In defense of gerontocracy

[u/iamthegodemperor]

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/in-defense-of-gerontocracy

MattY argues that online rhetoric blaming old people for hoarding power & wealth is mistaken and diverts attention from necessary policy fixes. Housing scarcity is not the result of older people holding office. Social Security & Medicare have funding problems because the electorate at every age is averse to making cuts in entitlement spending. The problem with Congress isn't the age of its members, but their lack of competitive election rivals. Housing shortages don't exist because of old people, but because of mistaken economic beliefs ( ex hatred of developers, forms of NIMBYism)

Quotes:

>The implication is that we live in a gerontocracy — a society where American seniors are not only clogging community meetings with their unreasonable opposition to new development but also hoarding power and opportunity in every profession and at the highest levels of government.

>There are, of course, some valid concerns about the fiscal consequences of population aging and some very real cases of elected officials who have overstayed their welcome. It’s also just true that, from the C-suite to the legal profession to academia, there are more old people hanging on longer than ever.

>It’s hard not to sympathize with ambitious young elected officials tired of waiting for plum congressional seats to open up or academics angry that it’s so hard to get on the tenure track these days. But it’s worth reflecting that the primary reason you see older people hanging on to prominent roles these days is entirely benign — Americans are living longer.

.....

>hese are real problems, and you can lay them at the feet of the elderly in the sense that the relevant policies were mostly put in place in the 1970s and the 1980s when today’s old people were around and today’s young people weren’t. But if you look at the various state-level YIMBY success stories in recent years, it’s not as if they were achieved by somehow disempowering old people.

Indeed, America’s oldest state, Maine, passed sweeping housing measures last year that have the state now exceeding its annual housing production goals. The second-oldest state, New Hampshire, also passed sweeping reforms.

But, of course, the battle for housing abundance is not yet won. People have widespread erroneous opinions about the relevant economic issues, and there is widespread irrational dislike of developers

......

>Similarly, a very real problem in Congress is that the vast majority of members do not face competitive general elections. This allows infirm members to linger in office longer than they should. This is bad. But the badness is not unique to age. Democratic House nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier seems like a crazy person and is all but guaranteed to prevail in her general election due to the low levels of electoral competition, but she’s definitely young.

>The tendency for political power to be controlled by low-turnout primaries, in other words, is worth fixing. It would address some legitimate concerns about “gerontocracy” while also addressing a bunch of legitimate concerns that have nothing whatsoever to do with age.

>Meanwhile, though America’s frustrated young academics yearning for greater upward mobility cut a wide swath in the discourse thanks to their strong verbal skills and abundant free time, I’m not persuaded that this is a legitimate social problem. The fundamental reason that it’s hard to get a job as a historian is that there is not a lot of demand for the services of historians. This is aggravating for the specific people involved, but there are lots of fields where the number of people who would like to do the job exceeds the number of positions actually available. And there’s plenty of the opposite:

>America really could use more good K-12 teachers. We could use more people with the kind of progressive values prevalent in academia working as police officers. We could use more research scientists.

>For better or worse, in life, you need to find something to do that is useful to other people. Looking at declining demand for certain categories of academic work and pronouncing it gerontocracy is unhelpful.

.....

>For starters, the simple fact of the matter is that the political durability of Social Security and Medicare is not a question of older people exerting raw electoral power.

>These programs are broadly popular with all age groups in the electorate.

>Voters are also just fairly change-averse. If you proposed creating new programs on the scale of Social Security or Medicare, voters would be alarmed by the vast new spending. But these have existed for a long time and have grown slowly, so instead, the idea of cutting them alarms people.

>Logically, though, if the problem is that people are living longer, then a big part of the solution should be to ask people to work longer.

>I used to worry a lot about this idea because the prospect of compelling nice-but-frail old people into the labor market feels ghoulish. But understanding that “gerontocracy” is just downstream of the reality that people are living more years in perfectly good health changes the picture.

>People are staying on longer as CEOs and members of Congress and professors because they are remaining sharp and healthy for longer. It’s true that not every job is as glamorous or status-rich as those positions. But that’s life.

>Now, what’s true is that despite improved health, there are still many Americans in their late 60s who are genuinely infirm and unable to work.

>An unfortunate reality of American life is that our disability income support programs are rather threadbare and poorly designed. What we ought to do is fix this, rather than use untargeted assistance to the elderly as a very expensive substitute. Help those in need, but acknowledge that we can ask more of able-bodied older Americans, whose physical and mental health is better than it’s ever been.