Death by Gerontocracy — Who Benefits While You Suffer

The previous posts built a model for why civilizations collapse. This post is about what that model looks like on the ground, in real countries, right now. The word for it is gerontocracy: rule by old people.

The Southport Riots

In the summer of 2024, a 17-year-old named Axel Ruda Cubana walked into a dance studio in Southport, England and stabbed the children inside. Three girls, aged five, six, and seven, were killed. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 52 years in prison.

Justice was done. Then Britain caught fire.

Riots broke out across the country. Protesters claimed the attacker was an asylum seeker, an immigrant who had no right to be in their country. They burned cars, attacked people they believed were foreign, and fought with police for days.

He was not an immigrant. He was born in Wales to Rwandan parents. He was a British citizen.

The protesters were wrong about the facts. But that did not stop the riots, because the facts were not really the point. The feeling underneath them was real: something has been taken from us, our country is not safe, and immigration is to blame.

That feeling is driving politics across the entire Western world.

The Immigration Surge

After COVID, immigration to the Western world accelerated sharply. Britain, France, Germany, Australia, and Canada all saw massive spikes in new arrivals. And this time, most immigrants were not coming from Europe.

They were coming from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, and Southeast Asia.

This is a genuine shift. In previous decades, immigrants from nearby countries blended into local culture within a generation. Today, the cultural distance is larger, the speed is faster, and the numbers are bigger.

In Australia, India, China, and the Philippines are now the three largest source countries. In France, most new arrivals come from Africa and the Middle East. In parts of Britain, entire neighborhoods look nothing like what British culture looked like thirty years ago.

People see this and feel invaded. That feeling is what produces the riots.

Who Actually Benefits From High Immigration?

Canada makes the real mechanics clearest.

The Canadian government has been running one of the most aggressive immigration programs in the world. Hundreds of thousands of new arrivals every year, with a stated goal of growing the population from 35 million to 100 million by 2100.

At the same time, housing supply barely moved. Prices went vertical.

This is the question worth sitting with. If you need more people and you bring in more people, why would you not build more houses for them?

The answer is that people who already own homes get richer when housing supply stays low. If the government built enough housing to meet demand, prices would fall. So property owners have every incentive to block new construction.

Policy is not designed for the nation. It is designed for whoever already owns things.

In Canada today, a quarter of all residents are first-generation immigrants. The generation that moved there for a better life is living eight people to a room and lining up for hours to apply for minimum wage jobs. Local young Canadians are in no better shape.

Both groups are losing. The only winners are people who already own property.

The Birth Rate Trap

Here is the trap the Western world built for itself.

Native-born Canadians are not having children. The birth rate has been falling for decades. Without immigration, the population would shrink and the economy would contract.

So the government brings in immigrants to fill the gap. But instead of managing this slowly and honestly, they accelerate it.

The immigrants are not integrating fast enough. Housing is not being built. The culture is changing faster than people can process.

And on current demographic trends, within one or two generations, the political character of these countries will look very different from today.

The Government That Helps You Die

In 2016, Canada introduced a program called MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying. The idea was compassion for the terminally ill.

By 2021, 10,000 Canadians a year were using it. The approval rate has climbed from 75% to over 81%.

So who is actually dying?

The largest category is cancer patients. Cancer is the most expensive disease to treat in the modern healthcare system. And in many cases it is not immediately fatal. People live with cancer for years.

The two most common reasons people give for requesting MAID are difficulty engaging in meaningful activities and difficulty performing daily tasks like shopping or walking.

These are not medical reasons to die. These are descriptions of poverty and depression.

What changed is not medicine. What changed is values.

A generation ago, the operating principle was that every life matters, especially the poor and vulnerable. Today the operating principle is cost.

How much does this person consume? Is it worth it?

This is what financialization looks like when it reaches the healthcare system.

The Stock Market Is Booming. Your Life Is Getting Worse.

At the same time that poor Canadians are being approved for assisted death, stock markets across the Western world are at record highs.

10% of the American population owns 90% of the stocks.

Amazon was $7 a share in 2008. It is now around $300.

If you owned Amazon stock, you are a completely different person financially than you were fifteen years ago. If you did not, nothing changed except that everything got more expensive.

Real economic growth, the kind that comes from people making and building things, has been falling. The financial economy and the real economy have split apart.

The government's response is to pretend it is not happening. When the economy enters recession, they do not say "we are in a recession and we are working to fix it." They call it a "period of transition."

This is gaslighting. Telling people their eyes are lying to them.

The Debt Nobody Is Talking About

The United States currently carries $37 trillion in government debt. American households carry another $17 trillion in personal debt: mortgages, credit cards, student loans.

Neither number will ever be paid off.

Canada does not even own its own resources. Oil, the largest source of national wealth, is now majority-owned by American and overseas investors. The country is selling off what it has to stay solvent.

This is not decline. This is asset stripping.

Who Benefits?

Taken together, here is what is happening across the Western world:

Housing prices rising faster than wages
Stock wealth concentrating at the very top
Real productivity falling
Government debt at historic highs
Birth rates collapsing
Mass immigration without infrastructure to support it
Government-assisted dying being offered to the poor
Governments lying about all of it

The useful question is not "what is going wrong?" The useful question is: who is benefiting?

Go through every item and ask who gains.

Rising property prices: people who already own property. Rising stock valuations: people who already own stocks.

Mass immigration: people who need cheap nurses, gardeners, cooks, and caregivers. MAID: people who want shorter queues at the hospital.

Every one of these trends benefits the same group: old, wealthy people.

Not all old people are wealthy. But old people are, as a group, far more likely to own property and hold stocks than young people are. And there have never been so many of them.

In 1900, people over 75 were a tiny fraction of any society. Today they are the fastest-growing demographic in the Western world.

They vote in higher numbers. They own more. They live longer.

And they have quietly shaped every major policy in the Western world to serve their interests, at the direct expense of the young.

This is what gerontocracy means. Rule by old people. Not a conspiracy. Just the predictable outcome of a system organized around whoever already has power.

The next post looks at what this looks like in practice: the pension crisis, the people actually in charge, and why the young cannot stop it.