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.
https://medium.com/psyc-406-2015/how-fast-does-iq-decline-ca...
But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
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.)
Older side has those who invented and lived by powerpoints / the executive summary, and they are more executive than ever, preferring to leave early or not show up at all because it's time for golf. On the younger side, people who grew up on social media and twitter, very media literate in some respects but also often stuck at high-school level reading / writing at best. They are leaving early too, because it's not like staying will help them get ahead!
You know what these very diverse groups have in common? Shared disinterest in nuance, and the idea that no matter how subtle something is, 280 chars or 2 slides should just about cover it.
I'll be honest, everyone I know thinks 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 and are still doubling down every chance they get.
Are you planning to work through democratic processes or do you mean revolution?
https://www.ft.com/content/1d41a591-940d-4936-b79f-4c7857138...
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.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
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.
I think solving inequality will not be about reducing access to said safety nets but increasing them for all.
In reality, few are concerned that Alice has a much nicer car than Bob, compared to concerns that Bob will die without insulin. Get Bob his insulin, and he will still be motivated to have a nicer car.
Not at all. It's the primary reason why communes fail.
Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street.
Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.
That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s.
If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no ability to work.
But they don't have to do those things. We're a service economy now and most of that involves sitting at a desk or very light office labor. They can still do that to sustain their lifestyle. Failing that, they could liquidate assets.
We're handing out money to people as a treat for their 65th b-day while the national debt is continuing to rise and their kids are crushed under loan debt, medical debt, and further revenue extraction to keep the shares backing retirement accounts increasing in value.
Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.
People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it.
Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
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.
Economists refer to this idea as the lump of labour fallacy.
That presumes there are a fixed number of jobs. Anyone can create a job, even doing simple things like going door to door and offering to mow the lawn.
Depends on geography of course, but it's not rare at all for boomers to have this many houses as a normal part of how they experienced middle-class life. As a group they are not only more likely to have rental/investment property, but also more likely to have multiple such properties. Why would they sell? They can get you to pay for all their services, and vote as a block to deny and remove services elsewhere.
In Australia, mandatory voting is compelled real or virtual attendance.
You are required to cast or mail in an anonymous response, that response can be blank, a vote for someone not listed, a regular vote, a donkey vote, paper with many pictures of various genitalia, etc.
No speech is compelled, no pen to paper is compelled, just that registered voters are ticked off the rolls and those registered that don't respond provide at least a weak excuse (my grandmother was sick that day) or face a nominal fine (eventually).
Think of it a citizens part to play in a democracy, the commitment to at least pay attention to the government hired by and paid for by citizens.
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.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
If you work harder than I, for the same pay, that is equitable but it isn't 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. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
Your two sentences contradict each other.
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:
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.