Samuel Moyn
speaker
165 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Samuel Moyn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks so much for having me.
Well, gerontocracy is a rule of by and for the old people, and we have it in this country.
And thankfully, finally, we've started to talk about the age of our politicians who at the end of their lives suffer cognitive decline.
like Joe Biden or death, like so many Democrats who died to facilitate the passage of the current president's one big beautiful bill or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who lost her bet on longevity.
And that debate is all to the good.
But what it misses is that there's a much deeper phenomenon, which is elder control of the political system generally, no matter how old the politicians are.
If Trump doesn't make it,
His whole term, we might have the youngest president ever, but we would still have the oldest voters.
And our wealth in this country is to an astonishing extent controlled by older people.
So I realized that I should just present the receipts to try to convince people just how deep the syndrome of gerontocracy goes.
Well, it depends on the problem.
I mean, I've got a long list and it's up to the politicians to decide if any are viable.
But if we start with the politicians, I do think, like most Americans, that we should have age limits for office.
And of course, we do at the state level in many cases around the world.
They're very familiar, including for judges.
If we only go for age limits or term limits, we're still likely to end up with a very old political class.
We might
control the risk for cognitive decline and death, but what about unfair representation?
In our Senate, we have one guy under 40, and we have very few 30 and 40-year-olds in the House.
And so what we need to potentially consider for politicians is youth quotas to kind of expand the range of generational representation.
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