The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | April 24, 2026 | No Comments

Yale Law Professor Samuel Moyn

Very seldom do I use the same headline twice in one week, but seldom does an idea as monstrously bad as Samuel Monyn’s attract my attention. To summarize as succinctly as possible, Moyn’s argument is this: “Old people have too much stuff. We should kill them and steal their stuff.”

Have I exaggerated for the sake of brevity? Perhaps so, but the subtext of Moyn’s book-length argument (Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It) is pretty clear — everything wrong in America is because of old people, and therefore we should adopt policies to inflict harm on these elderly enemies. If you’re 65 or older, you are analogous to a Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and Professor Moyn is Radio Hutu. This is simply hate propaganda, demonizing the elderly, and nothing good will come of it. Both Ed Morrissey and Matt Taibbi have taken stabs at explaining what’s wrong with Moyn’s idea, as expressed in the professor’s New York Times op-ed.

“Ageism” identifies an enduring phenomenon: the mistreatment of older people for no reason other than being older. Americans in middle age and beyond are routinely passed over for opportunities because of the irrelevant fact of a number on paper or how they act and look after getting older.
In today’s world, the unfair discrimination they cite coexists with a different kind of unfairness: a gerontocratic society in which the old control ever more power and wealth, leading to overrepresentation in political life and unequal power in social life.
It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans and national priorities — it is critical to the future of our democracy and society. America needs to confront gerontocracy before the system collapses under the weight of its inequality and injustice.
Older Americans deserve a say over the future even when they might not live to see it. But they do not deserve the stranglehold over it they currently enjoy through overrepresentation in elections, which produces too many regressive policies and too many seniors in the highest offices. . . .
The United States has one of the highest wage inequality by age of any country in the world, and the numbers keep getting worse: The pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 widened 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. The share of workers over 55 in the work force rose 88 percent in those same years.
Housing follows the same pattern. Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate in the country’s best cities, and they are not moving. . . .

You can read the rest, but ask yourself how Professor Moyn would react to these arguments about “overrepresentation” and “unequal power,” etc., if we replaced the phrase “older people” with one word: Jews.

The headline “Jews Are Hoarding America’s Potential” would probably not be published by the New York Times, nor would the author of such a piece have a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, let alone a tenured faculty position at Yale Law School. What is offensive about crude anti-Semitism is the same thing that offends me about Professor Moyn’s argument, i.e., that such scapegoating involves collective blame, and that this invalid categorization of guilt simultaneously creates an invalid category of allegedly innocent victims. This blame game is a distraction. It’s like the Black Lives Matters movement yelping about “systemic racism” and “white privilege” when the problem is (checks notes) criminals getting killed by police while resisting arrest.

Because I am 66 years old — and thus, according to Professor Moyn, part of the gerontocracy that is oppressing younger Americans — let me ask a few questions: How do I, specifically, “control ever more power and wealth”? How much of “the most desirable real estate” do I own? How am I exercising a “stranglehold” and benefiting from a “pay gap”? My kids own more real estate than I do, and my lawyer son’s starting pay at his first job is more than I’m earning after 40 years in journalism.

Trying to scapegoat me because of a statistical trend — the “pay gap” that “widened 61 percent” in a 40-year period — would be offensive even if the underlying numbers were not demonstrably invalid, but in fact this alleged trend is an apples-and-oranges comparison which ignores the fact that the overall quality of young people has changed since the 1970s, and not in a good way. Whatever problems my generation had as teenagers back in the day, the vast majority of us at least came from two-parent married households. If my now-adult offspring are doing better than the average member of their own generation, it’s probably due in large measure to this factor — my wife and I got married and have stayed married, and at least tried to give our kids an old-fashioned wholesome sort of upbringing. Professor Moyn is obsessed with demonizing old people for “hoarding” wealth, but how much of the widening gap between young and old is actually due to declines in the average socioeconomic background of young people caused by rising rates of out-of-wedlock births and the prevalence of divorce? And what about the role of mass immigration in this generational trend? Professor Moyn doesn’t mention that at all, but let us just ask: What percentage of American 18-year-olds were the children of immigrants in 1978, versus today’s 18-year-olds? What would it look like if you charted the U.S. percentage of immigrant population over time, as one line, and the “pay gap” as another line?

Professor Moyn is certainly not alone in ignoring this factor. Twenty or 30 years ago, I recall seeing politicians and pundits bemoaning “the growing gap between rich and poor” in America, even while those same people had nothing to say about mass immigration. If you are importing tens of millions of impoverished Third World refugees — which has been our de facto policy for decades — it is hardly a surprise to see an increase in the “poor” side of this “growing gap” that you’re complaining about, no matter what your policy is toward the rich. But of course, the people doing the complaining were liberals, predictably arguing for economic redistribution, rather than actually trying to solve the problem (which their own policies have caused). Sic semper hoc — liberal policies fail, and then liberals tell us that the solution is more liberalism.

Because he has chosen the elderly as scapegoats, and because he is a liberal, Professor Moyn is oblivious to all of this. He has another long essay in Harper‘s magazine, with this interesting section:

At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world— — and America above all –­ once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.
The age pyramid — ­which decreed almost as a law across space and time that the younger the humans, the more of them there were — has been rebuilt. There is still a narrowing tip in the upper echelons, because people still die. But below it, the structure is a rectangle, with steady-­state survival of most cohorts, and some younger groups smaller than some older ones. The rectangle is slowly ascending in height, which means that, where there was once a smaller proportion of people over forty, now more than half the population in some countries, and just about half in America, are above that age. Our current median age is nearing forty, up from thirty in 1980 and from the mid-­teens early in our national history. And while the trends in life extension have been irresistible, the coincidence of a declining birth rate with the ongoing survival of the baby boomers is creating an especially lopsided upper age cohort. There were just under five million Americans aged sixty-­five or older in 1920, accounting for less than 5 percent of the population; now there are more than fifty-­five million, making up almost 17 percent of the total.

Wow, talk about bias — it’s like he’s looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The “startling demographic transformation” has far more to do with declining fertility than with “gerontocracy.”

U.S. total fertility rate (TFR), 1950-2023

Total fertility rate (TFR) “represents the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with age-specific fertility rates of the specified year.” It is the standard metric of reproductive behavior used for all comparisons, whether between nations, or ethnic groups within nations, or between the same groups over time. While I have seen Census Bureau data that differs slightly from the numbers on this particular chart (i.e., with TFR peaking in 1957, rather than 1960), the overall trend is roughly the same. At the peak of the postwar “Baby Boom,” American women were having so many babies that it was more common for a family to have four children than to have “only” three.

However, once those children reached adulthood — the first Baby Boomers, born in 1946, turned 18 in 1964 — birth rates swiftly plummeted, and by 1973 were below “replacement rate” (2.1 TFR) needed to maintain population stability. For more than 15 years, TFR never reached replacement level and, when it finally (and just barely) did so in 1990, this was mainly due to higher birth rates among immigrant women, of whom there were a lot more than there had been 15 years earlier.

Every time I bring up this topic, two responses are typical — first, personal defensiveness, with people who have few children (or none) acting as if they have been accused of wrongdoing. Secondly, there is the economic excuse, the claim that young people “can’t afford” to have kids. Yet this excuse ignores the obvious fact that poor people are actually having more kids than rich people. The actual explanation, I would argue, involves what we may called lifestyle expectations. If you grow up in affluent circumstances, it is natural to believe you shouldn’t have kids until you can afford to give them a similarly affluent upbringing. And if both husband and wife are working full-time (as is the case for nearly all middle-class couples), childbearing almost unavoidably means taking a step down the economic ladder, however temporary it may be. Either (a) mom has to stay home to care for the children for a few years or (b) you have to pay someone else for childcare. Because I am the father of six children, I have extensive direct experience in the difficulties involved, and all I can say is what my dad told me when our oldest was just a wee baby: “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’d never have children.” You just bite the bullet.

Having done my part, personally, to combat demographic decline, I disavow any blame for a trend caused by other people’s choices.

Some people choose to go to Yale University, for example, but I wouldn’t go near the place — full of dangerous degenerates like Samuel Moyn — and I’d urge others to heed my warning. Elite academic know-it-alls have been the architects of our societal disaster (e.g., Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich) and cannot be trusted to provide solutions to the problems they have themselves caused. And I’ve been saying this since long before I was old enough to join the “gerontocracy.”



 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

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