Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale Law School. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. Richard Hanania questions him on the book’s embrace of socialism, and the two debate the empirical evidence relevant to whether it can work in the US. The interviewer brings up the issue of entitlements, which are becoming an increasing share of the federal budget and will in the coming decades crowd out other priorities. Doesn’t a concern with gerontocracy imply that we should at the very least stop redistributing money from the young to the old? Moyn reveals that he was originally thinking about calling for means testing in the book, but was eventually convinced that this would undermine public support for Social Security and Medicare.
Near the end, the conversation focuses on philosophical questions about what makes a good life. Moyn believes that the old need to have their money and resources taken away, and be forced to rely on the state. This raises the question of whether we should try to make people as wealthy as possible so they can pursue their own ends, or rather have the government take more of a role in making sure they find creativity and meaning. Hanania brings up Jimmy Buffett-themed retirement communities as an embodiment of the kind of preference-driven lifestyle choices that would be much less likely to exist under what Moyn calls “utopian socialism.”
For more on the ideas discussed in this podcast, see also Hanania’s review of Gerontocracy in America here.
