How to Put an End to Problem of American Gerontocracy (in the Nicest Possible Way)

A dynamic and innovative society, focused most on launching people into the prime of their lives, depends on taking good care of those aging out of it, if only to keep the threat of gerontocracy at bay. Our neoliberal age has pitted creativity against care. But there is no way to prize the first without privileging the second, too.

How we can get to a collective society in which anyone’s and everyone’s needs are covered by those with means is one of the longest (and longest-winded) debates in modern history. However, nobody to date has proposed doing so by overturning gerontocracy. Bear with me.

The biggest difference opponents of gerontocracy might make today, in fact, is putting a positive spin on senior status: building up fairness as a collective goal for all, and prizing retirement as an ideal time to pivot to new kinds of tasks. The final phase of life may end in death, but it is also one of great potential.

It is not just that older Americans will need a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of disempowerment go down. It is that everyone deserves importance and meaning as long as they live. Sweetening the dose of disempowerment, the higher taxes and the mandatory retirement, by providing new opportunities is likely to make it more acceptable, to the old not least. Only the ideal of supported and worthy retirement can ultimately make old people hoarding power more generous to their younger contemporaries than they are now.

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Put simply, this new deal consists of care in exchange for expropriation. Dying broke, as property and resource transfer is incentivized or forced, requires the swap of increased support. Unlike elder politicians and voters, those with excess power in the private realm might deserve compensation for losing it. Not only do they need alternative sources of relevance and significance along the way, but they also need guaranteed care until their last breath, if only to convince them to go along with an inspiring rejuvenation of society.

Everyone deserves a sense of relevance until the end.

After all, a lot of the motivation for hoarding as people age is due to fear of mistreatment when physical decline makes reliance on oth-ers indispensable. The historian Hendrik Hartog has shown that the American practice had once been to make intrafamilial promises of inheritance, even pittances, in exchange for support: “care for me,” in effect, “and you will get my property.” That changed in recent decades as younger people became more mobile and as care for older ones who can pay for private care was marketized. But the continuing lack of an American welfare state motivates retention of acquired wealth for a rainy or rickety day. It might even justify that retention as death is indefinitely postponed, and not merely motivate it psychologically. Would you give up much of your money if you will almost certainly need it to buy someone’s services to help you when you are too far gone to help yourself?

Which is where socialism comes in. Older Americans might even model it for the rest of us, as compassion and care for the old are bound up with their disempowerment and expropriation. I know: Americans famously reject socialism. Yet they are already closer to it for seniors than for any other age group. That isn’t saying a lot of course. But where American eldercare leaves a lot to be desired, the Scandinavian model of entitlements is already close to a communal paradise for the old, including the government-funded long-term care imagined by Democrats like Kamala Harris, who proposed it in her failed presiden-tial campaign. At the same time, however, it is precisely elder power and wealth in America that stands in the way of completing socialism for the old, let alone extending it to everyone else.

The great irony of retirement today is that it is out of reach for many who want it, and refused by many who can have it. Gerontoc-racy works through that refusal today. But that is why the attack on gerontocracy has to make retirement more attractive and sustainable, not less.

Cicero has been my nemesis in this book, for unconscionably grasping for elder power and offering up rationales for doing so repeated over the centuries. Yet his idealized portrait of retirement is one to reclaim and realize. “There is satisfaction in the knowledge of a life well spent and the memory of many things well done,” he re-marked in his tract. Once the fact that he was plotting a return to power as an old man is bracketed, the Roman orator’s idealized por-trait of retirement is worth reclaiming for our collective future. It can give older people a worthy out from their lordly striving.

Honoré de Balzac, the anti-capitalist novelist who trolled old misers, also observed that too many who do call it a day end up finding proxies for their repetitious work routines: “Some die outright; oth-ers take to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of their late employment.” Not going to lie: I have always found fishing incredibly boring, too. It’s no worse than pickleball, I suppose. Whatever people do with it, retirement should allow continuing some elements of old patterns in new forms, since continuity and familiarity matter. Ideally, retirement can also permit reinventing one’s life with different capacities and priorities.

Equally vital, aging misers addicted to their vocations need palliatives and surrogates for the drug of importance. Everyone deserves a sense of relevance until the end. Those unable to imagine replacing or transforming their jobs in the final stage of life are owed help in reimagining the meanings of their lives as they confront a new stage defined by changes and endings. Imagine, then, the utopia of manda-tory retirement with ongoing relevance for retirees built in, inducted into high-status leisure, including new forms of work for those who want it, generally on a volunteer basis.

Contrary to those who have proposed that ending vocations devastates identity, there is “no indication that highly work-oriented peo-ple are unable to take up leisure roles; in fact, just the opposite.” Many high-end retirement communities create small-scale paradises with activities all day for hobbyists, lifelong learners, and social butterflies. If bingo makes the rest of your life worth living, then fine, but today there is so much else for the privileged, which all elder Americans deserve, too. And it should prove possible to make some provision for those who need forms of their vocations, just without the power of holding on to their jobs and salaries. Elder volunteers, for example, have creatively found ways either to change a beat or continue their long-honed vocations, depending on what suits them.

Old age doesn’t have to be about disengagement or withdrawal, even when it is inevitably about transformation. “So people who declare that there are no activities for old age are speaking beside the point,” Cicero observed, rebutting anyone tempted to equate age with irrelevance and uselessness. “It is like saying that the pilot has noth-ing to do with sailing a ship because he leaves others to climb the masts and run along the gangways and work the pumps.” It is just that those who once enjoyed social and political power will have to learn to direct the alternative crafts of the rest of their lives.

Universities, currently epitomizing the gerontocratic turn of American workplaces, could easily be transformed into models for dignified retirement once mandatory age limits are restored.

I vividly remember, when I was a young teacher, the disregard and mistreatment a senior colleague suffered when he made the selfless choice to relinquish his post. It enabled the hiring of a much younger colleague, fluent and interested in the trends of the day, rather than a representative of past ones. But the way my older colleague was treated at the end was beastly. Immediately, he lost his office of forty years. At Columbia University, space is tight. In the hallway, he staged a somber giveaway of all the valuable books he could not take home, and then was forced to slink off into obscurity, rarely to be seen again. If the alternative to working forever is being reduced to a nonentity, why would anyone take it, until they could no longer do the bare minimum?

The end of gerontocracy depends on making retirement great as a necessary part of an intentional social project of rejuvenation.

No wonder that enlightened institutions soften the blow of retirement. Some reduction in status is inevitable. (Death, the ultimate indignity, is, too.) But some universities almost function as high-end senior centers nowadays, offering collegial networks, intellectual stimulation, and some resources. Less space-constrained than Columbia, Harvard and Yale provide retired faculty complete inclusion in intellectual life, free lunches, even smaller offices and staffing for emeritus professors. Unlike in fields where avocations have to replace callings, academic retirees go on to pen as many articles and books as decline permits. In a pinch, they offer courses for reduced salary.

For those who prefer to learn rather than teach, there are as many classes and lectures as you like. Before he died at eighty-five in 2001, the University of Cambridge don Peter Laslett even founded a University of the Third Age movement internationally, and then virtually, to organize education for retirees like himself. After all, assuming new tasks requires another round of training, not just for middle-aged workers changing careers but also for retirees adopting new pursuits. Americans near universities enjoy lifelong-learning programs to be equipped and enriched.

All such faculty lose, after having spent their final years before retirement at the top of the institutional income pyramid, is their paycheck and their power. Similarly, law firms that force out partners between sixty-five and seventy retain their services (usually with an office and staff) as elder statespeople and wise counselors. They have made millions through their annual shares in the firm. They can stick around in lesser roles if they like, or snowbird in Arizona or Florida sooner or later, with means to do so.

That very same example suggests that there is still cultural work to do in facilitating life transition. In spite of the ideal retirement that large-firm lawyers are forced to take, nowadays it is becoming harder to exit them. More and more often, exemptions to age limits are given to rainmakers. Some firms incentivize hoarding clients even as the end approaches. Those who do retire witness fellow seniors allowed to stay in the firm, not to mention friends in other professions with no comparable limits. “Firms with really good cultures help everyone understand that this transition is in the best interest of the clients and is best for the institution,” commented one lawyer in defense of the practice. “If there is a lot of trust and love in the partnership, things can work.”

I get it: cutting millions off from their vocation is a psychological blow that is probably impossible to soften entirely. But it is possible to soften it a lot. This is why, if mass retirement is going to spread across professional life, mandatory limits will have to be joined with other policies designed to make one end another beginning. John Maynard Keynes dreamed of an end to work, and some of the most radical and visionary progressive utopias today involve envisioning an abundant society beyond the need for labor. If it’s a good idea, why not start with those who have already worked, especially when they are justifiably deprived of careers they learned to love?

It is hardly just a matter of a soft landing into old-age welfare protections for those who need them. The end of gerontocracy depends on making retirement great as a necessary part of an intentional social project of rejuvenation. Only in that way can the disempowerment of elders occur on acceptable terms, and therefore occur at all.

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From Gerontocracy in America. Used with the permission of the publisher, FSG. Copyright © 2026 by Samuel Moyn