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Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

economist.com

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Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#41

Post by JuniperMesos »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #7

Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further. What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been…

I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of younger people.

This is a massive change from the situation of most of human history, where your life was extremely likely to be substantially similar to that of your grandparents, so anything useful they had learned and could pass on to you was likely to continue being useful. The rate of change in human life really started to accelerate with the industrial revolution, now some three centuries old; but humanity is now in a state where massive changes are happening much faster than the passage of human generations.

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#42

Post by JuniperMesos »

einpoklum wrote: post #13

Biden, Trump, Schumer, Feinstein, McConnel say: "What's that, sonny? Ask me again after my afternoon nap." ---- Anyway, the article's author seems to be quite the hard-line capitalist: > "The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent... is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does." So, even though society's productive capacity is incredibly high, having risen and risen over two centuries of indust…

> That is, people don't starve because there's not enough food, they aren't homeless because there are not enough houses and apartments, they are not left untreated for medical conditions for lack of doctors and nurses etc.

People don't actually starve today, because food scarcity is now a problem humanity has almost-entirely solved (the exceptions are war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa, not anywhere in a developed country). But there are many people who are homeless who would be if housing costs were somewhat cheaper because the housing supply was bigger; and there are many people who don't get enough medical attention because the time of doctors and nurses is scarce and therefore expensive - this is why there's so much interest in using AI for medical questions and examinations.

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#43

Post by jrflowers »

zdragnar wrote: post #24
jyounker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing. There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed…

If you look at the actual numbers, the trend over the last several decades is a steadily shrinking number of people in poverty in the US. If the only thing you look at are the wage gaps, you're ignoring the very real gains the lower end of the spectrum have made. If the choice were to be poor then or poor now, I'd much rather be poor now.

The number of people in the prison/jail/probation/parole systems in the US has gone up ~16x since the 1970s

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration...

While the population of the US has gone up by ~1.6x during that same period.

Seeing as convictions aren’t spread evenly across income brackets, a poor person’s chances of being in the carceral system outpacing population growth by a factor of ten doesn’t really jibe with the whole “there’s never been a better time to be poor” thing

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#44

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

zdragnar wrote: post #29
nswango wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's exactly the grandparent's point. Those conflicts are all the pretexts - they believe that it's actually class war and the other labels are all used to avoid calling it by its name.

It isn't class warfare if the two (or more) sides aren't divided by class. What OP meant was the income and wealth gaps are they only things they care about, not the only things that are real.

No, it's the empirical fact that the US is a plutocratic oligarchy. The oligarchy runs the economy, the government, and the media for its own benefit, and is violently opposed to anything that challenges this.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#45

Post by Pikamander2 »

The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.

As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#46

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #36
atoav wrote: post #9

The word becoming implies it isn't one as of now. The median age of the population in the US is 39. The median age of the Senate is 65. In other countries 65 is retirement age. So you could say, yes "America" (the US) is a gerontocracy.

The Latin word "senate" originally mean "council of elders", and is transparently related to "senex", meaning "old man". It's pretty ordinary in human society for the decision-makers to be primarily comprised of old people who have lived a long time and seen a lot.

Roman senators were 40-50

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003.09.49/

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#47

Post by lifestyleguru »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #41
lifestyleguru wrote: post #7

Welcome to the honorable club with with Italy and Germany. What's very specific is that the old pull up the ladder. They don't pass the knowledge, nor experience, not a single cent trickles down, no power is delegated. Even the opposite, with help of immediate family they vacuum up the money and power even further. What's quite mindblowing for an outside observer is that the birth year of American president has been…

I don't think that old people today are systematically willing or unwilling to pass down their knowledge and experience. But an underrated phenomenon of the modern world is that human society is now changing quickly enough that the knowledge and experience that old people have gained over their lifetimes is very likely to be out-of-date, irrelevant, or even actively-counterproductive with respect to the conditions of…

Not really. Medicine, engineering, law all are a sum of intergenerational knowledge.

Yet everytime I deal with healthcare I encounter some <30 years old kids who learn medicine from scratch and have only 5 minutes of their time for me. Reading about medicine fells like reading science fiction. We seem to know everything about a human, yet in practice you might die or become crippled even from a trivial problem.

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#48

Post by lstodd »

CurtMonash wrote: post #37
lifestyleguru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up, Obama is the only exception.

Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump were all born within a 2 month period in 1946. JFK, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41 all served in fairly junior roles in WW2, even if Reagan just made training films and so on. LBJ pretended to serve in the same war. (He went out on one bombing mission as some kind of observer and was awarded a Silver Star, after which he stopped bothering the military and went back to his real career.)

We really need some kind of interstellar war right now so that next presidents can serve in some junior roles.

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#49

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

einpoklum wrote: post #13

Biden, Trump, Schumer, Feinstein, McConnel say: "What's that, sonny? Ask me again after my afternoon nap." ---- Anyway, the article's author seems to be quite the hard-line capitalist: > "The only plausible way to keep public pensions solvent... is for retirement ages to rise as life expectancy does." So, even though society's productive capacity is incredibly high, having risen and risen over two centuries of indust…

It's The Economist promoting the party line, as usual.

"The economy is precarious and someone has to pay for that. This is a you problem. Don't look at us. Nothing to do with decades of neoliberal piracy."

Re: Is America becoming a gerontocracy?

#50

Post by defrost »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #46
JuniperMesos wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Latin word "senate" originally mean "council of elders", and is transparently related to "senex", meaning "old man". It's pretty ordinary in human society for the decision-makers to be primarily comprised of old people who have lived a long time and seen a lot.

Roman senators were 40-50 https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2003/2003.09.49/

From an alternative source, that varied:

  What period are we talking about? In the monarchy, the Senate were all men who could no longer serve in the military, generally believed to be at least 60 or older, and generally numbered 100-200 men.

  With Sulla's reforms in the 1st century BCE, you had a minimum age of 31, total population of about 600, with about 5% of that group needing replacement every year. The "elder statesmen" then were for the most part those in their 40s and 50s, with the handful of Senators who were older and had beaten the odds still around, [ ... ]

  By the Flavian dynasty, if you had military experience you could join as early as 25 and the body was as many as 900-1200 by the end of the 2nd century CE, filled as the Emperor saw fit.
~ https://old.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/1eptqj2/do_we_...

( Yes, Reddit .. but one of the better (for accuracy and comment quality) corners )

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