Samuel Moyn on Why Old People Are Ruining America
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I think black people should have more votes than I do. John Stuart Mill believed, you know, something that I don't believe, which is that those of us with doctorates should have more votes. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Do old people rule America? Why is it that our last two presidents
have been so old? Why is it that there are so many old people in the Senate and to some extent in the House of Representatives? Is it true that even in academia, in private industry, old people now have a disproportional amount of power? And is this a specifically American problem, or do the United States actually compare well in this regard to Germany or China or other countries around the world? And what should we do about all of that?
Should we, for example, give 20-year-olds six, seven times more votes than 80-year-olds? Well, that is what my guest in this episode of the podcast argues. Samuel Moyne is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and he is the author of a new book called Gerontocracy in America. In the last part of this conversation, we talk about a couple of rather different topics from earlier in Sam's work. We talk about his attempts to historicize and perhaps to some extent attack the importance, the prominence of human rights discourse in our contemporary politics.
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