Don’t Blame Older Generations for Society’s Structural Problems

To the editor:

It is disappointing to see Inside Higher Ed devote space to extending publicity for a book with harmful, extremist views about the aging of our country’s population. Matt Reed’s June 22 piece, “‘Gerontocracy in America’: A Review,” focuses on the newly published work by Samuel Moyn and gives him credit for “making a serious attempt to address a real problem.”

The supposed “problem,” the premise of Moyn’s book, is the ageist trope that older people uniquely and disproportionately contribute to certain problems in American society.

Moyn’s policy prescriptions range from extreme to extremely ridiculous. He has proposed weighting votes of younger people more heavily than other generations, implementing age-correlated tax rates and incentivizing older people to leave their homes. It’s beneath the standards of Insider Higher Ed to bring up fringe ideas like these for serious debate. No other demographic group would be talked about in such a manner.  

Americans aged 65 and older are far from a monolithic bloc in our society. We are all aging in diverse ways, and we all contribute throughout our lives to social programs that benefit us as we age. Everyone deserves the opportunity to engage fully in society, live in the homes we have worked hard to afford and continue to thrive in the communities we love.

Strengthening intergenerational connections, rather than deepening divides, is key to helping our communities address the challenges we face together. Generations are collections of diverse individuals, not single-minded groups. Framing today’s structural problems as the fault of a single generation overlooks the complex interplay of social structures and diverts attention away from ways generations can collaborate to create solutions. 

The public health advances that have allowed us to live longer, healthier and more productive lives also allow us to continue contributing to communities and fueling economic growth. As we learn from the work of the National Center to Reframe Aging, if we further normalize demeaning language about older adults (or any age segment), we risk embedding those attitudes deeper into our institutions and our culture—ultimately compromising the potential and well-being of the entire nation.