A Yale professor says America is now an ‘oldigarchy’—and Boomers on LinkedIn are enraged

I’m 42; Samuel Moyn is 54. When we talked about his new book, Gerontocracy in America, it felt less like an interview than a conversation between two people who’ve learned to live with the price of telling older, richer people something they don’t want to hear. Maybe Moyn was trying to give me advice when I asked him to describe what it’s like to write non-fiction that leaves a mark.

“I tend to write books that get a lot of blowback,” said the Yale law and history professor, clad in a navy-blue, school-branded T-shirt, zooming into the call from the wood-paneled head of college office in New Haven. He noted that a friend of his even told him he is always “antagonizing people,” but “this is on a different level.”

The fights have tended to be “smaller” and “more scholarly” than what he calls the oldest, richest class of citizens in the history of the world. “But I’m kind of a gadfly,” he shrugged. “That’s my career.”

It’s because Moyn has written what may be one of the most polarizing political books of the year: an indictment of America’s quiet slide into generational inequality, in which older, disproportionately wealthy voters and homeowners shape the economy — and America’s democracy — to their advantage while insisting they’re really the ones who are under siege. His core argument is simple and backed with data: “the rich today are old, to an astonishing extent.”

As Moyn writes in his introduction, “an aging society is more set on preservation than on renovation,” and he suggests that we have “long been drifting into an unsuspected form of rule … a new kind of society that privileges many older Americans—­ to the detriment of all, including many senior citizens themselves.” This is what he calls “gerontocracy in America.”

“What I decided,” Moyn told me, with a slight smirk, “was that the cause which I deeply believe in, of intergenerational justice, had been taken over by folks who read Fortune magazine.” It’s a typically provocative statement from the man who was once, ironically, the Henry R. Luce professor at Yale, a seat named for Fortune‘s very own founder.

Boomers choking the economy—and why it hurts to hear it

In my inbox, the backlash to what I view as honest, data-backed generational reporting has been intense. After I reported several months ago on Steven Ruggles’ academic research likening the Baby Boomer generation to a “pig in the python” of American demography, I just had to follow up with a letters column because of the extraordinary responses.

“I apologize for not dying soon enough for you, so your generation can pick over my financial bones,” one wrote to me. Another posed an absurd rhetorical question: “Are you suggesting putting boomers on ice floes or turning them into Soylent green?” Many older readers read accusation between the lines and responded as if I’d blamed them personally for an objectively true situation of stagnant wages, high home prices, and soaring national debt and entitlements.

Social psychologists call this “symbolic threat”: the sense that another group is attacking your values and identity, even when the argument is about material facts. The more I focused on data—wealth by age, housing shares, bottlenecks in promotion—the more some boomers told me........

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