Podcast Club ONLINE: Gerontocracy in America
Details
Note: For those of you anticipating Warren's climate presentation, it has been postponed to next week (8/3). Please stay tuned!
Last week, we discussed death and dying -- perhaps coming away with a hope to live a good long life that ends with dying old but well. Yet isn't there buzz today that there are just too many old people clinging to power, hoarding wealth and real estate, when they should step aside for the young? Are the sub-senior-aged Americans gunning for the elderly, whom they actually quietly aspire to be? Is this ageism? Shouldn't the elderly, who have put in their time and labor and accrued life experience, reap their reward? Is America a gerontocracy, and if so, should it be?
These questions and more are discussed in this week's podcast, Converging Dialogues, with host Xavier Bonilla and guest Samuel Moyn, the author/co-author of many books and both a law and history professor at Yale University. Moyn believes America is a gerontocracy and that it shouldn't be. Our leadership across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is significantly older than the general population (average age = 39.6; median age = 39.1). Other than an octogenarian president, over 1/3 of U.S. Senators are older than 70. And compared to other advanced democracies (OECD nations), we have the world's highest proportion of politicians over 60, almost double the rate of the next most-gerontocratic nation. But haven't the American people voted almost all of these people in? And are complaints against the elderly just jealousy and ageism? The podcast also covers Moyn's ideas for change.
This week's podcast guest, Samuel Moyn, is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School, and professor of history at Yale University. He has a law degree from Harvard University and a PhD in modern European history from UC Berkeley. Moyn is a fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2024, he was named one of Propsect Magazine’s top thinkers in the world. Moyn's latest book is Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Power -- and Wealth and What to Do About It.
PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast below before attending the meeting to optimize discussion.
https://convergingdialogues.substack.com/p/500-gerontocracy-in-america-a-dialogue
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(1 hr, 13 min. - Please feel free to skip the first 6 minutes of the podcast, where the host muses about reaching his 500th episode)
What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm
Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.