Moyn's Gerontocracy Critique: Valid Diagnosis, Radical Prescription
The Gist
Moyn correctly notices that America is run by old people in government and business, but instead of suggesting normal fixes like term limits, he proposes giving kids' votes to college students—a radical change to how voting itself works, not a modest institutional tweak.
Conclusion
Samuel Moyn, in contrast, identifies a real phenomenon (gerontocracy in politics and corporate America) but proposes radical, structurally destructive solutions (like giving children's proxy votes to college students) rather than good-faith reform.
Premises
- Samuel Moyn has published essays and public commentary explicitly diagnosing 'gerontocracy'—the concentration of political and corporate power in aging elites—as a genuine structural problem in American life.
- Independent empirical data on the advanced age of Congressional leadership, Supreme Court tenure, and Fortune 500 CEOs corroborate the underlying gerontocracy observation Moyn is responding to, establishing that his diagnosis tracks a real phenomenon.
- Rather than advocating incremental reforms that operate within existing constitutional structures (e.g., mandatory retirement ages for justices, congressional term limits, staggered corporate succession requirements), Moyn has floated proposals to extend proxy voting rights for minors to be exercised by young adults or college students.
- Such proxy-voting schemes would require overturning the one-person-one-vote principle and altering the basic constitutional franchise, making them structurally radical rather than adjustments that operate within the existing institutional and constitutional order.
- Good-faith institutional reform typically seeks to correct specific dysfunctions while preserving the foundational rules of the system (equal suffrage, checks and balances), whereas Moyn's proposal seeks to redistribute foundational political power itself along generational lines.
- Commentators across the political spectrum have characterized youth-proxy-vote proposals as reengineering the basis of democratic representation rather than addressing gerontocracy through targeted, procedural fixes.
Assumptions
- Reforms that alter core constitutional principles (like equal individual voting rights) are inherently more radical and destabilizing than reforms that operate within those principles.
- Moyn's public writings and proposals accurately reflect his considered policy commitments rather than being merely provocative thought experiments or rhetorical devices.
- The distinction between 'good-faith reform' and 'radical/destructive' solutions meaningfully hinges on whether a proposal preserves versus fundamentally restructures existing institutional architecture.