognitive decline or just outright death among politicians, not a broader sense of misrepresentation. Like if you had just slightly younger politicians through some kind of age or term limiting system, the American political class would still be far, far older. than the mean or median, and you would have much of the population almost completely unrepresented. So I wouldn't, I'm not so sure that even though it is kind of obvious, and I think young people feel a kind of sense of passivity or resignation in