Yale Professor Samuel Moyn Proposes Giving Younger People More Votes: The Debate About Aging Has Become a Debate About Rights
Yale Professor Samuel Moyn Proposes Giving Younger People More Votes: The Debate About Aging Has Become a Debate About Rights
In July interviews about his book “Gerontocracy in America,” Moyn argues that power, wealth, and the electorate in the United States are too heavily weighted toward older generations. His proposals include age limits for some public offices and different political weight for people with different amounts of life remaining.
On 13 July, The New York Times devoted a separate video report to this debate. Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, had just published “Gerontocracy in America,” the book at the center of the discussion.
In his definition, gerontocracy is the concentration of power among older generations through wealth, property, and the design of the electoral system. In a 9 July interview with Yale University, Moyn cites the following figures: half of the members of the US Congress are over 60 years old, half of voters are 52 or older, and workers over 55 account for about a quarter of the workforce, compared with 10% in 1990. He links this pattern to the greater difficulty younger people face in securing housing, employment, and political representation.
Moyn does not limit his proposal to replacing the people in Congress. He suggests considering age limits for some public offices, compulsory voting, and a different method of counting votes. In a debate with political scientist Yascha Mounk, he explains his reasoning as follows: a person who will live longer with the consequences of a law has a greater stake in it. This leads him to propose giving younger people greater political weight.
At this point, the debate about aging becomes a debate about the value of remaining life. Moyn wants to protect future generations from decisions whose consequences they will live with for the longest time. Yet age is a poor way to distinguish those who hold power from those who lack rights. He acknowledges that older people without wealth also suffer under the current system. Wealth and influence are concentrated among a minority, while age often merely correlates with that concentration.
Radical life extension makes his argument both more dangerous and easier to assess. If political weight depends on expected lifespan, the state gains a reason to reduce a person’s vote precisely because that person will live longer. Health and survival then become grounds for limiting a political right.
The same problem has already appeared in the debate about space resources that may determine how long a person can live. In that case, wealthy people can buy more time to live. In Moyn’s proposal, lifespan becomes the criterion by which the state assigns different political weight. In both cases, access to rights depends on the length of a person’s life.
Gerontocracy emerges when power does not change hands, wealth accumulates, and access to decision making is closed. Younger people need representation and protection for their future. Older people need full rights and reliable social protection. The effort to overcome death requires a universal right to a long life, not the allocation of civil rights by age.