Forget fascism. Forget socialism. What if the real threat to American democracy is the tyranny of the elderly? America’s leadership class has grown very, very old. “Questions about Senator Mitch McConnell’s health are only growing.” “Senator Lindsey Graham from the state of South Carolina has died.” “With images of his bruised hands covered in makeup going viral, President Trump is now defending his health.” And the rising generation seems to feel like their elders are hoarding the American dream. “Boomers ruined the economy for us.” “College is unaffordable. Health care is unaffordable. Gas is unaffordable, utilities is unaffordable.” “They inherited the greatest economy for the working class in quite possibly the entirety of human history, and they [expletive] it up in a few decades.” My guest this week is a Yale Law professor and the author of “Gerontocracy in America,” a new book that argues that the concentration of wealth and power among older Americans is our least-discussed crisis. Samuel Moyn, welcome to “Interesting Times.” Are they interesting, though? I mean, we’re going to find out. This conversation will determine just how interesting people find the times. But we’re going to start with politicians. Aging politicians. Because right now, we are watching Mitch McConnell, formerly the Senate majority leader, still an active senator, essentially seem to die in office with various conspiracy theories swirling about whether he is, in fact, already dead. One of the most consequential political decisions of the last decade was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire from the Supreme Court. Nobody on the Supreme Court seems to have learned anything from that. And of course, there was the Joe Biden incident. And there are some people who think that our current president may even be not quite young enough for the job. Start with the psychology of this phenomenon. What do you think is behind the refusal of older politicians and justices and powerful people to retire? I’m surprised you said that Mitch McConnell seemed to die. A lot of us are not sure he is alive. I think there’s a deep, existential reason to retain power, quite apart from the old saying that power corrupts and anyone who’s powerful wants to keep their power. It’s that as we age, we face mortality. The shadow of death hangs over us our entire lives. We’re starting in — We’re starting in hard. That’s good. Well, but it’s — I think there’s no way to explain the retention of power as we age, except, in the face of decline, to deny it. But then there are other reasons. I think we get used to a sense of our significance in our vocation or our job, especially when one’s in the news, so often when one is instrumental to making policy, and that’s a powerful drug, and it’s hard to imagine weaning oneself from it if one doesn’t have to. Is there some specific American thing or generational thing? Or is this just put any group of human beings in a position of power at 84 years old, and they will be likely to hold it? I think there’s something universal, and that’s the fear of decline and death, which I think is baked in. I wouldn’t want to scapegoat the boomers who were kind of in the right place at the right time. They benefited from something new, which is that we don’t just enjoy long lives, almost all of us, but doctors have succeeded in making us high functioning till near the end. They coined a phrase for it called “compression of morbidity,” saving death for the end rather than having us decline. And then there are American features that have less to do, I think, with the boomers and much more with the incumbency in office our politicians benefit from. After all, if you look across the water to Western Europe, even though half of humanity lives under political leaders over 70, Western Europeans are generally exempt from it, even though they have lifespans that are as long or in some case longer than ours. And is that term limits? What’s the Western European secret? I think that their way of organizing political competition, funding elections and governing parties has a lot to do with why, in general, they have not had the gerontocratic crisis in the political class that we have done. If you’re interested in judges — and I’m deeply interested in them — they don’t have life tenure, which our Constitution offers and has kind of on principle from the start. And so their judges do have mandatory retirement and often specific age limits. How far does this extend beyond the political realm? And again, especially in the United States. Because Mitch McConnell, RBG, Trump and Biden, right. These people are front and center. But do you see the same phenomenon in corporate leadership in private sector leadership. Absolutely I think that it turns out that aging politicians are the tip of the iceberg. Part of the reason why politicians are so old in the United States is that the electorate is so old, and then wealth in a lot of its forms turns out to be age inflected. And there’s very good data that in spite of the illusion we have, thanks to the kind of mythology of Silicon Valley CEOs in America have been aging and indeed just in the last bit of time, aging rapidly. And we should disaggregate and look at different sectors because of the old adage, write what you know. I do privilege a bit in the book universities where faculties, especially at elite universities where I teach and you have taught, have aged substantially. I am in my mid 50s. I’m still below. How old are you exactly. I think we need. I’m 5’ years old, 54.5. When do you join the gerontocracy. Like, what’s the. What’s the moment. I’m aging gracefully into it and I have a lot of gerontocratic power awaiting me. Which is why I wanted to seize the opportunity while I still identified a bit with those younger than me and above all, my own children to strike a blow against power that I will inherit if I stay around. So what is so bad about this state of affairs beyond the specific desire not to have someone who’s not up to the job. In a position of power. But assuming that lots of these older CEOs are still capable of doing the job. What is the structural problem that this creates for society. So first off, life extension is a miracle. And I don’t think you’re in favor. I’m in favor of it, especially when it comes to my life. But I do think we should benefit from life extension. Individuals should extend their vocations if that’s what they want to do. All other things being equal, and we should benefit as a society from the New lease on life that many of us can expect to have far into the future. But I think there are some drawbacks. A dark side, if you will. One is just the injustice that comes from not fairly organizing a succession process. Most firms have an internal hierarchy, and there are very few. People tend to be the old at the apex and those beneath them, in the HBO show succession, are waiting for their time. And I don’t think that’s good for anyone. Then there’s an existential side, which is that maybe because of the cult of longevity and the age old wish for eternal life, are not reckoning with our future, and we’re holding on in spite of the other things we could be doing in a last chance to reinvent ourselves from taking advantage of the extension of life which grants us potentially an ideal retirement, not just hanging on for dear life until death comes. So the gerontocrats themselves are moral, philosophical, existential victims of the system in the sense that they are encouraged to remain with power instead of confronting themselves or spending time with their grandchildren or both. I believe so. And we wouldn’t want to miss that. A gerontocratic society tends to produce policies that often hurt elderly people a lot, too, especially when older people control the political system. So what kinds of policy are you likely to get in a gerontocracy. And we should stipulate, as you said earlier, that when we’re talking about gerontocracy in politics, we aren’t just talking about the power of Mitch McConnell. We’re talking about older voters wielding power through older elected representatives. How does that, in your view, shape, and warp public policy. I think this is probably the most important question, because it wouldn’t matter how old the politicians are if they’re still government. Not of but by and for the old. I think that we become more conservative with a small C as we age. Some people are conservative as a youth, many people become more conservative. Some are born to it, some have it creep upon them. That’s right. I’ve given myself a lot of room to move. But again, my point is not about left right. It’s about dispositional do we think change is good stability as the most important thing about the protection of what we’ve painstakingly acquired. Do we think about the future in the same way a younger person would. And I mean, there’s an ancient debate. Cicero in really the greatest defense of older people and power ever written in our tradition says that older people plant trees for the future. Well, they don’t. Aristotle says no older people live in memory rather than hope. And when we look at specific issues, we find that the older you are, the less likely you are to prioritize climate change as a policy area. Take immigration, which I think is an especially fascinating one. We should note that older people are whiter to an extreme extent. And we also know that older people, as they age, tend to be more and more hostile to the welcoming of newcomers to the country. And of course, that’s true across the Atlantic, not just in the United States. Now, we could get into whether there’s a need for border control and immigration restriction, if you want, but I’ll just observe that as we age and we need care. Someone has to fund it in a context where there aren’t as many young people being produced. And someone has to do the caregiving. And so there’s a very credible argument, I think, that more immigrants would actually help older people as they age, and yet they’re the ones most against it. So these are ways in which essentially a gerontocracy skews right in its politics. So on government spending. Yes What do you think the net effect of an older skew is. And because it seems like you could say, well, it also skews conservative or Republican because old people have more resources at the same time. The American welfare state built by your left wing forebears is designed heavily around retirement protections, Medicare, Social Security. These are the third rail of American politics. What are gerontocrats want when it comes to taxes and spending. I think that’s a super point. And it’s really important to say this. It’s not that the old are on the right. They may be small C conservative, but that is true of aging liberals too. As an example, the no kings protest, especially as they continued, became more and more white and gray haired in their constituencies and we could argue that following their old standard bearer. Joe Biden, they were nostalgic in character, looking for a kind of status quo ante. Donald Trump, preferably a more liberal version of the 1950s and 60s. The glory days in which many boomers were involved of civil rights activism, maybe. Antiwar protest. But the side you’re raising is entitlements, so-called. And it is true. That older people tend to be fanatical about the protection of their entitlements, no matter the budgetary consequences. I think it’s sad that the concerns I’m voicing for fair fairness to younger people have generally been mobilized by those who want to get rid of those entitlements, when to me, a more obvious approach to not just guaranteeing entitlements, but expanding the care that older people need and that Medicare doesn’t cover would be raising taxes. But no matter whether they’re left or right, most older people tend to be let’s say, concerned with taxes. And I think it’s no accident that the gerontocratic era of American history has been the era of tax revolts. Let’s go a little deeper on the material side, right. Because it’s not just about Medicare and Social Security and taxes. It’s also that whereas when the welfare state was first being constructed and the New Deal era and so on, old age poverty was a central zone of poverty in the United States. Today, there’s still senior poverty. But if you’re just looking at balance sheets, savings, stock portfolio and home ownership. Old people. Well, how are they doing. Tell me how they’re doing. The fortunes. Of older people in our country have radically shifted. Of course, it’s true that they were once the worst off, in part because when we were much more a country that involved physical labor, people were kind of injured out of their jobs and had nothing to turn to. And it’s for that reason that Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security act in 1935 was such a transformative moment. At the same time, it wasn’t that costly because there were so few older people, especially living on, and there was an enormous number of able-bodied younger workers who could fund these programs. That’s not true now. But while it’s important to acknowledge how many older people there who are poor there, the rate of their poverty is no greater than any other cohort of adults. And of course, it’s way they’re way better off than children. Donald Trump’s one big beautiful bill cut SNAP benefits for children in poverty. And so if we’re concerned about poverty, we should maybe look a lot more than we have at children. Older people, especially when you get to the upper echelons of the class structure, have been the great winners of the latter part of the 20th century, in part because of some asset bubbles and part because of all the special privileges that have been built into our tax code, and in part because the abolition of mandatory retirement. Why was mandatory retirement abolished. Well, it was abolished across the country due to the AARP and the a federal law called the Age Discrimination and Employment Act that was revised a few times between the 1960s when it was first written and the early 1990s and essentially in all but a few sectors like air traffic control or airline pilot, mandatory retirement was made illegal. So what we call the age wealth gap has been expanding. Meaning just give me a couple examples of what are the specific benefits that seniors get in our system in terms of policy that you were just referencing with let’s say, homeownership or something like that. Well, I think it largely consists of tax breaks. Ever since kind of California started the property tax revolts of our time. the outcome of many of our tax laws has been to immunize older people’s possessions from taxation, which once would have been a very noble cause given that they’ve lost income. But as a result of some of these asset booms, these aging Americans are sitting in very nice houses. The best there are. They’re blocking the construction of New housing for everyone else, including senior appropriate housing. And it might be true that many of these relatively wealthy older people can’t access their wealth because it’s tied up in a house, but they’ve created an incentive structure where they don’t want to sell. And so it’s a kind of perfect storm that’s resulted in a lot of injustice. Just as a larger generalization, do you think there’s any evidence that boomers or boomers fading going into the silent generation have been stingier with their children, or less likely to pass on resources while they’re alive than prior generations. I don’t think so. I think generations do have different experiences, which can lead them to behave differently in the aggregate. But from what I can see, the boomers were just like the rest of us, just in a particular time and place, especially with some early good fortune and then some asset bubbles along the way that benefited them hugely that have made them the standard bearers of gerontocracy. But we will all inherit it from them. Do you think that the millennial generation in particular, there’s an ongoing debate about how screwed are millennials debate. Because this was a generation, or at least part of the generation that came of age around the Great Recession. They have been the ones most likely to be priced out of certain areas and neighborhoods, the most likely to say, well, I can’t get a home in this school district because homes are too expensive and no one’s building New homes and so on. At the same time, there’s a lot of countervailing evidence that says, no if you actually look at overall salaries and overall income and so on, millennials seem to be doing just fine. Where do you come down on that debate. I think some of the trends that we’ve been talking about have been relaxed or even reverse in the couple of years since the pandemic. But when you look at the broad swath of the past half century, it’s staggering how far, there’s been a shift in wealth upwards to older people. We had a trillionaire for a bit and I’m not going to say he’s old, but if you look at the billionaire class on a worldwide scale, 90 percent of those people are over 50. 45 percent are over 70. And I’m not calling for generational warfare, in part because my nightmare is that millennials will do fine. It’s just they’re in a waiting game to come into the resources and are political. Question has to be about when in life, not just whether you get the resources you need. Do you think that it’s just as a baseline, better for society to have younger people in strong positions of influence, just because let’s say young people are more creative and dynamic, people are more likely to figure out the best idea for a New business or understand a New political problem or something else. At age 36, than they would be at 56. Is that. That’s a substantial part of it. If we’re interested in why are we stuck. Why are we on this timeline. I think we could ask, have we gotten the balance right between the kinds of gifts that relatively younger people bring to their organizations compared to relatively older ones. And I’d call for balance, since what psychologists call crystalline intelligence, which is about experience and habituation, wisdom, wisdom, it can be called wisdom, but then you would need it balanced, especially if you purport to care about creativity, innovation, dynamism, which we ought to in a modern society. O.K, I’m going to save the defense of the gerontocrats for after you give me some prescriptions. So anyone listening or watching who’s waiting to have someone speak up. Remember I’m just. It’s coming. No, well, I know you’re going to. You’re so be prescriptive. What do we actually do about this. Because you just said you’re not calling for generational warfare. But aren’t you calling for generational warfare. No in part out of just the real concern that as you suggested earlier, unlike the time of the boomers who were rebellious in their youth, even if they paradoxically built a pretty objectionable world in the end, in the end, we all build a somewhat objectionable world. Probably I’m not counting you out or myself, but I think the distinctive feature of the boomers is that they were very numerous and they had a chance by coming into power early to shape the world that no successor generation has gotten. And I speak as a Gen Xer we’re the forgotten generation. Our mantra is Reality Bytes. And that was really a reference to the world at the end of history that in a sense, weren’t bequeathed because the boomers hung on. They kept running it. But I guess I would say that it’s not just out of that strategic concern that there aren’t enough youth who aren’t already resigned, that I say we need intergenerational solidarity because again, gerontocracy hurts older people, too, and I’m convinced that there are a lot who see that they have hung on and they’re part of an unjust structure. And so just as we’ve had transracial movements to attack racism. We could imagine intergenerational solidarity to think about a better form of succession in American society. Let’s say you get this intergenerational solidarity. Give me the anti gerontocratic agenda. Give me let’s say the three pillars. Well, so I would just say there are buckets. There are the politicians whom I think we could benefit either from age limits, mandatory retirement for them or I think better a way of with youth quotas, of having different age cohorts represented in our political bodies. When it comes to elections, we didn’t talk about those. But elections are stunningly old, especially kind of non-presidential elections in our country. So what do you do. And I think there’s a range of fixes, some more modest like mandatory voting stopping our practice of punishing young people for mobility, or for their inability to leave work as easily as a retiree. I’ve gotten in some hot water for proposing. We consider overweighting the votes of younger people, or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country. So those are edgy. Why not. Why not assign them to those children’s parents. Well, because there’s a divergence of interests between parents and children. And I think it’s likelier that young people, not people who are raising families, will have the best insight into the interests of children. Whereas if you were awarded 5, I think that’s doubtful. I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do. I say this with all due respect to 24-year-old recent college graduates, of whom I hope to be the parent of in nine years or so. I think parents generally and confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children. And part of our goal, I think, is parents, but also as a society is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents. As much as we rely on parents to raise them. Aren’t aren’t. In my experience, parents are more likely to be the hostages of their children. But look, I would love to live in a world where you and I sat down at the bargaining table. And we’re trading, your weighting of votes for 20 somethings, for my extra votes for parents in practice in the United States, where we have a system of one person, one vote, we have various constitutional issues, and then we just have no one in Congress is standing up and proposing giving parents votes for kids. This seems fun, but fanciful Yeah, right. I just said, let’s throw the edgier ideas on the table. I will mention we already do have weighted voting. Those with who happen to live in less populous states have votes not just because of the Senate, but because of the consequences for the electoral college that are not one person, one vote. But if we accepted that we have such a thing, maybe we could experiment with it more. But I agree with you that know if in the short term we’re dealing with more actionable proposals. So just to turn to the last bucket that involves wealth and the obscenity of having the age wealth gap that we do. And there I basically, aside from proposing mandatory retirement for those retaining jobs in many sectors, I basically think we should rethink our tax code. And far from punishing the worst off seniors by stripping them of their badly needed entitlements. We should fund them better, and we should just recognize how well off many seniors are and to redesign our tax code to catch up. O.K, I have more questions about the realism of this, but just at the level of existing political factions, you are on the left. Your book has been reviewed by a lot of people on the left, and there is a running left wing critique which I will offer to you, which basically says, no matter how much you are trying to cover yourself and present this as just I’m going to tax Elon Musk and a lot of 80-year-old billionaires and we’re going to redistribute and it will be great. You are still scapegoating the part of the population that has benefited from the welfare state that liberals built. And in so doing are handing ammunition to the right to libertarians, to budget cutters, and that really all that a good leftist should say is the old have what everyone else should have. So how do you respond to that critique. So I’d say, we have to distinguish the description of what we’re living through from our prescription of what to do about it. The left view, often on the more descriptive first side is to say age isn’t really why there’s advantage in the United States, it’s just class. And that’s easy to Dodge, because it turns out that you can’t understand class today without seeing how it’s age inflected. Class advantage compounds. Exactly and I absolutely I’m sensitive to the criticism that my ideas could be easily mobilized to scapegoat older people and hurt the wrong ones. And if that happened, I’d be horrified. But as far as I can see, there’s no way out of our quandaries without having an honest, open conversation about this experiment we’re running, which is demographic. And in the first instance, I think we have a chance to save the really just view that there’s intergenerational inequity from those who are abusing it in the name of attacking older people and destroying the welfare state. And I think if we don’t talk more about age in politics, we’ll have not just misunderstood our situation, we will have missed the chance to create a New coalition of youth and old. O.K, now. I’ll speak for the malefactors who would twist your perspective. It seems like from a right wing perspective, if you start with your analysis, you don’t have to become Paul Ryan tomorrow, right. But if this is your perspective on the world, you should not just want to impose crushing wealth taxes on entrepreneurs or something. No, we’re dealing with a society that redistributes through the welfare state resources upward to people who are not dynamic. And productive. We should be means testing Medicare and Social Security so that older people who are well off, aren’t getting benefits that they don’t need. We should be stripping out regulations that prohibit building New housing of the kind that you mentioned. And you can go on from there. Why doesn’t this analysis make you a man of the left, more libertarian, a little more Paul Ryan esque. Well, I do want to insist that we should have policies that are aimed, at least some of the time, at unleashing our capacities and stoking innovation. Where I might differ from some other podcasters at the New York Times’ is that we’re not just concerned about abundance and novelty with economic innovation and economic growth, but where I think I’m going to differ most with the libertarian or neoliberal POV you’re rehearsing now is that there’s still this question about the flaw of care to which everyone’s entitled, especially as they age. And there are lots of ways of making that not just less costly, but more generous. And we really should. I think we could get into some. But to get but to get that uplift right. Yes, you need growth and dynamism. You need money that given our budget deficit picture, we don’t have at the moment. So somewhere in raising taxes. Well, you can get it from raising. You can fix part of the fiscal picture again by raising taxes on some of the wealthy old. But you still need to generate economic energy. You do. And that is why is that not a deregulatory, abundance oriented mission. Well, it is, but I think there’s a you’re now presenting what I would hope it turns out to be a false choice between deregulatory and regulatory policies, on the one hand, and generating the funds to pay for care on the other. I don’t see any conflict between those two missions. It’s going to be really hard work. But if we abandon either, we’re lost. Is it possible, in order to get that kind of politics, to have younger Americans think of themselves as a constituency as a politically engaged constituency, unto themselves in the way that the AARP did for seniors, because this seems like for your politics to work, you again, I do think you would need a kind of sense of intergenerational warfare as part of politics. I think that’s very fair, Ross. I mean, I do think maybe our biggest political problem is the alienation of younger people from the political system. I see it in my own daughters, my children, college age, have inherited a world they think is irreparably broken and beyond redemption in many ways. And I think that’s a tragic thing. So we do have to imagine them angrier than they have been. Also, if they could be activated in the way you’re envisioning, they could see the need for establishing cross-generational solidarities because not just for strategic reasons, but on principle. They could be a kind of New universal class thinking of themselves as acting for the sake of everyone. I wonder, though, if it almost isn’t 35 to 45-year-olds who are more of the challenge in the sense that yeah, you can. It’s young people may be apathetic, but it’s natural for the 20 something to think of themselves as kind of oppressed by the weight of the world that older Americans have built. Whereas it’s people in the thick of it in the midst of their working lives or their family lives and so on, who seem less likely to think of themselves as a class with coherent interests. Absolutely, I feel bad even in our conversation that it’s easy to slip into a dichotomy of age versus youth, but actually it’s age versus everyone else. And that would most of all, from my perspective, include the broad middle of those in the prime of their lives who are under-resourced, who are stagnating and haven’t been bequeathed by their elders, whether within their families or on a social basis in a sense, their inheritance, which is resources when they could. Most use them to make our world a better and more creative place. O.K, now let me speak up on let me speak on behalf of those elders. Because I think the argument that would be made by them and on their behalf is that what you call unjust hoarding or holding on to houses that you should sell or stock portfolios that would benefit your kids is one a rational preparation for a world where whatever you do in your professional life, you’re going to live longer than anyone has. Yes, in recorded history. And you need resources for that future. Two in maintaining those resources, aren’t you actually in the end, reducing certain burdens on your kids, on your middle aged kids. That, one of the stories of American life before the 1930s, before Social Security well, what happened, what happened to old people when they were injured and couldn’t work anymore. Well, they moved in with their kids. Absolutely right. And you had a whole system based on that kind of intergenerational burden sharing that imposed really big burdens on younger people and workers. And so on. And now we’re in an age where people live a long time. People need long term care. They need all of these things. And isn’t gerontocracy just planning for that future. Well, there’s a lot there Yeah well, I have to speak on behalf of my elders. And it was a very, moving peroration. I will say that I believe very deeply that we’ve created a society in which it is rational to hoard because we will live indefinitely long. We know from the pandemic that the state of care to which we’re entitled at the end of our lives is horrendous, I mean, horrifying. And it is completely understandable that one would stash away everything one could to avoid that fate. It’s also because as you say, we’ve moved away from the intergenerational family, which we could revive, but we could also revive intergenerational community. And that also has gone by the boards. There’s enormous age segregation in the way we live residentially. Part of the reason is that older people control the best real estate, but also because has there. I think there is a kind of alienation where young people no longer want to support not just their aging parents, but older people and their society generally. And so, on remedies, I think we have to do something culturally to overcome these problems. What to me is not a viable solution is to have older people retain so much that in a sense, disinherit the future because they are convinced that they will have to spend down an enormous amount just to survive till the end. But what is this, I guess. What is the standard of care that you’re aspiring towards. So right now, I observe, and I’m sure many people watching and listening. Have observed the end of life of people who are technically millionaires. People, they own a home. It’s appreciated. It’s worth $1.2 million. Whatever right. And they enter end of life care. And it’s not like just Republican grinchy to say there’s a lot of trade offs here that are not resolved by just taking a tax bracket up a little bit. There are. Look, you’ve got to be right. And I’m not trying to downplay the immense complication of these policy domains, but we also know there’s a lot of rationalization involved in, let’s call it hoarding. And there are a lot of reasons. One has for not pivoting to more intergenerational generosity. And if we just have this fiction that older people are there for the wisdom they have in their heads, and not everything they’ve acquired and are keeping that they should begin to pass on under the right conditions, then I think we haven’t really organized the inevitable succession that our humanity involves. Very well. Do you think that there’s a different kind of attitude towards the old from. Yes 40 somethings or 20 somethings that would encourage that kind of attitude in return. Like what. How should. How should the middle age think about their parents that they’re not going to get everyone Among the old on their side. But they could deploy some tough love. Let’s call it that. And it would involve the insistence that you’ve had your turn, and you have a chance to one more time in your life to reinvent yourself. But what you cannot do is deprive the rest of us of our futures, or just make us wait until we’re old to enjoy resources. But there would also be I think some promise there. We provide you care. We make retirement great because neither care nor retirement have been great things for most of them who’ve been lucky to get them. And so we’re just at the beginning, I think, of imagining what an ideal old age could look like. And young people and people in their prime would have to be as committed to it as invested in making it real, but invested invested not just at a physical level, but at a personal like. That’s right. It would mainly be the resources, physically of the elders, but it would have to be a participatory project across generations to be real. O.K, let’s end by talking about maybe the starkest alternative to that vision of care, which you touch on in the book, but maybe gingerly, gingerly, right. Which is assisted suicide and euthanasia, which are other ideas and policies that have themselves gained a lot of ground under conditions of aging populations in North America and Western Europe. Just give me your general views. First on assisted suicide. Is it a desirable policy, a human rights victory, something dangerous. What do you think. I think it’s a legitimate and Noble thing. If one under one’s own power and freely decides to end it. But of course, we would need to understand that in the conditions of our day, where older people often are suffering from depression, a sense of neglect, and prematurely end their lives, let’s say under psychological duress. We would want to. Make sure that these choices were free. And maybe that’s not always the case Yeah, I’m interested in this because there’s a couple of polls here. In the euthanasia debate, you have the argument that says that you just made that says if people are making this decision absolutely freely feeling that they’ve lived their life and want to go out on their own terms, that’s O.K. Or maybe good, or if they are, suffering from depression, poverty, all these kind of conditions that render them incapable of making the decision. That’s not ideal. But I think just based on what you’ve been describing in this conversation, there’s a middle zone, where you basically feel a kind of pressure towards euthanasia. Towards assisted suicide. You don’t want to burden your children and your grandchildren. And so you end up feeling of pressure to go out as soon as you’re not in good shape. Yes It seems like that could be the way that societies end up reconciling these difficult forces. They say, look, we’re not going to take away. We’re not going to take away your big house or your comfy retirement. We want you to enjoy all those fruits. But it’s just that when you get to the last three years where it’s really expensive, then we want you to feel some pressure to exit early. That seems like that’s my I guess it’s a dystopian vision, but it just seems like where someone where these lines could intersect. You’re sure. So it’s a credible nightmare scenario, but it would be a travesty of my views. I’m not imputing it to you. I understand. I mean, I wonder if you have a gerontocracy that sets up a system of assisted suicide. Yes what does that look like. I guess. Well I would just contrast it with the utopia, which seems to me, it’s more plausible to achieve in real life, which is that we insist that as we age, we never become a burden or useless. It’s actually our ancestors. Some of the pre-modern, as I talk about in the book, who did have euthanasia, even like euthanasia accepted by the aging when they were burdensome. We live in circumstances in the wealthiest country in the world that we should never tell anyone that they’re a burden. On the contrary, we have the resources to as long as doctors can perpetuate life, not to provide immortality. That’s Brian Johnson talking for an elite. But at least to provide care to the end. Would you rather die as a burden on your loved ones or. But while getting while being cared for or relieve them of that burden. If I’m only. Do you want to be. Do you want to be a burden. I definitely want to impose a lot of burdens on my children to take care of me in the future, and I am already talking about it. They are. They are critics of my hoarding of books, among other things, and insisting that I divest myself of those things so that they don’t have to. But I think it’s eminently just for me to be a burden on the future, on my own children or my society generally. If there’s a point at which I’m nothing but burden, including to myself because I have nothing left to create or explore, then maybe I should have the choice to exit on my own terms rather than in some other way, because there will be an exit. How did this play out for your own parents, and did you have profound conversations about gerontocracy or personal conversations about intergenerational obligation with them. I have not with my father, to whom my book is dedicated, who died long enough ago that I didn’t have the chance. My mother is still alive and thriving in her 80s, and we have talked about it now and again. My father-in-law, who did recently pass away way we talked about these issues all the time because he was a realist. But I’ve also had the benefit of going to his synagogue and talking to many people who are actively, as aging Americans, thinking about these issues every day. And I think it’s been a kind of fascinating conversation to interact precisely with not so much in my own direct family, but with older people generally who are all over the map on these matters. And I get as much fan as hate mail. Well, you and everyone, will reach a point of greater familiarity with these dilemmas, but for now. Sam Moyn, thanks for joining me. Thank you Ross.
