The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis
harpers.org
harpers.org
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
We don't allow under 18s to vote, so clearly some age restrictions are legitimate.
As someone just hitting the 60 yr old mark, and looking at my parents who are still pretty sharp in their late 80s, -- so definitely talking about myself and my capacity here,
No-one over 70 has any business in a high ranking government office. The mental flexibility isn't there.
Which means no one over 66 should be allowed to run office (yes, I know this puts senators in office until 72, and kicks out representatives at 68, but it also gives a single number which is easier to understand).
It's also a question of accountability. A 40 year old politician will expect/have to live with their choices for another 40 years.
The group that uses the rhetoric like "which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote". You tell me which one that is.
The version of the fix that I like is, if you would be 65 or older on the day you would begin holding the office, you are ineligible to be in the election or the appointment process. This gives some room for acknowledging that there isn't a clear cut-off where one immediately becomes unfit to serve. If you're a healthy 64, you can serve all the way to 70 for an office with a lengthy term; but if you're going soft at 65, then you don't need to make the difficult decision of whether or not to run. The decision has been made for you, way ahead of time, and you can make plans to retire and support a successor, avoiding a really nasty, personal primary process.
This would have nicely avoided Biden's awkward "will he, won't he" decision that led to the 2024 disaster we're still suffering from. Feinstein & McConnell would have retired well before their brains transformed into cottage cheese, turning them into jokes and destroying whatever legacies they worked to build. It's better for everyone.
It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policies [0], give us a comforting thought that most of the recent relevant candidates would have been out of the picture, while not actually addressing the "shit sandwich vs turd torta" dynamic.
As for the Senate itself, I'd propose increasing the number of senators to 6 per state to dilute this effect of a strong senator being a boon to state regardless of how bad their politics are. Perhaps straight term limits for the Senate and the House as well.
[0] while it certainly means better policies than what we have now, the bar is currently on the floor.
There are other great reasons to change our voting system! I just think it doesn't solve this exact problem, while an upper age limit does.
In the context of the article and of controls, I think we should worry more about controls on those in power (i.e., politicians) than others (i.e., voters).
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.
I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one.
> successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
Sure. But billionaires?
> And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire.
If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
> That's a bad thing to be.
Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else. Creating SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are good things.
They aren’t and they didn’t.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
Musk parlayed the loan into $trillions.
So cool.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.
Two of those examples are online gambling, which is controversial to the extent that it's partly outlawed in the US.
But more importantly, 13 isn't an awful lot. Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
You can type such questions into google as well as I can.
> 13 isn't an awful lot
There aren't that many self-made billionaires of any age.
Young people’s ability and motivation to organize and communicate is not dependent on anything other than themselves choosing to do it and get involved
> That’s why we’re not as good at it.
If you continue to believe that you’re dependent on older generations to teach you everything you’ll never get anywhere.
What works for older generations isn’t going to be good advice for getting younger generations to organize and communicate. The age differences are large.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...
They get tired of being advertised to. They start complaining about being nickeled and dimed for every single thing they used to get as a part of another purchase. They look at their wages staying flat while costs go up and up.
This is it. The American economy has been warped by the interests of older people who are more interested in keeping the wealth that they've accrued safe than in investing in ventures that are riskier but that provide a broader and more diverse base of opportunity. When you ask, "Why are so many young people unemployed or underemployed today?", it's because cash, which could have funded the investments that stupid young people would have made in risky small businesses that employ workers with idiosyncratic or less-than-expert skill sets, were instead placed in the hands of boomers who just bought more FAANG stock.
Suddenly, those huge conglomerates are the only ones with capital, so they bid up wages and costs to keep resources out of the hands of would-be competitors. This creates a cycle of "growth" (or, rather, when the organic growth subsides, government steps in with subsidies because they can't let the largest employers and economic engines in the country do poorly).
And here we are.
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
Contrast that to now, where an 80 year old in his twenties likely did not even have colour TV.
But those kings were (legally) absolute monarchs, while Venice was (somewhat) a republic. This isn't a trivial distinction. The young kings of the various Carolignian successors also tended to inherit their titles when their fathers were killed, while Venice occupied a highly defensible geographic location (a swamp) which supported institutional continuity.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
It's a taxpayer-funded insurance policy, where the risk is you being alive without a way to earn a living. We have effectively managed that risk for a very large portion of the people who are collecting on that insurance policy by switching over to a service economy where most jobs do not require the physical labor that an elderly person cannot safely do. Furthermore, they're also the portion of the population with the longest time to have accumulated assets.
If you want to keep the insurance policy sustainable for the next generation - who is also paying into it - you need to treat it like an insurance policy. If you allow people to make any and all claims against the funds backing an insurance policy, the funds will eventually be depleted as there will be more people withdrawing from it than paying in. You also have to account for the opportunity cost of the people paying into that system not paying into something else, like our ballooning national debt, or the debts that many Americans of working age have to take on to maintain a decent standard of living.
It's insurance. It's there in the name. Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance.
I get far less value back than I pay into my property insurance, unless, of course, I've had a fire or a disaster. That means I've presented a need for the insurance. A casualty has occurred. I have a claim. I can then access the value that I paid into the insurance fund.
I don't write the insurance company and upbraid them for not helping me out on the down payment for a house, because I understand the meaning of the word "insurance".
We essentially have a bunch of people writing exactly that letter.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
Something like "arrest the trend towards upward accumulation which also reduces incentives to excel", maybe.
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.
There is no other meaningful definition of the value of an item or service.
> either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
Nobody is going to hire someone who produces less value than their pay.
Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value. Plenty of net-negative, work-creating behavior gets rewarded with big raises.
No evidence of that.
> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.
You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.
I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.
2. What better way to keep an eye on how things are working on twitter by dogfooding the platform?
3. An effective manager does not micromanage a company. He finds competent people and delegates the authority.
4. Most of his tweets are advocacy of the products of his various companies. A major part of being a CEO is being the top salesman for the company.
5. WaPo is owned by Bezos, who competes directly with SpaceX.
6. His companies seem to be doing quite well. Why mess with success?
And people demand the maximum pay they can get. It's the Law of Supply and Demand.
Consider this. You hire Bob for $10/hr, and he produces $100/hr in value. What's going to happen? Your competitor hires him away from for $20/hr. Then another competitor hires Bob away for $30/hr. This proceeds until Bob gets paid about $85/hr. The ROI of hiring Bob is somewhere around 15%.
There's a good reason why the vast bulk of the American workforce is paid much more than minimum wage.
However, lack of information is called "risk", and risk strongly affects what you will pay for something. A low risk deal will cost you more than a high risk deal.
Risk is part of every transaction in a market economy, and is priced in.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
Work or die vs Work to gain additional benefits.
The trouble with that is the same reason communism fails - too many people decide to just live off of the work of others, and play video games all day.
Also, who is going to work as a janitor? Most jobs are not filled with glory. They're tedious - that's why they are called "work".
- Some labor is easy both to offshore and to automate -- e.g. factory work
- Some labor can be offshored a lot more easily than it can be automated -- this causes at least a practical problem for the "nice UBI" countries. I'm struggling to think of particularly good examples...
- Some labor can be automated more easily than it can be offshored, e.g. self-driving
- Some labor is "rare enough" that it can potentially be well-paid -- my intuition says construction and repair, especially with the aid of machines
But janitorial labor is low-status, is required constantly, needs to be done on-site, and is really hard for a robot.
So a particularly good UBI test: how do you hire janitors?
It's not necessarily impossible -- for example, if a few shifts of janitorial labor could double this "decent baseline," would people pick it up? Would this leave it affordable?
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/...
Having been welfare adjacent more than once, getting food stamps is difficult and many legislatures have spent the last few years making it way more difficult, adding job requirements and the like. Ideologically you are probably fine with that, but it has consequences that you seemingly do not perceive.
No, they weren't. They were promised a monthly check that, should they become absolutely devoid of marketable skills and liquid assets in their old age, would prevent them from dying in a gutter.
They're nowhere near dying in a gutter.
If you want to solve inequality, stop giving checks to people who spend it on golf trips to retirement villages in Arizona, and give it to people who have 84-month car notes and whose student loans are in forbearance. You only have enough money for one of those two groups, not both, so use utilitarianism to decide who to give it to.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
I remember one guy who had a one man outfit that replaced broken garage door springs. It was all he did. He had a trunk full of springs.
Any decent real estate agent has a rolodex of these people, who are hired to do what is necessary to prep a house for sale.
Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy.
More seriously though, it's not as simple as 25% fewer jobs, or an economy that grows 25%. For example the number of elected positions is pretty fixed, and all those octogenarians in the senate are certainly blocking younger talent.
Politics may be an extreme example, but lots of other jobs are "proportional". There's a fixed number of plumbing jobs (per million head of population) so adding 25% more plumbers dilutes the plumbing pool. A boon in construction would drive up the demand for plumbers, but construction booms come and go.
The "economy" is (again simplistically) a measure of money flow. It doesn't really measure "production" as much as it measures "cash velocity". As such having a retired tranche spending all day long is a good thing.
And yes, more labor would lead to a growing economy. But a lot of that growth is in "poor quality" jobs (aka service level jobs) not "new production".
In other words the economy "grows" if money changes hands quickly. The standard of living though is more tied to "production".
Take, for example, health care. The sector can grow 25% by adding more admin staff, claims evaluators etc. None of which results in better health outcomes. Or it can grow by building hospitals, training doctors and nurses. Both increase the economy, both offer more jobs, but only one leads to a higher standard of health.
In truth the current economy is built around the customers free time. From music, movies and tv, to sports, travel, phones, social media, online advertising and sales, deliveries (of goods or people), restaurants (fast or slow), home improvement, it's all about monetizing free time.
Having a large customer base with nothing but free time is what makes it all work.
By that logic, when the population was 25% less than it is now (~1980s), there was a job for everyone.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
It's the job of government to make sure that doesn't happen, not cater to it.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
The goal is not to maximize return, it's to guarantee a check that keeps you from being destitute. That's it. That's the whole point. Not limitless growth, not a nice bit of sugar from Uncle Sam every month to supplement millions of dollars in assets. To keep you from being dying in the street as an elderly person.
If we're going to call the current abuse of OASDI a legitimate use of insurance, then I want to be able to get my home protection policy company to help me out on a down payment for a house. I've paid in, after all. It's the least they can do.
It's called "insurance" but it isn't really insurance like your home insurance. It's a mandatory pension plan. Everyone who pays into a pension is entitled to get it. It may well be a bad plan with a bad implementation. But those are the rules nonetheless.
If Social Security wasn't universal I guarantee voters would've gotten rid of it a long time ago. Then nobody would have it - neither the rich nor the poor.
If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money. In most studies, retirees receive less in benefits than if they had been able to invest their Social Security contributions. But that's fine, SS really has two main goals: a forced savings towards retirement, and as a social safety net for those who would otherwise be impoverished in old age.
I'd just tax it at 100% unless they declare bankruptcy. The US national debt skyrocketed during their lifetimes. Mathematically speaking, they did not pay enough in tax to support the spending that their duly-elected officials enacted. They also didn't, mathematically speaking, have enough children to make up the difference in future taxpayers, either. The American birth rate never recovered after 1970. Someone's got to pay off those bills, and if the numbers comparing the Boomers to Millennials at the same age say anything, they say "the Millennials will not have the money to pay off their parents' government debt."
Is that harsh? I don't know. I do know that your children's generation is supposed to have it better than you, and by pretty much every objective measure, the Boomers did not do that for their children, at least not economically. So it's time for them to put up.
> If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).
Why should they be receiving Social Security at all? Same with Medicare. This is the demographic that has more collected wealth than any other age cohort. If they do, in fact, need government help, they can prove their need, like you have to with unemployment insurance or Medicaid.
> The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money.
Then those who don't really need it won't miss it. Those who do will have a more sustainable program to support them.
Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.
https://freefacts.org/resources/how-much-money-will-i-pay-in...
You find those who have saved so much they have no hope of spending it all and yet are still scared to spend. Those who spend months worrying if they can buy a new car to replace their 25 year old Camry and yet they live on social security alone while having mandatory IRA disbursements in the thousands.
Social security et al should never have been sold as “savings for the future” and just been another tax.
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now.
In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers.
The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name.
The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal.
The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'.
The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
Why would people with a short-term future be likely to address long-term problems?
Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come.
The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.:
professors - with tenure - they can die on the job.
board rooms are visibly older e.g average age of Apple board members 68.
the partners at law firms etc.
now very few companies have very few succession plans.
in other parts of the world even worse e.g in Africa - you have presidents with one foot in the grave tryin' to rule.
Closing that budget gap is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not impossible to fix and it's a fairly long way away. There are a lot of proposals going around for how to fix it and those will become more politically palatable as it gets closer.
The Southern Strategy is underutilized as a tool to rebuild, rather than dismantle, works for the public good. (/s but kind of not?)
selfish lot - old - would rather spend time playing golf and traveling while doing nothing.
sadly the West is now going through the same thing.
https://www.ft.com/content/1d41a591-940d-4936-b79f-4c7857138...
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun and are still doubling down every chance they get.
Are you planning to work through democratic processes or do you mean revolution?
Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where.
Revolution seems highly unlikely to succeed -- it would be unpopular and you'd have to turn much of the military/police to your side.
Frankly, I think the push of the idea of the intergenerational conflict is a con. It will not lead to anything getting better, but when people are angry and scared, they become vulnerable.
Be wary of anyone offering big, impossible promises. They'll be sticking their hands into your wallet soon enough.
I think you're wrong here. Most people are pretty fed up right now.
Instead, a substantial fraction of the population don't care enough to vote one way or the other. Those that do vote have been pushing us toward the system we have now.
It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...
There are a lot of people who don't want to be penniless and homeless with a diminished capacity to work. That includes people who are old already and people who realize they will become old.
That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?
> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.
Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.
> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.
You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?
The societal problems we face are real. Framing them as young/good vs. old/bad is effectively the same as ignoring them entirely.
You should be looking for a different framing.
How about this? https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4633773-eat-the-boomers-...
> In his book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” Bruce Gibney argued that “generational plunder” was their economic legacy. Through tax cuts and deficit financing of several wars, the Boomers left America in shock. “Plunder” is a strong word. In the corporate legal world, it is enough to justify a clawback of the plunderers’ assets.
IMHO if we don't use it to settle the debt, it won't be inherited by people anyway, it will simply be deleted during end-of-life care, where the oldest boomers pay the youngest boomers that are still in charge of whatever insane private-equity healthcare mess we land on, thus making the "greatest generational transfer of wealth" directly to the 1%.
But you seem to be talking about taking the retirement savings and homes of people who are using them to live.
You find different numbers in different places, but the median retirement savings for boomers is under $200,000. That's a lot of money, but it needs to last ~15 years or so, years where they're likely to have reduced or no capacity to work.
A lot of old people have paid-off houses, which is a major asset. You could take those (e.g., by taxing them out), but then where do the old people on a small, fixed income live?
The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
But I think a lot of people care: the old people themselves, of course. The people who love them. And everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/18/national-...
> Greene desires something that has long been forecast but that has not happened: “more generational conflict.” However, “the boomers are organized,” and there has not been “a broader political awakening among younger generations.” So, boomers are serenely unthreatened as some of their households receive almost $117,000 annually from Social Security, and some Medicare programs cover “golf balls, greens fees, social clubs, ski trips, and horseback riding.”
Indeed, so serenely unthreatened that they are very actively threatening to everyone else. These are the same people that are forever using hunger as a bargaining chip with snap, school lunches, and policing what other people can and cannot get.
> The attitude seems to be, "to hell with them, who cares?"
The attitude is just that they were the primary beneficiaries of the spending. They presided over the debt growth to ~40 trillion and if they did not approve they also did not stop it. They still will not let anyone else stop it! If the generational conflict were literally a war with a truce, one might expect significant reparations, or at least acknowledgement and apology? Far from it. Older folks gouged out 10x profit selling crappy houses, and while young people are delaying life milestones for decades to try to buy that house, boomer landlords charged them rent to stay at their third investment property and mocked legitimate hardship with latte and avocado toast bullshit.
For whoever needs to hear this, that 'ok boomer' reply feels less and less adequate. It's actually deadly serious and a very bloody business to just doom millions of people. Data will be clear about this one day and you already see all the trends.. deaths of despair up, life expectancy down, births down, conflict up, climate crisis closer, all with zero resources to pick up the slack. Boomers have even begun destroying international standing and friendships that might have helped us negotiate the national debt situation later. While they're working to pull the ladder up for the improvements they made to civil liberties and women's lib. On the whole they'll have lived longer, happier lives in better conditions than their kids, and they did it by stealing the future.
> everyone self-aware enough to realize they too hope to become old.
That's exactly what I'm getting it. Again not so much for you but for whoever needs to hear it.. Prospects on HN are better than average, ok? And Gen-Z looks to be childless, which may be painful, but is rational and avoids drama. Listening to average Gen-X / Millennials though.. many obviously don't plan to be old. They know they can't afford to be old. So they are taking care of their elders, they are taking care of their kids, and when that tapers off they're planning to just die quickly themselves if/when they get sick. The worst nightmare of what must never happen to the elderly in civilized society is just another awkward future that boomers may have already caused and will not have to face, but posterity will.
Hope this helps someone, really. Boomers need to be able to hear it. This is a bit like being an American abroad.. you expect to be a bit of punching bag on occasion. It doesn't actually matter if you're personally complicit, you kind of need to acknowledge you're a member of a group that has been up to no good. It's not a shame ritual, or bitter ranting, or just provocative. It's a calculated test that's probing for ignorance or understanding, character, empathy, and solidarity. Most boomers don't pass, and don't pass, and don't pass, and make things worse. => End of patience, end of cordial relations, end of respect, end of trust, end of relationships.
Is ageism not like racism, sexism, etc.?
Do you have decent relations with your living parents and grandparents?
First, young people didn't choose this. It's been coming from the other direction and out in the open for a very long time. Why not make it official that it's mutual? Past time this was acknowledged, expected, and planned for. Second, I don't dislike all old people in all cultures or anything like that. We're talking about a specific cohort that shares the same experiences and most of the same perspectives. This isn't about who they are anyway, or about what they are like in some abstract sense. It's about what they've done as group and continue to do.
Boomers wrecked the veritable paradise that their own parents built with unforced errors and some combination of greed, stupidity, and malice. Then they blew up the lives of their children, and have moved on towards wrecking the rest of the country and indeed the whole world as much as possible before they check out. They did that, not some impersonal forces of history.
America IS boomers. That's the whole point of the article. Are things going well? America may not actually survive boomers. There's no point in a long list of their crimes, it's in TFA too, and everyone knows the inheritance. Housing crisis, national debt, and climate change alone would be a crippling blow for posterity, but now that's just a few of the disasters ahead, and we're in a much worse position to meet any of it. The first generation that was actually selfish and stupid enough to piss away so much prosperity that they've very likely ruined things for several generations. Boomers can't even disagree with this, because who would they blame? They'd have to sit down, shut up, and let someone else steer.
While many of the people who did so profited handsomely many did not.
There hasn't really been any recognition of this or any sort of plan to provide restitution for this sacrifice.
That isn't ageism. That's reality.
I retired last year, lead software engineer, never got into management as a civilian, did software for over 3 decades. My salary was lower than it was as a mid level 20 years ago.
What old people have "much more money", maybe they can send some my way.
I thank God for Social Security and hope and pray it remains well into the future, even for the 99% of the people who are saying bigoted, dumb shit on this page.
One of the distinctive features of such societies was the ability to switch jobs every few years, including changes from leadership positions to menial jobs, from engineering to humanities.
P.S. See Ivan Yefremov works for instance.
Because we have politicians who can barely walk and talk on their own they're so goddamn old. These aren't the best and brightest of our country, these are old people who can no longer string together enough thoughts to understand their mere presence is hurting the entire country.
Mandatory retirement age? Voters being adults and fucking paying attention, instead of acting like children and believing everything they see on TV and social media?
I like Obama as much as anyone else. But that would've been bad for democracy. Not to mention the man himself. He looked absolutely shattered by the end of his second term. Executives need term limits. And possibly judges too; albeit much longer terms than the legislatures or executives that appoint them.
I agree with you that term limits for legislators are a dumb idea.
This is really obviously not true. The Democrats' preferred candidate for Maine's US Senate seat, Janet Mills, was 78 years old. She had never served in congress. (she dropped out of the primary when her impending loss became obvious)
That is how voting and elections is supposed to work, not by saying people of a certain age, color, race or creed can't hold office because young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
> young people today are bigoted and feel they deserve more than all generations that ever preceded them throughout all of history.
Each generation doing materially better than the previous one used to be a widely agreed upon goal in the United States. Perhaps not really relevant to this comment thread.
So, we just have to take all the wealth and property
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.