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
I think he's representative of a neoliberal take on life in general.
And for many, many years, their view has been that if you care about intergenerational justice, you have to target entitlements for the sake of older people, whereas I call for expanding them
and I think he's, with all due respect, again, wrong for a couple of reasons.
One is that the main way that older people have control over our political system is not that they get entitlement, especially when they're poor.
It's all the other ways.
Being the politicians in extraordinary numbers, being the voters and controlling the political system through campaign campaigns,
finance, and then just wealth, housing, jobs.
None of that has anything to do with social security.
And so I want to argue against Russ that we shouldn't treat intergenerational fairness as a pretext for attacking the elder benefits that older people need.
And as I mentioned, I actually think contrary to that neoliberal POV that we should expand elder entitlements because my firm
belief is that one reason a lot of older people do retain their wealth is that they're going to live indefinitely long.
They know it.
And deep down, they don't know who's going to take care of them.
Our welfare state does not because Medicare excludes long-term maintenance of older people, which is a scandal.
And so my sense is that if we were more generous to older people, they either would
You know, dilute their own influence over our affairs so that it's a more just society or taking their power from them in exchange for care would be a kind of just compensation.
Well, so it depends what we're talking about.
I mean, I try to convince you with all the receipts in the book that housing is in a very large part a crisis that's of old people's making for a few reasons.
One is that because of the insane way that we make land use decisions in our country at these local town meetings, older people control supply and constrain supply.
Second, as you noted, and that story exemplifies this, older people are very averse to downsizing, in part because they've made sure there's nothing to downsize into at the local level where these decisions are made.
Showing 101–120 of 165 · page 6 of 9
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