David Runciman: The Cult of Longevity

David Runciman

With hindsight what is most shocking about Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on 27 June 2024 is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young. Trump was at that point the second oldest presidential candidate in American history – second only to Biden – yet Biden’s intermittently ashen, waxen, leaden, frozen performance had the effect of giving Trump a youthful glow. The ex-president looked alert, his eyes were clear, his voice more confident, his demeanour that of someone who had all the time in the world to watch his opponent’s candidacy implode. Analysis after the event by NBC News suggested that Trump went off topic 50 per cent of the time compared to Biden’s 30 per cent. It didn’t matter. Only one man looked like he knew where he was.

The Trump-Biden debate stands as an indictment of America’s political system: something has gone badly wrong when an elderly politician with Trump’s flaws of character and competence can be provided with a platform that presents him as the vigorous option. But as Samuel Moyn argues in his powerful new book, it is a mistake to fixate on the age of recent presidential candidates (Trump and Biden were the oldest candidates in history even in 2020) as emblematic of what he calls ‘gerontocracy in America’. Two-party systems have always had an occasional tendency to throw up absurd and unpalatable choices. Sometimes they are old men and sometimes not. How many people in France felt happy at having to choose between Chirac and Le Pen in 2002? Or in Britain between Johnson and Corbyn in 2019? National elections are quirky events and their vagaries rarely fit into a neat pattern. It is possible that the next US presidential election will be fought between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (currently aged 36) or Jon Ossoff (39) and J.D. Vance (41) or – gulp – Donald Trump Jr (48). What price gerontocracy then?

In fact, the real evidence that power in the United States has been tilted towards the old and away from the young can be found outside the hurly-burly of presidential politics, which usually serves as a vast distraction. The penny-drop moment for me came earlier this year when I read that Alvin Hellerstein, the judge presiding in the federal case against Nicolás Maduro, is 92 years old. That wasn’t the real shock – maybe, as with elections, this was one of those quirks that happens from time to time. But it turns out that 6 per cent of all federal judges (of whom there are 1400, if you include the 500 semi-retired judges who continue to practise with ‘senior status’ after the age of 65) are in their nineties. That means there are around eighty of them. The oldest, Leo Glasser of New York’s Eastern District, is 102. The explanation is simple. The office is held for life. People are living longer than they used to. Older people can be poor judges of whether they are still able to function competently. In the case of actual judges within the US federal system, there is little or nothing anyone can do about it.

The prospect of finding yourself face to face with a nonagenarian judge is one version of gerontocracy in America. Yet the US is not the country with the world’s oldest population nor the most sluggish birthrate nor the most unbalanced demographic profile. Far from it. The median age of Americans is still under 40 (39.2), which is lower than China (40.2) and much lower than Europe (it’s 48.8 in Italy) or Japan (50.2). The US total fertility rate (the number of children born per woman) is 1.6, substantially below replacement levels but still a lot higher than Canada (1.2), let alone South Korea (0.75). By global standards, the American population is ageing but not especially elderly, mature but not yet sclerotic.

The problem comes with America’s political and economic systems and the ideas that underpin them. The US is the country where the fact of an ageing population does the most to exacerbate inequalities of wealth and power. It leads the way in letting the old hold on to what they have and making the young pay the price. Moyn’s title deliberately echoes Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published nearly two hundred years ago. Tocqueville didn’t believe he was writing about the world’s only example of popular government or that American democracy was a curious statistical outlier. But it was a harbinger of what happens when an idea is allowed to operate unchecked by the forces that constrain it elsewhere. Nineteenth-century American democracy was a glimpse of a society in which trends that were increasingly apparent everywhere had been let off the leash. So it is with gerontocracy in 21st-century America.

Part of the cause is the US constitution. It was drafted by men who feared the arbitrary power of majority rule and introduced many institutional checks on it. The holding of federal judicial offices for life was one such check: no kicking individuals off the bench just because the people have grown tired of their doddery ways. The US Senate – which, as Moyn points out, takes its title from the idea of an assembly of the elderly (senatus) – was another. Originally, US senators weren’t directly elected. Even now, when they are voted into and out of office, many are what they were always intended to be: old. The average age of US senators is 64. Five are in their eighties. These judicial and legislative institutions originated in a world that is now passed. The Founding Fathers had assumed that democratic majorities would conform to the inexorable laws of social composition: they would be relatively poor, relatively ignorant and relatively young. Having richer, better educated, older representatives served as a balance against the tendency of unchecked democracies to expropriate the assets of the privileged few. Today, more than half of Americans enrol in college. Acute poverty still exists but the nation as a whole is immeasurably richer than it was 250 years ago. The biggest difference, however, is that the majority is no longer young. Older generations can and do outvote younger ones. Having elderly representatives no longer looks like a check on anything. It is more like another finger on an unbalanced scale.

Yet even political representation is something of a sideshow. Given the extent to which wealth is skewed in the US towards the elderly, and the extent to which older voters decide the outcome of elections, the question of who wins those elections can be secondary. The victors still have to do what the voters want if they are to get re-elected. As Moyn writes, ‘if the voters are wealthy and old, it may not even matter whether the politicians are young.’ I got a glimpse of this dynamic at work in another setting following the general election of 2019. Shortly after the result I met Dehenna Davison, the newly elected Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland, who was 26 at the time, one of just a handful of twenty-somethings in the House of Commons. I told her how great it was that she could speak for people of her age in Parliament. She looked at me as though I were mad. She was there, she said, as po-faced as any old-timer, to represent her constituents. And her constituents were old. The median age in Bishop Auckland is nearly 50 and those who overwhelmingly voted Conservative in 2019 were considerably older than that. Moyn has his own reasons for not wanting to go too hard on swapping out elderly politicians for younger ones. The US senator who is most adamant about the need to redistribute the wealth being hoarded by older generations happens to be one of those eighty-somethings. Bernie Sanders is 84. He was last re-elected in 2024, which means that if he serves out his full term he will be 89 when he finally retires – if that’s what he chooses to do.

The real question, then, is why old people exercise so much power behind the scenes. Here again the distinctive features of American political life play their part. The propensity of older voters to turn out in greater numbers than the young is a widespread phenomenon, as prevalent in Europe as it is in the US. It is also true that almost everywhere this imbalance is exacerbated outside general elections: the more local the election, the lower the turnout; the lower the turnout, the more likely it is that older voters will make up the numbers. What makes the US different is the extent to which increasingly gerrymandered districts mean that general elections are not where the big decisions are made. Ninety per cent of seats in the House of Representatives are non-competitive between the two main parties – one or other has them sewn up – such that the important elections are the primaries that decide from which wing of the party the candidates will be drawn. In presidential elections the median age of voters is 52. In other elections it is 56. In primaries it is 65.

American traditions of localism, then, play their part in the entrenchment of gerontocracy. In places where local government decides on the allocation of resources across competing public goods, those districts where the well-to-do old congregate are often the ones with the fewest children. As a result there is little incentive to direct money at schools or other child-friendly resources. That money will have to come from those living in the places where the children are, who will tend to be younger and therefore worse off. It is a vicious circle: the elderly, who have the most to spend, get to spend the least of what they have on everyone else, and everyone else has to pick up the tab. Similarly, in states that like to hold referendums on matters of public policy – including taxation – older voters are able to flex their electoral muscles. California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978, ushered in a new wave of legislation limiting rises in property tax. It was driven, at least in part, by old people enraged at the prospect of paying higher taxes to fund education. Attempts since then to repeal it have proved futile.

Why, though, do the old have so much more money? In one sense, the answer is obvious. The longer you live the more time you have to build up savings, the more likely you are to own a home, the less likely you are to have young children dependent on you. Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this, including all those grandparents who provide for their grandchildren. What’s more, many old people are poor, do not own a home and have few if any savings. When they are poor the elderly are as vulnerable as anyone, not least because they usually lack the capacity to earn money and in many cases are unable to look after themselves.

Old age used to be associated with poverty, and the aged were considered dependants who in the absence of family care were likely to face extreme hardship. Modern welfare states were in part created to counter this. But in the world’s richest societies, it is no longer the case that age correlates to a lack of resources. Instead there are vast pools of assets held by older citizens, particularly in the form of property, private pensions and other retirement funds. As a result, there is often vast inequality, both within the older age bracket and between the wealthy elderly and the rest of the population. In this, America is out in front. It may not have the oldest population or the fewest children. But, as Moyn makes clear, the US leads the world in wealth and income inequality due to age.

Again, an American phenomenon has American causes. One of the greatest inequalities of old age is access to healthcare. Those with the means to pay for the best treatment are likely to live far longer than those who cannot, and as medical technology advances this gap is growing larger all the time. As a result wealth correlates to longevity, and longevity means holding on to what you have for longer. At the same time, the American tax system – and the anti-statist ethos that often underpins it – encourages private philanthropy where other polities might look to fund public goods from general taxation. Letting individuals choose the way they deploy their largesse means hospitals will get more than schools – especially the hospitals that cater for the old and in which they may just have had their lives extended – and art galleries more than youth centres.

Behind all this are the unintended effects of a political order built around the idea of rights. Many of the rights that were established in the constitution and its subsequent amendments have been extended over time to protect minorities (and in the case of women, majorities) who weren’t much present in the thinking of the Founding Fathers. But the irony is that the old, who are still a minority however you swing it (a median age of under forty means the over-sixties have a long way to go before they are in a numerical majority), get protections designed for the exploited, the underrepresented and the excluded. The 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, declares: ‘The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.’ It was passed at the height of the controversies surrounding the Vietnam draft to ensure that those aged between 18 and 21 who might be called up to fight and die for their country could also have a say in the legality of the war. It was intended as a form of political protection for what might otherwise be a highly vulnerable group. Yet that wording – no abridgment ‘on account of age’ – now means that any idea of curtailing or limiting the powers that the old possess to reinforce their advantages through the ballot box will fall foul of the constitution. And as we know, changing the constitution is almost impossible today, especially given the way the voting profile is skewed by age.

But, you might ask, isn’t it pretty ageist to make such a song and dance about the fact that older Americans are far more likely to have and to hold on to power and money than they were in the past? Age is very different from other kinds of privilege, in the sense that it is not a fixed characteristic. To rail against the patriarchy or white power is to complain about social – and indeed biological – categories that won’t turn into their opposites. But every old person was once young and in due course the young will become old. Isn’t this therefore really a matter of the way advantages are distributed across individual lifetimes, and doesn’t it make sense for most of us to want to have plenty to live on towards the end, especially if we have worked hard to get there?

Moyn disagrees. There are reasons it’s a mistake to think that this is simply a case of turn-and-turn-about over a lifetime. First, the plenty that many wealthy Americans have accumulated to provide for their old age is increasingly unproductive excess. It’s locked up in houses that are bigger than the owners need, in savings they never touch, in retirement funds that could fund much more than a comfortable retirement. Second, the growth in inequality based on age has happened so fast, and the future is currently so uncertain, that for present generations the situation can feel set in stone. The world in fifty years’ time is almost impossible to imagine. Telling a teenager not to be too grabby for the assets of the old because he or she will one day be old too seems like thin gruel in the current climate.

Ageism can still be a problem, as when older workers are discarded because they are too much trouble to retrain, or elderly citizens are cut off from online help and support because the new technology has passed them by. But it’s no longer clear that this is where the significant social challenges lie. As AI gobbles up entry-level jobs and squeezes the employment prospects of graduates, and as the latest technology insinuates itself into all our lives whether we like it or not, it can be hard to believe that the biggest losers are going to be anyone but those who are currently young.

Ageism itself is a relatively recent concept. The term was coined by the gerontologist Robert Butler in 1969 to describe routine discrimination against the elderly, who had been left behind in the great wave of civil rights movements of the 1960s. Butler drew on the struggle against racial and other forms of injustice to make his case. He invoked Malcolm X and Simone de Beauvoir to highlight the plight of one more minority who were subject to condescension, neglect and exploitation: the old. He turned on its head the argument of Paul Goodman’s 1960 cult classic Growing Up Absurd, which inveighed against the laws and practices keeping adolescents out of the decisions shaping their future. The real absurdity, as he saw it, was that the people with experience and wisdom on their side were treated as though they were nothing but an irksome burden.

Butler was remarkably successful in getting ageism taken seriously, and an industry of lobbyists, campaigners and boosters emerged to champion the interests of senior citizens. The American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1958, began its transformation into one of the biggest and most powerful lobbies in American history. It currently has an annual operating budget of nearly $2 billion, nearly ten times that of the National Rifle Association. And it does good work, putting older Americans in touch with organisations that can attend to their needs, making sure they are well informed about their rights and campaigning to protect their interests. Butler was correct to point out that the elderly are easily forgotten when social discrimination is in the spotlight, not least because they are much less prone to take to the streets to make their frustrations known. But, in part thanks to Butler, that neglect is far less likely today as the advantages enjoyed by the elderly have grown. Agitation against ageism was a product of its era, along with other hot-button issues of the 1970s, like ‘global cooling’ and the imminent ‘population bomb’. We’re not in the 1970s anymore.

Yet Moyn wants to go further. His argument is not simply that we are applying outdated standards to a rapidly changing social hierarchy. It is also that there is something wrong with unduly empowering the old per se. He believes that increasing longevity is not something to celebrate, at least not in political terms. It is something to ameliorate. As we grow older we become more cautious, more backward-looking, less open to novelty, more easily scared. That’s not true of everyone, of course, but it’s true enough to be revealed across aggregate patterns of behaviour. The word ‘hoarding’ is in Moyn’s subtitle for a reason: the money – and power – that wealthy older people cling on to is often a product of their unfounded fears for their own futures. Many people who have significant assets die with those assets more or less untouched, even if they told themselves that the money was there for their old age. Financial advisers will often say that the hardest task they face is persuading their elderly clients to spend down their savings. Wouldn’t it be better to die having made use of what you’ve built up rather than simply having watched it sit idle?

The common response is that by leaving it untouched an older person has preserved it for his or her children. But if that’s the rationale, then it would be better to pass it down to younger generations long before death does the job for you. It’s not only more tax-efficient but it also means that the money will be in the hands of people who might actually use it. One problem of increasing longevity is that the rich – whose money means they tend to live the longest – only end up handing it over to their offspring when they too are getting on in years and likely to hoard it as well. There are too many Prince Charleses left waiting for their inheritance and not enough Prince Harrys spending like there’s no tomorrow.

The traditional justification for gerontocracy, which has long been an organising principle for certain kinds of society, is that you want old people in charge precisely because of their tendency to look to the past and value continuity over change. Cicero believed that the young were volatile and feckless. The old, by contrast, were motivated by interests that transcended their immediate desires (this, he thought, was one of the advantages of sexual impotence). Aged citizens could see the big picture, take the long view, make sure that the glories of the past were not forgotten in the heedless rush to enjoy the present. But that’s not the way modern democracies work. Our societies need to keep changing. When there were fewer protections for old people this ethos of progress at all costs was one of the forces that threatened to leave the elderly more vulnerable. Early 20th-century progressives such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann championed the cult of youth and the dismantling of established traditions and institutions. Under this regime the old could be seen as embodying past failure – symbols of what needed to be left behind. But now that wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of the old they are far more likely to be barriers in the way of progress than the victims of it. Established institutions are increasingly hard to reform, even when they are failing, because older citizens like what they know. We don’t have a politics of what works so much as a politics of what won’t they notice. All human beings are risk-averse but we get more risk-averse as we get older. Now that older people have much more to lose, retooling politics for a rapidly changing world is getting harder all the time.

That’s the prognosis. What’s the cure? Moyn is clear about what not to do. It can be tempting to think that the real issue here is that old people are becoming an unsustainable burden on the public finances. Politicians across the political spectrum have become aware that an ageing population imposes enormous strains on the welfare system. People who live longer need more and more care but contribute less and less to the public purse through taxation. In the American case, this means that on current trajectories Medicare and Medicaid look like they could soon bankrupt the federal government. There is no easy answer, especially since no politician gets an easy ride on this question. Democrats tend to have younger voters on their side but also a greater historic attachment to welfare spending. Republicans who might love to slash the federal budget also know that old people vote for them. Nonetheless, some scorched-earth polemicists on the neoliberal right are increasingly willing to bite the bullet of what’s euphemistically called ‘entitlement reform’, which really means making the old pay their way.

How? Well, as they live longer, they could work for longer, into their seventies and beyond. Or they could be forced to make do with less. Subsidising healthcare for the old can appear to be a bottomless bucket: lives are prolonged, pushing the state ever more beyond its means. At some point it might be necessary to call time on what looks a bit like an existential Ponzi scheme, whereby the only way to keep the system afloat – and all those old people alive – is to draw in ever more resources from younger generations to prop up the scam. Bringing this set-up to an end will mean some old people dying sooner than they might. So be it, the unsentimental critics of the current arrangement say. The old have had it their own way for too long.

Moyn is as unsentimental about the cult of longevity for its own sake as anyone. He can’t see the point of prolonging life simply because the medical science allows it. He would prefer that we ask tougher questions about what human life is for. There’s nothing in this book about the thorny issue of assisted dying but he does suggest that the distinction that moral philosophers make between killing and allowing to die is one we shouldn’t be squeamish about confronting. Don’t kill the old people – but don’t be afraid of letting death take its course if continued existence is a terrible grind.

However, Moyn is adamant that entitlement reform is at best a distraction from the real problem and at worst likely to entrench it. Cutting state provision for the elderly will not level the generational playing field. It will unbalance it further. That’s because the central issue is the advantages enjoyed by older people who don’t depend on the state in the first place and who will be left more or less untouched by any reform. The losers will be those without assets; the elderly who are sitting in big houses checking the size of their retirement funds each morning will end up better-off than ever. Instead, what is needed is a direct assault on wealth, not welfare. Moyn is blunt about this: the solution to the problem of gerontocracy in America is the expropriation of the assets of older citizens who have far more than they need. This money could then be used to expand rather than contract the resources the state makes available to an ageing population, including to all those who have seen their nest eggs raided. If old age were more secure for everyone because well-resourced care became universally available then perhaps the sting of seeing your savings shrink might be softened. ‘Care in exchange for expropriation’ is Moyn’s recommendation.

In other words , this is an argument for socialism. It is, as such arguments go, a pretty good one. Old age is naturally semi-socialised anyway. Most of us will end up depending on some form of collective support, even if for the fortunate and/ or better-off among us that might happen in the comfort of our own homes – family care, private nursing, specialised help – rather than in a retirement community or a medical facility. No man or woman is an island as infirmities start to mount. Moyn contends that full socialisation in the form of generously funded state care plus a cultural shift towards quality-of-life concerns rather than either a focus on the sanctity of private property or the supreme value of life extension would meet a near universal need. This could be achieved by ending all the tax breaks and special protections that currently ring-fence the wealth of those beyond retirement age.

It would be perceived as an assault, for sure, but it might ultimately be experienced as a liberation. There would be less to worry about if the availability of the necessary support could be taken for granted. If one were freed from such anxieties there would be more scope to enjoy doing whatever it is one might like to do in retirement and to expend whatever private resources one has on that. Among the original goals of socialism was that it should allow individuals to be more themselves – more selfish if you like – without having to feel guilty about it. If the state takes care of everyone then there is no reason to have a bad conscience about spending what’s yours on you. Old people who don’t spend what’s theirs on anything at all are the ones who could benefit most from that change of approach.

A common vice of books about political transformation written by academics is a tendency to use university life as an illustration of what’s possible. Look: deliberative democracy works well in my little college so why not try it out on society as a whole! But in this case the analogy is quite helpful. Moyn writes about the remorseless greying of his own institution – Yale Law School – where the elimination of a mandatory retirement age coupled with increased life expectancy has produced a much older faculty. In the 1980s, only one professor was over 65 and none was over 70. Now, nearly a third of the professors are over 65 and 15 per cent are over 70. In other law schools, the uncapping of earlier retirement limits has led to the number of 70-and-older professors increasing tenfold. Older professors dominate by their seniority and stifle by their cultural if not their political conservatism.

To deprive older academics of the privileges they have been hoarding is not to cut them off from the benefits of the community to which they belong. They can still write books and give papers and go to seminars and hang out in libraries – in fact, liberated from the administrative burdens of a professional existence they can do more of these things, only without being able to control how their younger colleagues manage it. As someone who quit professional academia aged 57 but still lives in a university town and maintains a connection with the institution for which I worked, I can testify to the truth of this. I enjoy going to seminars more than I used to. I enjoy reading academic papers more than I used to. I don’t have to sit in meetings that take all day and go nowhere. I don’t have to worry about how to mark a piece of work that has almost certainly been written by a machine. The price of this emancipation is having no say in the way the university goes about its business and a less well-padded income than I had in the past. It feels like a good bargain.

That said, the United States is not a university. It is a complex modern society, a ruthlessly leveraged capitalist economy and a barely functioning representative democracy. The last of these is the biggest problem. Even if socialism for old people is a good idea whose merits might emerge over time, how are you going to win an election on that basis? Gerontocracy in America is rooted in the unequal distribution of wealth but it is reinforced by the unequal distribution of political influence. The money shores up the power and the power shores up the money. Campaign finance reform might help but it still leaves the challenge of overcoming the disproportionate influence of older voters, who remain the biggest barriers to change.

Moyn canvasses the various options to address this, whether lowering the voting age – to twelve, to six, to birth – or simply instituting a system of proxy voting so that younger voters get their interests represented by those closest to them. He suggests that 18 to 25-year-olds could vote twice in each election – ‘once for themselves and once for the younger cohort they can represent virtually’. An alternative is to give parents extra votes for each of their children, a scheme sometimes championed by natalists who hope it might boost the birth rate. My own view is that letting children vote would be preferable to having some adults get more votes than others, though I can see it is largely a question of personal taste. But there is something fantastical about all these schemes. How will they ever get adopted? There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to unwinding the power of the elderly, since the fear from which they might be liberated makes the act of liberation deeply unappealing to them. Older voters would already have to be quieted in order for older voters to be quieted. It’s not going to work.

Economic inequality is exceptionally difficult for democratic systems to remedy in the absence of a massive structural shock. In The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century (2017), the economic historian Walter Scheidel argued that only the most violent disruptions consistently reduce inequality over time: war, revolution, famine, plague. It is destruction on a societal scale that equalises the distribution of risk since past a certain point there is no escape even for the wealthy. We did have our own plague recently but it wasn’t extreme enough to make a significant difference to generational inequality. In fact, far from redressing the imbalance, Covid tended to exacerbate it. As a disease that primarily affected the old (in the US, deaths among the over 65s accounted for more than 80 per cent of the total and nearly a third of all fatalities were among those aged above 85), it required that government policy was geared towards protecting the elderly. Younger citizens had to pay a price for keeping older cohorts alive and this included lost education and disrupted working lives.

At the same time, Covid exposed the glaring inequalities among older generations. The primary killing zones included long-term care facilities for the elderly, especially larger institutions with low staff-to-resident ratios and high levels of shared room occupancy. In other words, the sorts of place you might end up in if you can’t find anything better. Older people who started the pandemic in better health, who could stay in their own homes or relocate to well-resourced care homes, were more likely to survive. To be better-off before the pandemic was the best indicator of how well off you would emerge from it. Something similar was true of the other great disaster of recent decades, the financial crisis that began in late 2007. As Moyn writes, ‘in the three years from 2007 to 2010, while the average income of all age groups under 65 dropped, by more and more the younger they were, it rose for those 65 and over. Whereas those under 35 saw their average income drop by almost 4 per cent in that period, those over 75 saw theirs spike by 6 per cent.’ When catastrophe strikes in the age of bank bailouts and stay-at-home orders, to those who have shall be given more.

Moyn doesn’t have much to say about what is going to move the dial. A pandemic that – like the Spanish flu of 1918-20 – primarily afflicts the young? National bankruptcy? A revolution? This is a very US-centric book, which is understandable given its subject matter, but the rest of the world is treated rather glibly as a site of alternative possibilities without much explanation of the way these were achieved. Scandinavia, Moyn says, ‘is already close to a communal paradise for the old’, with extensive government-funded long-term care. But there is no description of the social conditions that made it possible. Meanwhile, the UK is described in terms I hardly recognise. On the one hand, we are told that the British government does at least have general state provision for long-term care, which would probably come as news to those people scrabbling to make up for the gaping holes in the system. On the other, Moyn says that the drive to achieve ‘entitlement reform’ in the US was in part inspired by ‘Britain’s experiment in “neo-liberalising” old age, when benefits across the Atlantic were slashed.’ When was this, exactly? It’s easy to caricature other countries – for better and for worse – when you are consumed with the inadequacies of your own.

Still, Moyn’s case is arresting. He can’t say how America will remedy its gerontocratic bias, but he is entirely convincing that something will have to give. His book is an antidote to the routine claim that modern democracies are already taxed to the limit. A wealth tax, it is said, would simply drive the wealthy to move elsewhere. A property tax would be unworkable because a home is more than simply a liquid asset. Estate duties are massively unpopular because they appear to pursue people beyond the grave after they have already been taxed in life (hence the misleading but brilliantly effective label ‘the death tax’). Income taxes can’t go much higher without stifling economic activity and snuffing out entrepreneurship.

None of this is true. There is no upper ceiling on taxation – it all depends on the circumstances. During the Second World War income tax on higher earners in the UK reached 98 per cent and taxes on excess corporate profits were at 100 per cent. After the war it was understood that what had appeared to be political impossibilities were actually perfectly possible in extreme circumstances. As a consequence the postwar Labour government, though effectively broke, was nonetheless able to construct an extensive welfare state, including a national health service, that persists in some form to this day. It wouldn’t have happened without the war – a set-in-its-ways parliamentary democracy wouldn’t have made such a leap on its own. Waiting for another war to work the same magic on 21st-century politics would be crazy, not least because wars can be lost as well as won. But the rest of the century looks wide open when it comes to the possibility of unforeseen upheavals, whether geopolitical, climatic, technological, biological or something else. When the established order is shaken then new distributions and dispensations don’t simply become possible, they become necessary. Meanwhile, enjoy your retirement, if you can.

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