The Gerontocracy: How the Old Took Over the World#

Okay, let’s break down what’s going on with all the older folks in charge.

First off, here are some numbers to show you what we’re talking about:

• The average age of a public company CEO is now 58 years old.
• The average director is 63.
• The average member of Congress is over 60.
• The only reason the incoming Senate isn’t the oldest ever elected is because, well, unfortunately, so many members are dying while still in power, which pulls the average calculation down.

If Donald Trump serves his entire term, he’ll be the oldest president in history, after replacing the previous oldest president in history.

And it’s not just here. The leaders of the two most populous countries on Earth, India and China, are also 74 and 71 respectively. The average person in the world today is, on average, ruled over by someone about 40 years older than them.

This all happened because of just a few small changes in how populations look. So, the big question is, how did old people take over the world like this?

(Just a note: The original discussion included some thoughts about leaders like President Putin and a brief, perhaps humorous, aside comparing the age of a wall to a wheel and a string, before getting into the main explanation.)

The Significant Influence of Baby Boomers#

Up until 2020, Baby Boomers were the largest generation in America by a long shot. As they went through life, they became a big and very politically active group that could pretty much decide government policies almost on their own.

Think about how their priorities shifted:

• When they were young: They could vote for things like free education and strong social support.
• When they started working: They voted for worker protection, affordable housing, and policies to help raise children.
• As they got further in their careers and owned homes: They wanted lower taxes, good investment returns, and retirement opportunities.

The tricky part was that, as their priorities changed, things like worker protections, free education, and affordable housing became less important for everyone who came after them.

This idea was made popular by David Willet, who is currently in the British House of Lords. He wrote a book called “The Pinch: How Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Fortune.” Willets is a politician, a demographer (someone who studies populations), and he’s a Baby Boomer himself. The book is definitely worth checking out, and a link for it was mentioned as being in the description.

The Post-War Economic Boom: The Right Place at the Right Time#

Now, the Baby Boom itself wasn’t enough to get us where we are today all by itself. Human populations have gone through boom and bust cycles throughout history. Things like plagues, wars, famines, and natural disasters have made some generations bigger or smaller than others for thousands of years. But never before has so much power ended up in the hands of older people.

In the past, being part of a really large generation could actually be a disadvantage because more people your age meant more competition for resources and jobs. So, there had to be more going on this time.

Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation (the one just before them) were indeed large groups for their time. But that specific time period just happened to be the period with the most intense wealth creation in human history.

After the Second World War, a lot of things came together:

• Widespread industrialization
• The automation of domestic chores
• Women entering the workforce
• The adoption of global trade
• Modern finance

These factors made global, and especially American, productivity shoot up incredibly fast. The world is hundreds of times wealthier today than it was back in the 1950s.

Baby Boomers were perfectly positioned to take advantage of this wealth creation throughout their entire lives. Because they had such a big say in politics, policies were often tailored to suit their needs at whatever stage of life they were in. This timing – being a large, politically active group during the biggest creation of wealth ever – allowed Baby Boomers to build up the largest generational fortune in history. And as they’ve gotten older, that wealth has helped them gain even more influence.

Eventually, that power will pass on to the next generation, even if the current holders don’t want to give up their positions. I mean, death is inevitable, right? That should eventually level the playing field. Well, let’s look at why things might not get better anytime soon.

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(Please note: This section contains details about a video sponsor, as included in the original text.)

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Luck and Timing: Beyond Just Being a Boomer#

Let’s get back to the main topic. Think about companies and systems like:

• Apple
• Microsoft
• Google
• Sun Microsystems
• The Java programming language
• The Internet itself

They’re some of the biggest tech forces in the world, sure. But they also have something else in common: they were all founded, created, or managed by people born around the year 1955. To be fair, Eric Schmidt didn’t technically found Google, but he played a huge part in making it what it is today alongside Larry and Sergey, and he made billions doing it.

If you look at presidents, you have to go back a little further. Three of the five living presidents were born within just 6 months of each other in the year 1946.

Now, with a small group like this, and some randomness in who gets selected for these top jobs, coincidences like this can happen. But people like Malcolm Gladwell have pointed out that these kinds of statistical oddities show the power of being born at just the right time. His book, “Outliers,” which has been referenced on the channel before, is also definitely worth reading because it gives lots of insight into how a little bit of luck can cause massive differences in people’s lives.

For Boomers, it was the perfect mix:

1. Being around for brand new technologies that would completely change the world.
2. Being able to create some of the most valuable businesses ever.
3. Not having much competition yet when they were doing this.

This wasn’t just true for starting huge tech companies or running countries. Being born at the right place at the right time also helped the oldest people today build up wealth in smaller, but maybe even more important, ways too.

Securing Advantages: Housing and Local Control#

The most obvious example is housing. Homes in America are now more unaffordable compared to how much people earn than ever before. Older generations, who have had decades to build up equity in their homes (and maybe even bought some investment properties), are actually benefiting from these high home prices instead of being crushed by them.

Even though older generations paid higher interest rates on their mortgages back in the day, their home ownership rate was much higher than for the generations that came after them. This is because the cost and difficulty of buying a home were much lower back then.

Today, the gerontocracy (rule by the old) is working to protect this advantage in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Public records collected by Zipia show that the average age of a city council member in America is 52 years old. That’s not quite as old as Congress, but remember that city council is often the first step in a political career. So, for every young person on a council, there’s likely someone older.

The discussion mentioned an example like Councilman Milton, who was first elected as a city councilor way back in 1948 as a member of the Dixiecrat party. Their platform at the time included things like de-integration. This historical example highlights the potential for long-serving council members.

Bringing it to today, while some councils might be younger than other government levels, the people who actually participate and engage with them are often older. According to the National Civic League:

• Only 15% to 27% of Americans vote in local elections.
• Of those who do vote, elderly homeowners are massively overrepresented.
• People aged 65 and above are seven times more likely to vote in local elections than voters aged 18 to 34.

Even local politicians have to listen to the people who vote for them. Based on who watches these videos, it was noted that very few viewers would know who sits on their local city council or even what their policies are. This is a shame because city councils have incredible power and are often where average people have the best chance to make a real difference. (There was an offer to give a “useless heart emoji” to anyone who commented saying they’d been to a city council meeting or voted locally, until the speaker got tired of reading comments).

So, older people have voted for people who will keep their homes valuable, and these elected officials tend to be older people themselves. This helps solidify the rule by the old starting right from the local level.

The Final Ingredient: Inequality#

So, older people were influential at the right time, got rich, and then used that wealth to get even more influence. It seems like a pretty straightforward cycle. But there’s still one piece that doesn’t quite fit everywhere.

What about countries outside of America that didn’t get incredibly rich in the second half of the 20th century? Their Baby Boomers had much tougher lives. Even if they could vote, they wouldn’t be influencing the economy of a massively wealthy country and shaping it to work for them. They’d likely be voting for the political party least likely to take away their basic farm.

This is a general point, of course, but it’s hard to overstate just how fortunate the USA has been over the last 70 years.

There was a graph shown that was described as “kind of haunting.” It showed the average global life expectancy at birth over the last 100 years. There were two noticeable drops:

1. A small one caused by COVID-19.
2. A much larger one from about 60 years ago.

You might think the larger dip was from World War II, but those numbers aren’t even on this graph because records from that time were too unreliable globally. This 2-year global drop in life expectancy was caused only by China’s Great Leap Forward. This was an economic plan that was so bad it caused mass starvation and so many deaths that it actually noticeably lowered the average life expectancy for the entire world.

If American Boomers were in the right place at the right time, this was the complete opposite. Instead of going on to start a tech company, you would have been lucky to just make it to your first birthday.

The point here is that even with that history, China is still largely ruled by elderly people today. And that’s because of the final and most crucial factor: inequality.

Baby Boomers were not only the wealthiest generation in history, they were also the most unequal. Now, before anyone starts talking about seizing wealth, it’s important to remember that a lot of this inequality came from the rich getting much richer, even while poorer people were also getting richer than they had been in the past. The life of a poor Boomer was significantly better than a poor person’s life in the 19th century. But the gap between rich and poor grew much, much wider as people built fortunes that were previously impossible.

This means the world isn’t really ruled by all Boomers; it’s ruled by Rich Boomers. They were just the first group to get their seats at the top.

In China, things just happened to open up for economic changes conveniently when Baby Boomers were in key government positions. They were able to effectively put in place their own unique version of capitalism, which, not surprisingly, involved making themselves and their close connections wealthy before anyone else.

Even in America, wealth is a big factor in whether you’re even around long enough to rule. Average life expectancy is way up and keeps rising, but this is mainly because of two things:

1. Fewer babies dying shortly after birth (drops in infant mortality).
2. Wealthy people living much longer (increases in the lifespan of wealthy people).

According to a study mentioned, published by the National Library of Medicine, the difference in life expectancy between the poorest 1% and the richest 1% was more than 14 years. That’s a bigger difference than the average life expectancy difference between America and Afghanistan. The study also found this gap is getting wider because advancements in health technology, diet, and lifestyle are helping wealthy people live longer, while the life expectancy for most of the population is staying relatively flat, especially for people who had physically demanding jobs throughout their lives.

To become an old politician or leader, you first have to become old, and the best way to do that is to stop being poor.

Staying in Power and What’s Changing#

The rapid increase in life expectancy means that once people get into these positions of power, they are staying there much longer than they used to. And if people aren’t leaving these positions, it makes it harder for younger people to move into them. This is most obvious in photos of political bodies, but it’s probably an even bigger issue for regular workers around the world who can’t get promoted because senior roles are filled with long-term executives.

Older workers know it’s much harder for them to find a new job somewhere else, but it’s also harder for them to lose their job in the first place. In America, age is a protected class against discrimination, but only for old people (over 40). Young people are not specifically protected in the same way.

This has contributed to a trend in the job market where the main way to really move up and get better pay is by “job hopping” (moving between companies), because even if companies wanted to reward loyalty, most of those benefits would likely go to the Boomers already there.

To be fair, many of these older people are incredibly capable. A career spanning decades gives people valuable experience, connections, and reputation. And while the old complaint about old bosses making way more money but not being able to use email was true in some cases, even very old people today have often used technology for a good part of their careers, so they aren’t as far behind as the elderly were a decade ago.

But none of this should matter that much, right? Because even if old people rule the world now, eventually we will become those old people and take over, right? Well, maybe not.

First off, it’s not really a good system to have people just waiting around to get old enough to finally get some power. But the shift is already starting to happen. The population conditions that made this situation possible in the first place mean that as the current older rulers pass away, they are likely to be replaced by much younger candidates. Older people have many ways to try and hold onto power, but as their poorer peers die off, they are slowly losing their sheer numbers advantage.

This hasn’t affected countries with authoritarian governments as much, because once those individuals get power, they aren’t going to give it up just because the public wants them to. But in 2024, for the first time in decades, democratically elected leaders around the world actually got younger on average. This happened partly because almost all incumbent leaders didn’t do well in recent elections, and opposition leaders are generally younger. But it also shows a growing trend of younger voters having more say in who represents them.

So, if you’re someone in your 40s or 50s waiting to inherit positions of power, the bad news is that, just like much of your life, you might get skipped over. But the good news is that might be a small price to pay to finally challenge the rule by the old. The one main exception to this global trend of leaders getting younger was here in America.

Corporate Boards: A Fast Track to Elderly Power#

There is one specific area where power has been gathered in the hands of older people faster than almost anywhere else: corporate boards. For well-connected people with friends in the right places, it’s often seen as the ultimate retirement job.

To learn more about what these people actually do on corporate boards, you can check out another video (which was linked).

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