It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people.
That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.
The list of countries with no low or negative birthrates is very short (mostly heavily underdeveloped countries). That's why the Gerontocracy applies nearly everywhere. I doubt it was favoured, but it's result is the shift of incentives from long term (young people) to short term (old people). Democracy fails here.
No cultures directly favor low or negative birthrates.
But we've known since the 1800s that it follows from female education (and this seems independent of culture, it was first observed in France, but you can see the same trend in any African country, or even Iran), which is favored.
France went through a demographic transition 100+ years earlier than all other European countries and then had a population boom in the 50s and 60s. I doubt an average French women was less educated in 1960 than in the mid 1800s.
I don’t think it’s that straightforward, material conditions in combination with massively lower mortality in all age groups and a shift in social values must be playing a significant part
Are we calling 40s old now? There are 2 countries where the median age is above 50 [0] and the US is 38.9. And I suppose under 18s aren't in the voting pool but if a country has a median age of 50 they probably don't have that many under-18s running around. And old people don't vote as a totally unified a block, it'd be like saying countries are run for women because the median voter is a woman.
I'd suggest the main issue is that the world is so complicated that the younger voters just don't know what to organise and vote for. In the US in particular, they seem to basically be running an experiment every single election to try and figure out who they need to vote for to get some sane economic policy and stop getting involved in stupid wars. No success so far but you have to admire the process. The only people not getting the message are the people paid off to ignore it.
The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.
As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.
America may be become a gerontocracy but it’s far more likely to be a plutocracy first and that will cause more long term harm. Old people die eventually, but the ultra rich keep it in the family.
The median age of the population in the US is 39. The median age of the Senate is 65. In other countries 65 is retirement age. So you could say, yes "America" (the US) is a gerontocracy.
The Latin word "senate" originally mean "council of elders", and is transparently related to "senex", meaning "old man". It's pretty ordinary in human society for the decision-makers to be primarily comprised of old people who have lived a long time and seen a lot.
What period are we talking about? In the monarchy, the Senate were all men who could no longer serve in the military, generally believed to be at least 60 or older, and generally numbered 100-200 men.
With Sulla's reforms in the 1st century BCE, you had a minimum age of 31, total population of about 600, with about 5% of that group needing replacement every year. The "elder statesmen" then were for the most part those in their 40s and 50s, with the handful of Senators who were older and had beaten the odds still around, [ ... ]
By the Flavian dynasty, if you had military experience you could join as early as 25 and the body was as many as 900-1200 by the end of the 2nd century CE, filled as the Emperor saw fit.
> With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
Millennials received kick in their teeth when entering adulthood and around the time when was the moment for a last (or the first, finally) child. Real estate market had never been cheap either. Exactly overlaps with falling birthrates over the last twenty years.
Looking at other countries, "interestingly" Russian invasion of Ukraine basically wiped out childless millennials on both sides. Putin noticed that's the last chance to monetize the demographic opportunity and hopefully that was his last fart.
> Wealth Accumulation: Older Americans hold a massive share of the nation's assets, often choosing to retain their wealth rather than pass it down early, largely due to the terrifyingly high costs of late-life healthcare.
So having good social security helps everyone. Unfortunately my country ( IN) does not prioritise that part.
Most countries are facing similar problems. In the US, it's the millennial problem. In France, it's HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet). In Korea, it's the '20-something male' issue. In Japan, it's the 'geneki sedai' (working generation). In China, it's 'neijuan' (involution).
The common thread is that these are generations that climbed the class ladder early on, when infrastructure was lacking and there were opportunities. They had many children, jobs were plentiful, and medical advances delayed death, which meant that upper-level positions never opened up and the older generation just stayed put.
The Boomer generation naturally worked hard when infrastructure was scarce, and they succeeded under harsh physical conditions, so they find it hard to understand the generations below them. Meanwhile, the younger generations are despairing over the fact that the class ladder has been pulled up. Success is a universal desire, after all.
The older generation was in a harsh environment, but they were seated in the front row of a growing pie. The subsequent generations have better consumer goods and education, but the entry price for core assets and status has gone up, making success much harder to achieve
At the core, the real issue is the need for wealth redistribution. But in that process, the people who failed to climb the Boomers' class ladder are left behind. And crucially, as societies modernize, people tend to have fewer children, which shifts voting power away from the younger generations, making the problem even worse. In other words, everyone knows the future needs to support the youth, but doing so would cut into their own pensions and make their old age harder. And since most people are unwilling to give up their vested interests, the situation becomes even more difficult.
Boomers may have had harsh conditions growing up, depending where they were. But once into adulthood they had a fairly easy time of it. Jobs were plentiful, costs of essentials like housing and further education were relatively low, and they had significant disposable income.
The fact many of them assume the modern economy works the same way when in fact it's a much harsher environment is a curious phenomenon.
I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing.
There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed primarily for their benefit.
If you look at the actual numbers, the trend over the last several decades is a steadily shrinking number of people in poverty in the US. If the only thing you look at are the wage gaps, you're ignoring the very real gains the lower end of the spectrum have made. If the choice were to be poor then or poor now, I'd much rather be poor now.
While the population of the US has gone up by ~1.6x during that same period.
Seeing as convictions aren’t spread evenly across income brackets, a poor person’s chances of being in the carceral system outpacing population growth by a factor of ten doesn’t really jibe with the whole “there’s never been a better time to be poor” thing
I'm not American but I can tell city - land conflict, geographic conflicts are a very much thing in the whole world.
I mean we have more contemporary political research so why not cite these.
Oh, also communism, Marx ideas were a catastrophy for Eastern Europe. Greetings from my vacation in Bucharest
No, it's the empirical fact that the US is a plutocratic oligarchy. The oligarchy runs the economy, the government, and the media for its own benefit, and is violently opposed to anything that challenges this.
Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further.
What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been almost constant since 2001. I know that millennials are irresponsible and unreliable brats, but c'mon... they're over 40 now.
I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of younger people.
This is a massive change from the situation of most of human history, where your life was extremely likely to be substantially similar to that of your grandparents, so anything useful they had learned and could pass on to you was likely to continue being useful. The rate of change in human life really started to accelerate with the industrial revolution, now some three centuries old; but humanity is now in a state where massive changes are happening much faster than the passage of human generations.
Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.
JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)
Biden, Trump, Schumer, Feinstein, McConnel say: "What's that, sonny? Ask me again after my afternoon nap."
----
Anyway, the article's author seems to be quite the hard-line capitalist:
> "The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent... is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does."
So, even though society's productive capacity is incredibly high, having risen and risen over two centuries of industrialization and mechanization - supposedly the problem is that older people are slacking off. This is (mostly) false. Most of the basic material wants we face today are artificial. That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc. That's not to say that there are never shortages of materials or of trained professionals; but what the author is essentially saying is that working people need to shed blood, sweat, and tears more so that the insufficient share of the fruit of their labor, that actually goes back to them (= us), becomes sufficient.
This is not dissimilar from a feudal lord, who takes most produce as tax, telling his tenant farmer that if he wants to have enough to feed his children, he should get some of them to also work the fields so that there's enough to go around.
> That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc.
People don't actually starve today, because food scarcity is now a problem humanity has almost-entirely solved (the exceptions are war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not anywhere in a developed country). But there are many people who are homeless who would be if housing costs were somewhat cheaper because the housing supply was bigger; and there are many people who don't get enough medical attention because the time of doctors and nurses is scarce and therefore expensive - this is why there's so much interest in using AI for medical questions and examinations.
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.
The list of countries with no low or negative birthrates is very short (mostly heavily underdeveloped countries). That's why the Gerontocracy applies nearly everywhere. I doubt it was favoured, but it's result is the shift of incentives from long term (young people) to short term (old people). Democracy fails here.
No cultures directly favor low or negative birthrates.
But we've known since the 1800s that it follows from female education (and this seems independent of culture, it was first observed in France, but you can see the same trend in any African country, or even Iran), which is favored.
France went through a demographic transition 100+ years earlier than all other European countries and then had a population boom in the 50s and 60s. I doubt an average French women was less educated in 1960 than in the mid 1800s.
I don’t think it’s that straightforward, material conditions in combination with massively lower mortality in all age groups and a shift in social values must be playing a significant part
Low birthrates are a constant in every industrialized country independently of culture.
Every country is moving in that direction
Are we calling 40s old now? There are 2 countries where the median age is above 50 [0] and the US is 38.9. And I suppose under 18s aren't in the voting pool but if a country has a median age of 50 they probably don't have that many under-18s running around. And old people don't vote as a totally unified a block, it'd be like saying countries are run for women because the median voter is a woman.
I'd suggest the main issue is that the world is so complicated that the younger voters just don't know what to organise and vote for. In the US in particular, they seem to basically be running an experiment every single election to try and figure out who they need to vote for to get some sane economic policy and stop getting involved in stupid wars. No success so far but you have to admire the process. The only people not getting the message are the people paid off to ignore it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
The median age of voters in the US is 50 years old (2019).
I think it's a fair assumption that majority of the 50 year old think about their retirement (meaning around 30 years into the future).
The median age in America is about 40, so depending on how you define old the majority could go one way or the other.
0-18 contributes to median but are not allowed to vote
The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.
As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.
America may be become a gerontocracy but it’s far more likely to be a plutocracy first and that will cause more long term harm. Old people die eventually, but the ultra rich keep it in the family.
The word becoming implies it isn't one as of now.
The median age of the population in the US is 39. The median age of the Senate is 65. In other countries 65 is retirement age. So you could say, yes "America" (the US) is a gerontocracy.
The Latin word "senate" originally mean "council of elders", and is transparently related to "senex", meaning "old man". It's pretty ordinary in human society for the decision-makers to be primarily comprised of old people who have lived a long time and seen a lot.
Roman senators were 40-50
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003.09.49/
From an alternative source, that varied:
~ https://old.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/1eptqj2/do_we_...( Yes, Reddit .. but one of the better (for accuracy and comment quality) corners )
A little late no?
Economist has a global audience. The report about locally specific things are outdated as they are other countries to report about.
Most of the civilised world is becoming a gerontocracy.
With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
> With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
Millennials received kick in their teeth when entering adulthood and around the time when was the moment for a last (or the first, finally) child. Real estate market had never been cheap either. Exactly overlaps with falling birthrates over the last twenty years.
Looking at other countries, "interestingly" Russian invasion of Ukraine basically wiped out childless millennials on both sides. Putin noticed that's the last chance to monetize the demographic opportunity and hopefully that was his last fart.
https://archive.md/HKxLR
> Wealth Accumulation: Older Americans hold a massive share of the nation's assets, often choosing to retain their wealth rather than pass it down early, largely due to the terrifyingly high costs of late-life healthcare.
So having good social security helps everyone. Unfortunately my country ( IN) does not prioritise that part.
Most countries are facing similar problems. In the US, it's the millennial problem. In France, it's HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet). In Korea, it's the '20-something male' issue. In Japan, it's the 'geneki sedai' (working generation). In China, it's 'neijuan' (involution).
The common thread is that these are generations that climbed the class ladder early on, when infrastructure was lacking and there were opportunities. They had many children, jobs were plentiful, and medical advances delayed death, which meant that upper-level positions never opened up and the older generation just stayed put.
The Boomer generation naturally worked hard when infrastructure was scarce, and they succeeded under harsh physical conditions, so they find it hard to understand the generations below them. Meanwhile, the younger generations are despairing over the fact that the class ladder has been pulled up. Success is a universal desire, after all.
The older generation was in a harsh environment, but they were seated in the front row of a growing pie. The subsequent generations have better consumer goods and education, but the entry price for core assets and status has gone up, making success much harder to achieve
At the core, the real issue is the need for wealth redistribution. But in that process, the people who failed to climb the Boomers' class ladder are left behind. And crucially, as societies modernize, people tend to have fewer children, which shifts voting power away from the younger generations, making the problem even worse. In other words, everyone knows the future needs to support the youth, but doing so would cut into their own pensions and make their old age harder. And since most people are unwilling to give up their vested interests, the situation becomes even more difficult.
Denmark does not have a problem with age. It has gone the other way: members are younger today than in the old days. Graph: https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...
Average age is 44 years !!!
The oldest is 72. Youngest is 23. Majority is 30-54. https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...
source: https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/danmark/det-nye-folketing-...
Boomers may have had harsh conditions growing up, depending where they were. But once into adulthood they had a fairly easy time of it. Jobs were plentiful, costs of essentials like housing and further education were relatively low, and they had significant disposable income.
The fact many of them assume the modern economy works the same way when in fact it's a much harsher environment is a curious phenomenon.
"We are going to call the current situation anything but class warfare."
boomers vs millenials, reds vs blues, south vs north, city folks vs country ones
Maybe a political conflicts are more complex than a guy 150 years ago thought.
I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing.
There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed primarily for their benefit.
If you look at the actual numbers, the trend over the last several decades is a steadily shrinking number of people in poverty in the US. If the only thing you look at are the wage gaps, you're ignoring the very real gains the lower end of the spectrum have made. If the choice were to be poor then or poor now, I'd much rather be poor now.
The number of people in the prison/jail/probation/parole systems in the US has gone up ~16x since the 1970s
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration...
While the population of the US has gone up by ~1.6x during that same period.
Seeing as convictions aren’t spread evenly across income brackets, a poor person’s chances of being in the carceral system outpacing population growth by a factor of ten doesn’t really jibe with the whole “there’s never been a better time to be poor” thing
I'm not American but I can tell city - land conflict, geographic conflicts are a very much thing in the whole world. I mean we have more contemporary political research so why not cite these.
Oh, also communism, Marx ideas were a catastrophy for Eastern Europe. Greetings from my vacation in Bucharest
None of those things are classes in the sense of the times the notion of class warfare was first pitched, and many of them cross classes.
There's plenty of poor/impoverished boomers, blues, reds, city and country folk
I think that's exactly the grandparent's point.
Those conflicts are all the pretexts - they believe that it's actually class war and the other labels are all used to avoid calling it by its name.
It isn't class warfare if the two (or more) sides aren't divided by class.
What OP meant was the income and wealth gaps are they only things they care about, not the only things that are real.
No, it's the empirical fact that the US is a plutocratic oligarchy. The oligarchy runs the economy, the government, and the media for its own benefit, and is violently opposed to anything that challenges this.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further.
What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been almost constant since 2001. I know that millennials are irresponsible and unreliable brats, but c'mon... they're over 40 now.
I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of younger people.
This is a massive change from the situation of most of human history, where your life was extremely likely to be substantially similar to that of your grandparents, so anything useful they had learned and could pass on to you was likely to continue being useful. The rate of change in human life really started to accelerate with the industrial revolution, now some three centuries old; but humanity is now in a state where massive changes are happening much faster than the passage of human generations.
Not really. Medicine, engineering, law all are a sum of intergenerational knowledge.
Yet everytime I deal with healthcare I encounter some <30 years old kids who learn medicine from scratch and have only 5 minutes of their time for me.
Would you look at that. Clinton born in 46, Bush Jr 46, Obama 61, Trump 46 and Biden 42.
And this why immortality is bad and death is not to be cured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
Bush Jr was born '46. Obama (literally the next president) was born in '61. Not much of a pattern there
What year was the president born in for the past decade
Look up, Obama is the only exception.
Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946.
JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)
We really need some kind of interstellar war right now so that next presidents can serve in some junior roles.
Biden, Trump, Schumer, Feinstein, McConnel say: "What's that, sonny? Ask me again after my afternoon nap."
----
Anyway, the article's author seems to be quite the hard-line capitalist:
> "The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent... is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does."
So, even though society's productive capacity is incredibly high, having risen and risen over two centuries of industrialization and mechanization - supposedly the problem is that older people are slacking off. This is (mostly) false. Most of the basic material wants we face today are artificial. That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc. That's not to say that there are never shortages of materials or of trained professionals; but what the author is essentially saying is that working people need to shed blood, sweat, and tears more so that the insufficient share of the fruit of their labor, that actually goes back to them (= us), becomes sufficient.
This is not dissimilar from a feudal lord, who takes most produce as tax, telling his tenant farmer that if he wants to have enough to feed his children, he should get some of them to also work the fields so that there's enough to go around.
> That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc.
People don't actually starve today, because food scarcity is now a problem humanity has almost-entirely solved (the exceptions are war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not anywhere in a developed country). But there are many people who are homeless who would be if housing costs were somewhat cheaper because the housing supply was bigger; and there are many people who don't get enough medical attention because the time of doctors and nurses is scarce and therefore expensive - this is why there's so much interest in using AI for medical questions and examinations.
It's The Economist promoting the party line, as usual.
"The economy is precarious and someone has to pay for that. This is a you problem. Don't look at us. Nothing to do with decades of neoliberal piracy."