Works by Harvard-affiliated authors
Excerpted from “Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth ― and What to Do About It” by Samuel Moyn, J.D. ’01, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
For two centuries, “Democracy in America,” published by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville starting in 1835, has been the most famous book about the United States. It deserves to stay that way. But it might need an update.
There have always been older people. A psalm of the Bible says that, unless they die early for some reason, human beings get 70 years — 80 if they’re lucky. Genesis mentions generations of superagers at the start of humanity — like Adam, Noah, and Methuselah, the latter of whom celebrated his 969th birthday. And elders have long been accorded preferences and priorities. Whenever seniority is used to allocate positions or resources, an impulse toward gerontocracy — the empowerment of the old — is at work. Another biblical passage, this one from Proverbs, holds that “gray hair is a crown of glory.” The “preference for age and seniority,” one historian has remarked, has been “shared by all those corporate institutions which set a value on hierarchy, stability, and continuity.”
