GBONEWS: SPECIAL BOOKMOBILE REVIEW–Moyn’s Gerontocracy Book Says Live Shorter and Prosper Not So Much; Journalists in Aging Fellowship Deadline Extended
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations.
July 29, 2026 — Volume 33, Number 7
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. If you have difficulty getting to the full issue of GBONews with the links provided below, simply go to www.gbonews.org to read the latest or past editions.
In This Issue: Our Prediction Market’s Betting on Better Journalism.
1. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Extended Deadline for 17th Journalists in Aging Fellowship: GBONews readers may be pleased to know we’ve stretched the application deadly deadline to next Monday, Aug. 3, 2026—and beyond. If you or reporter friends who might be interested next additional time, have them send me a not by Monday’s deadline to express interest in submitting their application, if they can have more time. Again, have them contact me, Paul Kleyman, pfkleyman@gmail.com, (415) 821-2801, by Aug. 3, 2026.
Selected Fellows receive a $1,500 stipend, plus all expenses covered to attend the training at GSA’s 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting, at National Harbor, MD, Nov. 4-7, 2026. Applications must include a one-to-two-page story pitch for an in-depth project about any research-based aspect of aging. The fellowships are a collaboration between GBONews’ publisher, the Journalists Network on Generations (founded 1993), and the Gerontological Society of America (GSA).
2. THE BOOKMOBILE—A SPECIAL REVIEW
“Moyn’s Gerontocracy Book Says Live Shorter and Prosper Not So Much”
One Journalist’s Half-Century Perspective on Author’s Peculiar Thesis
By Paul Kleyman
The fusillade of social media consternation and commentaries slung at Samuel Moyn’s new book, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), may erroneously suggest that the Yale historian is staunchly conservative. Yet, as the New York Times Book Review’s astute political analyst Jennifer Szalai notes dryly, he is “a man of the left.”
The book’s controversial premise began generating anger from anti-ageism advocates last Spring with the volume’s pre-release fanfare, including a New York Times “Sunday Opinion” piece headlined, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential”, and chapter excerpts in Harper’s Magazine, “The Old Guard: Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis”, plus the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education: “Professors Are Too Old: The academy’s gerontocracy problem is worse than anyone admits”.
Gerontocracy in America promotes the notion that the accrued stature people may attain, especially in their seventies and eighties, has resulted in a roadblock of political power, halting the progress of later generations. The book arrives in the wake of recent national elections, marked by the dubious outcries of numerous pundits, politicos and late-night comedians, against a presumptive “gerontocracy” in Washington, based stereotypes of age with little substance beyond cries of “80!” Old is out—again–although to Moyn, the high-tech rich get a pass.
Yet the Yale historian’s concept of “gerontocracy” hone to no discernible definition of age-consolidated authoritarianism by ingrained party operatives, who inertly perpetuate their power through formal leadership reserved for elders. Think: China’s Politburo.
In the United States Congress, does he imaging an elder-bonded accord between, say, Senators Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, who hardly promulgate tandem views? On the GOP side, House Speaker Mike Johnson, is 54, the same age as Moyn.
Larry Davids vs. Raging Grannies
Elders’ legislative and elective dominance with advancing age, though, is secondary to Moyn’s main evidence that the old have wrested undue influence over the nation’s prosperous potential. He faults civic engagement: The old hold excessive political power because–they vote more than the young. Oh, and he contends that they turn up at town hearings to lobby against their communities’ wider interests.
For this author, the whole influence-wielding lot evokes a mob of fist-shaking Larry Davids shouting “get off my lawn.” Echoing the trope that aging fosters conservatism, he selectively focuses on limited, usually local policy disputes, ignoring, say, the Raging Grannies and so many older protesters, such unnamed other seniors demonstrating from Occupy Wall Street to recent anti-ICE demonstrations.
Elders’ advocate Janine Vanderburg concisely summarized Moyn’s supposedly liberal agenda in her informative, if fancifully titled blog, Slaying the Ageism Dragon: “Older Americans control too much wealth, too many jobs, too many homes, and too many votes. His proposed solutions? Mandatory retirement. Progressive taxes designed to force older homeowners out of their houses. Age ceilings on political office. And — my personal favorite — finding ways to reduce the disproportionately high participation of older adults in local democracy.”
At the Washington Monthly, Noah Berlatsky called Moyn “tone deaf.” He wrote, “Though the book claims to stand on the side of youth and progress, it often seems oddly conservative—and oddly disconnected from our current crises.” The New Republic’s review by Alexander Zaitchik was headlined, “Don’t Blame Old People for American Decline.”
Heralded as the book was by prestigious editorial entities, reviews in mainstream media outlets have been mixed at best, such as The Economist, with stated in a subhead, “A new book spots a real problem and offers terrible solutions.”
And the NYT’s Szalai scoffed at his remark that, among media pundits and politicos, during the 2024 presidential election, “It was sadly on trend to scapegoat old people for exerting a death grip on power.”
She chided the professor for then proceeding “to scapegoat old people for exerting a death grip on power.” Except, the day after her review appeared, the Times included Gerontocracy in America on its list of “7 Books We Love This Week” (July 2, 2026)–ending with a link to Szalai’s unloving review.
My 50-Year Take
Still, regardless of the critical quality of those reviews, I read Gerontocracy in America through my own filter as a journalist who has covered pretty much all of the issues Moyn broaches over the half century since my book, Senior Power: Growing Old Rebelliously (Glide, 1974) came out.
It struck me that, more elementally than the author’s rehashing of old right-left debates, Moyn wrestles viscerally with the underlying political philosophy between the presumption of a limited “pie” of public resources and the more promising vision of expanding resources that may emerge from a more mature and robust aging population.
Lost to Moyn, and evidently to major publishing concerns that have given the book national exposure, is that the professor’s scholarship creaks throughout Gerontocracy in America with simplistic explanations, factual gaps, and retreaded political tropes. In each discourse around America’s social and economic infrastructure, he omits key elements that any debater would find essential to acknowledge in countering opposing views. Among numerous examples:
* Moyn berates older people for causing today’s housing shortage by fomenting the “taxpayer’s revolt” that began with California’s Proposition 13. But he neglects to mention that the law’s capping of property taxes applied not only to residential homes, but to commercial properties–to the tune of up to $12 billion annually, estimated by the California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, in 2019.
* On generational spending, the Yale professor quotes a controversial calculation from a 2013 Urban Institute report calculating that $7 in federal tax dollars goes to older Americans for every $1 allocated for children. Absent is that most children’s funding in the United States is in state spending for education and other child and family services.
But an analysis of that study by the John A. Hartford Foundation (“Misleading Federal Spending Stats Pit Children vs. Older Adults”) explains that combining state and federal spending “shows that the difference declines to a ratio of about 2 to 1 in favor of older adults, down from the hyperbolic 7-to-1.”
That ratio shrinks closer to 1-to-1 when removing the closed system of old age pension payments from the equation. As Hartford’s economists wrote that including “Social Security income as a federal outlay for elders—and not viewing it as a benefit system we all pay into . . . doesn’t make sense.” Also, who’s at fault for exploding Medicare expenditures, as well as Medicaid cuts affecting both ends of the age scale?
* Proposing a new wave of mandatory retirements, the Ivy League history and law educator ignores the current fiscal moment when employers are facing long-predicted labor shortages. Yet he doesn’t at least acknowledge years of international efforts to retain and recruit today’s increasingly healthier senior population by developing age-diverse workplaces. Failure to do so and block age-based job discrimination will cost the United States, alone, $113.5 billion by 2040, according to new research by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
* That the predicted tsunami of dementia has proved wrong in new research deflates Moyn’s mythical allusion to older Americans sinking into inevitable decay. Biodemographers at Duke University demonstrated in “Changing Story of the Dementia Epidemic” (JAMA, March 12, 2025) that the national incidence of dementia plunged from about 30% to 10%, between 1984 and 2024. The prospects of losing one’s “marbles” beyond age 65 have dropped steeply for 90% of us.
The Duke finding is only the latest data showing slow declines with age in various disease process for successive cohorts of older people.
Moyn’s “One-Phase “Life Course vs. “Every Age on Deck”
I couldn’t speculate as to whether Samuel Moyn is despairing of his prospects beyond his next 20 years, but he does offer this narrow political assessment: “Reform must reckon with the life course, registering the inevitability of decline and disappearance. Instead of permitting indefinite retention of authority, our policies should usher people through phases of life. Americans ought to be educated and equipped in one phase.”
He depicts political power in the United States as being dominated by “well-off” elders. Oddly, human development for Moyn ceases after middle-age—the life stage when he feels that more upper-level managers or faculty are thwarting the careers of middle-aged and younger workers, especially “white-collar” professionals. Never mind critiquing outmoded hierarchical business models or economic-political variables (immigration crackdowns, tariff inflation, wars). To this author, it’s older people who are plugging the U.S. jobs bottleneck.
Moyn claims his approach to easing the nation’s economic divide, unlike the harsh policy schemes of past “neoliberals,” such as cutting Social Security and Medicare, actually would strengthen the programs—including new Medicare coverage of long-term care.
Tortuously, he explains that his more generous social safety net would enable “aging men and women [to] rule and enjoy power over the collective future only up to a point, and not only because they decline and die. It is just for them to make way for others to get their turn.”
Life rolls cradle-to-grave for him on a well-greased conveyor belt designed to ease older generations out to Forest Lawn. In his turn, though, the author fails to support his case.
On issue after issue, Moyn exposes a shallowness of research that evidently escaped the thin scrutiny of his elite publisher and editors.
As if in reply to his misguided quest to reinstate mandatory retirements, for example, this June the WEF released its third “Longevity Dividend” report on the employment picture for most of the 32 advanced economies in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The report concludes, in part, “OECD countries . . . will suffer nearly $500 billion in productivity losses by 2040, due to under- and unemployment of adults aged 55-plus relative to younger workers.” The U.S. portion, almost a quarter of that amount (the $113.5 billion previously noted) will drain away without a concerted program to prevent age discrimination and promote multigenerational employment structures, according to the report.
The WEF report concludes, “Tackling ageism can boost productivity, provide health and wealth benefits to individuals and reduce financial reliance on governments. It also provides an opportunity for employers to access under-used skills and experiences of a valuable–and growing–cohort of society.”
Disneyland and the “Taxpayers Revolt”
Elsewhere, Moyn berates adults in later life for causing today’s U.S. housing shortage by fomenting the “taxpayer’s revolt” that began with California’s 1978 Proposition 13. Changing the statute’s cap on commercial property taxes, which he neglected to mention, is far from an arcane detail. The provision, costing state programs $8-$12 billion annually. As recently as the Golden State’s June 2026 primary election, one major gubernatorial candidate, Tom Styer, campaigned for reform, stating, “Disneyland still pays property taxes at the 1978 level.”
As for Moyn’s greedy old homeowners, Jim Schultz, founder of the respected Democracy Center, explained in a 2020 commentary on the Cal Matters news service that when Proposition 13 was on the 1978 ballot, “Typical homeowners were hit with tax hikes of as much as $1,000 dollars per year–four times that in today’s dollars. For the elderly living on fixed incomes, these increases threatened to toss them out of their homes altogether.”
The Ivy League professor’s slant avoids any reference to a myriad of other explanations for today’s housing crisis: the machinations of real estate interests; local hearings held when working residents can’t easily attend; inflationary home-repair costs leaving many, often minority elders, “house rich and cash poor”; insurance and other cost pressures forcing many to sell family homes, often to private investment firms. Meanwhile, politicians have been disparaged for failing to seek revenue sources for community needs, other than property levies, say by increasing corporate and state income taxes.
On this and multiple other concerns in the book, Moyn’s viewpoint forfeits credibility by not providing enough knowledge of divergent considerations to counter, much less learn from them. Curiously, though, the flaws pocking Gerontocracy in America seemed so obvious, I struggled to comprehend why he, much less his prestigious publishers and editors, failed even cursorily to address them.
Whose Billions Now?
As Moyn fabricates his case against older people—strangely not the 1% class—as the primary culprits causing America’s decline, I kept sensing a deeper, underlying motivation for his off-the-monied-track litigation. That many wealthy elders top the roster of campaign donors, as Moyn discusses, shouldn’t surprise anyone. He invokes the likes of GOP stalwart, Miriam Adelson, 80, widow of Sheldon, the late Las Vegas casino magnate. The average billionaire in 2025, as calculated by Forbes, was age 67.3.
Closer to Moyn’s mid-50s, however, are today’s most influential AI/media gazillionaires. Here’s a dozen: Elon Musk, 54; Mark Zuckerberg, 42; Sam Altman, 41; Jeff Bezos, 62; David O. Sacks, 53; Sundar Pichai, 53; Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, 63; Peter Thiel, 58; Mark Andreesen, 54; Michael Dell, 61; and the didactic duo of Paramount and CBS News (farewell, Stephen Colbert and John Dickerson) of Larry Ellison, 81, with his media-mogul son, David, 43. should suggest to anyone with a desktop calculator that today’s diffused population of 61 million Americans ages 65-plus, can’t so easily sit in the Oval Office or jet to Beijing, as influentially as the billionaire class – 59.9.
DOGE-meister Elon Musk, 54; Mark Zuckerberg, 42; Sam Altman, 41; Peter Thiel, 58; Michael Dell, 61; and The Ellisons (David, 43, and his dad, Larry, 81). Average age: 59.9.
Repeatedly, Gerontocracy in America dotes on the generational selfishness of older people and their advocates. In doing so, he overlooked substantial intergenerational initiatives, such as Bill McKibben’s Third Act, for 60-plus activism on climate change; Marc Freedman’s Co-Generate (with younger co-director, Eunice Lin Nichols), which nurtures cross-generational collaborations to address major issues of the day; and Donna M. Butts.
Butts’ nonprofit Generations United (GU) has joined with national child welfare organizations for decades to support grandparents raising their grandchildren, help foster kids, and develop forums, such as to educate older voters about the value of supporting school initiatives on local ballots. Having recently retired from heading GU for nearly three decades, Butts just published her new book, Grandfamilies: Stories of Children and the Loving Relatives Who Raise Them.
Particularly inspiring to current generations of advocates for intergenerational justice, who Moyn fails to acknowledge, was Gray Panthers Founder, Maggie Kuhn, who lost her job at 65 to mandatory retirement.
Kuhn lived long enough, until age 89, to successfully lobby Congress to ban the practice for most areas of employment. In those later years, I’d see her being slowly aided to a stage, where once seated at a table, she would position the microphone with her arthritically crabbed hands, before charging into a galvanizing speech. She’s always concluded by leading the standing-room audience in her Gray Panther Growl. Kuhn’s famous refrain was, “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”
A Generational Creativity Gap
Certain that innovativeness fades with the year, Moyn issues this dire warning to “the left, which neglects at its peril the political effect of seniors in a gerontocratic age. A liberal or radical politics that does not put creativity in our prime at its center and core has lost it way, displaced entirely by caretaking and compassion—essential as these are, especially for older people.”
A simple Google search for “creativity and aging,” though, would have opened his screen to a colorful array of books on the topic, most significantly, the benchmark volume, The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life, (HarperCollins, 2000), by Gene D. Cohen, MD, PhD, former head of the National Institute on Aging.
In his later volume, The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain (Basic Books, 2005), Cohen wrote, “Our personalities, creativity, and psychological selves continue to develop throughout life.”
He continued, “This might seem obvious, but for many decades scientists who study human behavior did not share this view.” In 1907, for instance, Sigmund Freud, at age 51, wrote, “At about fifty the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.” Cohen, observed, “Ironically. . . he wrote some of his greatest works after the age of 65.”
Moyn contends, “Along with our denial of mortality, our inability to age gracefully is due to our unwillingness to accept a third act different from our youth and our prime.” His perplexing notion imagines human life coursing hill, dale and out to pasture. No doubt, the human animal is mortal, but a growing body of research shows that, as commonly as not, people do improve or hold steady after 65, often with increased capability promising to extend not only our life expectancy, but our health spans.
He might have strolled across the Yale campus to talk with nationally distinguished research psychologist Becca R. Levy, PhD, about her latest study, a 12-year longitudinal investigation that’s particularly relevant to his framing. In early 2026 ], the author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live(Morrow, 2022), Levy and her co-investigator, Martin D. Slade, PhD, published the findings of their 12-year longitudinal study. Their article, “Aging Redefined: Cognitive and Physical Improvement with Positive Age Beliefs”, revealed that nearly half (45%) of their study’s 15,000 participants of 65-plus improved physically and/or cognitively over those years.
Their research also exposed a longstanding scientific bias, the presumption embedded, for example, in a World Health Organization assessment tool, which measures only how much older people decline over time. International researchers, Levy and Slade explained, have considered “older persons who improve to be exceptions,” so they haven’t gauged seniors’ capacity to gain in their health or mental acuity, only decline.
Levy, who confirmed in an email that she’s never met Moyn, is widely regarded for her 2002 research showing the older people with very positive attitudes about growing older outlive those extremely negative about their years ahead by a stunning 7.5 years. She is only one scholar among the encyclopedic roster of gerontological experts, who might have tested and better informed his premise that later life offers little besides a downhill slide.
Somehow for Moyn, decades of social and scientific research remain spectral in his text, just as older people tend to be invisible in American culture. Instead of at least addressing the evidence of later-life vitality and contribution, he adopted a policy position that would deny free choice to an enormous population segment based on their “inevitable” deterioration and diminished worth to society.
His Mythical Choice—Unrelenting Fragility
Moyn’s fatalism defaults to the myth of Tithonus, wearily often cited in gerontological papers. This Trojan prince was beloved by the goddess Eos. Her father, Zeus, granted her wish for him to have eternal life, but she neglected to plead for his healthful immortality, condemning him to endless, hopeless, worthless deterioration.
Dispiritingly, Moyn wrote, “Today, we are approaching a time when a legion of Tithonuses will be living in our midst and on a mass scale; and it is having distinctive political and social consequences. The main question is whether the hour is too late in our collective life to arrest and reverse them.”
Once again, Moyn fails in his due diligence to account for genuine research. In this case, Zeus is being kinder to modern-day Tithonuses.” Scientists have showed the declining incidence of dementia from 1984 to 2024, o only one in 10 Americans ages 65-plus, as I noted earlier being reported in JAMA over a year before Gerontocracy in America hit bookstores. Not a matter of one particle of obscure research, this finding comes linked to decades of demographic aging research at Duke and elsewhere tracking incremental declines in diseases in late life.
The Economist, recently examining this large-data Duke study (“How Dementia Is Being Defeated,” July 9, 2026) also observed, “Some smaller studies have also found big declines,” particularly highly regarded Framingham Heart Study, which “show an average drop in new dementia cases of 20% per decade over almost 40 years between the late 1970s and early 2010s.”
Moyn’s ill-cited mythological choice helps to explain why his punishing policy prescriptions, in the name of attaining “intergenerational equity,” slams the door of vital longevity in the face of more than 60 million, going on 70-plus million Americans. Stridently, Moyn declares, “It’s not ageist to begin to save our democracy from gerontocracy.”
The Debate: Setting Limits vs. Possibilities to the End
Most peculiarly, Moyn concludes the book by conjuring a ghostly debate between two late pillars of polarity over whether our society’s emerging longevity best calls for an exit strategy for so many elders, or a public commitment to the human potential and purpose in our final years.
He revives the debate between obverse philosophies of bioethics pioneer, Daniel Callahan, PhD, author of Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (Simon & Schuster, 1987), and Robert N. Butler, MD, the Pulitzer Prize-winning first director of the National Institute on Aging. Rather than present their perspectives for readers to weigh, Moyn’s final chapter, titled, “Ageism and the Necessity of Limits,” signals that his thumb is firmly on one side of the scale of justice. In doing so, he misrepresents and demeans Butler’s outlook.
Callahan believed that those past age 75 or 80 have a moral duty to decline costly public health care procedures, in order to preserve Medicare and related public programs for the future. (He did not object to paying privately if one could afford it.)
While Moyn objects to Callahan’s neo-liberal form of health care rationing, he declares, “But Callahan was right. Setting limits was just part of setting priorities, and most of Callahan’s arguments for limiting certain kinds of health care would also support depriving older potentates of their power over government, policy, and society.”
Exactly who those potentates are, the elder “oligarchs” Moyn bemoans, are never quite identified. The strain on federal budgets of the dysfunctional U.S. medical and Big Pharma systems don’t get much play in Moyn’s courtroom.
Nevertheless, the professor of legal issues gavels, “Setting limits to their power is part of setting broader priorities that enable people in their prime to take their shot, rather than living in permanent thrall to the elders they support. And it forces those who have lived a lot of life to confront their own limits.”
Alternatively, Butler counselled in his final book, Longevity Revolution (Public Affairs, 2010), “We must help people deal with their fears of aging, dependency and death, and develops a sense of the life course as a whole.” For him, “The greatest possibilities remain to the very end of life.”
As I’ve written before, much of the focus of gerontology over the past four decades has been on extending the human healthspan. As some have put it, adding more life to our years, not merely years to our life. Multiplied by tens of millions of older people, the addition of only one more year of healthful activity to today’s older generation would, according to economists, such as Andrew J. Scott, PhD, author of The Longevity Imperative, increase national productivity gains in the trillions of dollars.
Having already judged Callahan to be “right,” Moyn praises Butler ever so cautiously before—unsuccessfully—trying to bury him. He writes, “Butler made an essential contribution, too. But the danger of ageism he identified is no objection to taking elders down a peg where necessary, in order to stop gerontocracy before it brings even more discrepancy in resources and power, even more illusions about the mortality no one can avoid, and ever more dreadful postponement of our collective future.”
Note that he doesn’t peg the penetrating economic inequities that are far more germane to today’s accelerated causes of Ameria’s declining ability to meet the basic costs of living. Among many relevant documents, Moyn might have consulted the 2025 report, “Living Between the Lines: Economic Insecurity and Older Americans.” In the study, demographers at UMass Boston’s Gerontology Institute found that, among those 65 or older, “In every state, more than 43% of older singles and 17% of couples are at risk of being unable to afford basic needs and age in their own communities.”
The Institute’s Elder Economic Security Standard Index gauges seniors’ ability to meet the costs of health care, housing, food, transportation and miscellaneous necessities, provides a county-by-county tool across the United States.
Whose Better Judgment?
While Moyn claims he’d strengthen old-age entitlements for vulnerable elders, he offers no plan for avoiding the political fragility of such public generosity from mirroring the precarious political fate of Medicaid at the hands of state legislators. Why not propose the kind of universal protections for Americans of all ages to reverse the country’s cavernous inequality? Why not explore ways to maximize the socio-economic stability structured around the premise of intergenerational interdependence. That understanding is what Maggie Kuhn, Robert Butler and so many others in the field of aging have long stood for?
Instead, Moyn defaults to the most grudging bottom line of government resources—never mind today’s massive tax cuts and trillion-dollar budgets for an undeclared war. For him, the prime suspect causing America’s malefaction is an overprivileged segment of old people.
Moyn writes, “Callahan had the better of the argument, speaking to serious distributional, existential, and civilizational concerns. If the perpetuation of life threatens higher goals in its unintended political effects, it deserves a political response that keeps the virtues of extra time while counteracting its vices.”
Ageism, he proclaims, also affects the young, in contending that Butler failed sufficiently champion children’s future while promoting the cause of the old. It’s bizarre presumption regarding the foremost proponent of social investment across the lifespan.
The would-be iconoclast contends that Butler failed to “ponder at any point whether the retention of excess power is another consequential expression of the fear of decrepitude and death.” That is, Moyn chastises the deservedly revered physician for failing to anticipate the author’s questionable, solipsistic thesis.
Here’s Butler in a WNET public broadcasting interview in 1998: “What we do see today is a gross inequality of wealth and income across the spectrum in American life which is going to ultimately be extremely harmful not just to older people, it’s already also very harmful to children.”
During that interview on WNET public broadcasting’s “Open Mind,” host Richard Heffner, noting that Callahan was a mutual friend of his and Butler’s, asked, “Dan also says . . . that we will never learn to accept the fact of death if we keep chasing life-everlasting. And it’s a pursuit that we can never achieve.”
Particularly relevant to today, Butler replied, “My own sense is that if we were to have had that attitude in 1850, we would not have developed as we have since. Antibiotics, a variety of vaccines, a whole host of medicines that have dramatically reduced death. I think it is foolish to imagine the total conquest of death, to imagine immortality, but to pursue diseases, to pursue means of bringing quality of life.”
As for that limited budgetary pie, which Callahan and Moyn stressed should justify limiting public support of seniors’ access to a full life, Butler commented, “The pie really isn’t limited. All we need to do is to look at what it was like in 1898, when we had no idea about lasers and 40-hour weeks and computers and airplanes. There’s always been, happily, a growth of our gross national product and our productivity over time.”
Robert Butler observed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Why Survive: Being Old in America (Johns Hopkins, 2002 edition), “None of us know whether we’ve already had the best years of our lives, or whether the best is yet to come. But the greatest of human possibilities remain to the very end of life.” Yours, too, Prof. Moyn. And, at 81, aches, dimming energy and all, mine as well.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2026 Paul Kleyman. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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