Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks friendly cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun.
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper: It's an insurance policy to ensure someone (alive) is not starving or living in a ditch, as opposed to a inheritable investment account.
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
A Modest Proposal: Allow different tax rates for taxpayers who could vote, but don't. Perhaps if the pain was more personal, then few people would regularly vote straight-ticket for the Apathetic Party?
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
While I mostly agree...
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
The Doge had no power.
It may have been stable and dominant in spite of that, like America, currently being run by senile old men. The human mind is a biological computer and it isn’t pretty the older it gets.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
Being ruled by Generation Lead doesn’t seem like a great improvement.
lead-ership
> Our gerontocracy is not the result of a malevolent plan, .. Boomers aren't distinctively evil.. The fact that they are so numerous and the fact that they are aging in era when life has been extended make the syndrome endemic. .. America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—waiting for the old to make way for the new—defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks friendly cordial relations between the generations are over. Seems like the author knows it too but wants to be gentle. Let's just say it. America straight up looks Saturn devouring his children. Is he horrified? Sure, but mostly just horrified to be caught in the act. And now that he thinks about it, kind of disgusted with you that you'd want to be so judgemental about the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
We may continue to see generational wealth-pumps installed by the elderly to destroy the youth, but at some point soon it will be a kind of survival cannibalism. Boomers did it for fun.
Term limits would fix it
Term limits are perhaps the dumbest idea that ever plagued democracy. The idea of mandatory firing your most qualified, experienced employees in an incredibly difficult job that can only be learned with on-the-job experience is literally insane. If not for term limits, the US would have had Obama in the presidency this entire time instead of the absolute garbage scraps that were left over when they fired the only person remotely competent enough to lead them.
Demographics in most developed countries make catering to old people the strategy to win elections.
Commentators: "America's young are addicted to their phones, hopelessly politically polarized, and socially illiterate. Test scores are dropping and critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. They hate and fear the other gender, mainline conspiracy theory podcasts, struggle with anxiety, were coddled from birth, etc. etc."
Also commentators: "The elderly have to go. We need fresh blood."
(Yes I acknowledge there is a middle position where you elect 45-year-olds who came of age before the internet yet are still reasonably sharp mentally. I just think it's interesting that the two narratives above seem to coexist so easily.)
Honestly, 45 year olds will probably have some of the most objective views across that reality.
But are they the same commentators each time?
I didn't claim they were. Just claimed that those two narratives have been coexisting for a while and I've never seen them duke it out.
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
It's happening in the US, too.
I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income.
They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security.
Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
If you work for 40 years, chances are you will have accumulated some assets. I'm not sure that "sell your house and cars to pay for food" is a policy that will be popular.
Equally those same people have paid taxes for 40 years, paid into social security (to the benefit of their elders) and so on.
Keeping them in the work-force is largely undesirable. A job occupied by a 70 year old is a job not occupied by someone younger. If retirement age was say 80 instead of 60, there would be 25% fewer jobs to go around. (using imprecise simple math).
Look, most all of us will get old and eventually claim on social security or whatever. Politically just "ending that" is pretty much a non-starter to anyone who has been contributing for any length of time. Even fiddling with the edges of it (raising the retirement age) will get you voted out of office.
> Why the hell are they able to collect on that?
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor... but old versus dead.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper: It's an insurance policy to ensure someone (alive) is not starving or living in a ditch, as opposed to a inheritable investment account.
Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
Because they were promised it - fundamentally leaving the rich out of the social safety net doesn't even get us much and administrating the distinction costs money, and I am no fan of the wealthiest get additional benefits.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
A Modest Proposal: Allow different tax rates for taxpayers who could vote, but don't. Perhaps if the pain was more personal, then few people would regularly vote straight-ticket for the Apathetic Party?
Penalizing people who don't vote will not result in carefully considered votes. Voting rights include the choice to not vote.
Mandatory voting would be nice to have, but it is a form of compelled speech.
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Ranked choice voting allows for instant run off elections. Should have a similar effect without requiring a full redo of the election.
That's just mandatory voting.
The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.
This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it's enough.
And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
A not thoroughly thought out response:
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
No, they're already being suppressed. They'll take the easiest action possible to ease the pain, which means voting for whoever does away with the fines.
People in America die from preventable illnesses constantly because they cannot afford access to care but I guess they forgot to protect the ability to not die or whatever.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
Relatedly, it's a skill that goes with positions that are clung to such that nobody else gets to practice and learn said skill.
An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
Equity and fairness are at odds with each other.
Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.
Equity means equal results.
If you work harder than I, for the same pay, that is equitable but it isn't fair.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Your two sentences contradict each other.
Equity? You mean equality (and that's still about rights, not pay.) Equity is just a stake in the outcome at all.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
An apocryphal story about equity:
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?