Samuel Moyn at Harper’s Magazine:
At the core of the gerontocracy’s rise is a historical irony. The modern world—and America above all—once stood for youth, novelty, and energy. And yet the same modernity that gave us democracy and other forms of progress also prompted scientific advances that prolonged life. Those advances drove a startling demographic transformation that has increased the proportion of elders in our society, unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress. Call it the Great Aging.
The age pyramid—which decreed almost as a law across space and time that the younger the humans, the more of them there were—has been rebuilt. There is still a narrowing tip in the upper echelons, because people still die. But below it, the structure is a rectangle, with steady-state survival of most cohorts, and some younger groups smaller than some older ones. The rectangle is slowly ascending in height, which means that, where there was once a smaller proportion of people over forty, now more than half the population in some countries, and just about half in America, are above that age. Our current median age is nearing forty, up from thirty in 1980 and from the mid-teens early in our national history.
more here.
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