The World Run by Old People — Secret History #3

The previous post ended with one answer: every major policy trend in the Western world benefits old, wealthy people. That is gerontocracy in practice.

This post is about why it is not going to change.

The Pension Crisis Nobody Is Solving

When Canada and most Western countries first built their pension systems, they made two assumptions.

Old people would die around age 72. And money put into the stock market would grow reliably over time.

Both assumptions turned out to be wrong.

People are not dying at 72. They are living to 85, 90, sometimes 100. Every additional year of life is an additional year of pension payments the system was never designed to fund.

The stock market assumption also collapsed. Pension funds are run by cautious administrators, not aggressive traders. Investment banks, staffed by the most competitive people in finance, have extracted enormous returns from pension funds for decades.

Pension funds are consistently the worst-performing investment vehicles in the modern financial system.

In 2001, there were roughly 7.6 pensioners for every 12.7 workers. The sustainable ratio is one pensioner for every three workers.

Today, in much of the Western world, there are more retirees entering the system than new workers joining it.

These pension funds will be insolvent within the next ten years.

When that happens, the money will not simply disappear. It will be taken from somewhere else: public schools, hospitals, infrastructure.

Old people are the largest voting bloc in every Western democracy. Politicians will not cut their pensions.

They will cut everything else.

Who Is Actually Running the World

By 2040, the United States will have 65 million people over the age of 65 and around 15 million people over 85.

These 15 million people, as a group, control more wealth and political power than any other demographic in the country. They vote in the highest numbers. They have the most time to organize, lobby, and make noise.

And they are running the government.

Joe Biden was in his 80s when he was president. Mitch McConnell, who led the US Senate, was also in his 80s.

Dianne Feinstein was a sitting senator until she died in office at 90. Chuck Grassley was still working in the Senate at 90 and did not want to retire.

These are not anomalies. This is the system working exactly as designed.

Wealthy old people have accumulated enough money, connections, and institutional power that they simply will not let go. And the rest of us, biologically trained to respect our elders, do not stop them.

This is happening everywhere. Japan and Germany are the most extreme cases, but the pattern is the same across the entire Western world. The political center of gravity keeps moving older.

What the Three Generations Actually Want

The three generations in any society have very different priorities.

Young people are rebellious and creative. They want to change the system and are open to new ideas. Mature people want steady growth and broad consensus.

The elderly want one thing above all else: safety. They do not want anything to change. Any change threatens what they have built, accumulated, and protected over decades.

A society governed by the elderly will always choose security over freedom.

The young want to take risks. The old want to lock things down.

What Gerontocracy Produces

You can see the preferences of elderly rule in the policies spreading across the Western world.

Lockdowns. When COVID arrived, entire economies were shut down for two years. Young people lost years of education, career momentum, and social development.

Old people, who faced the greatest medical risk, were protected. The tradeoff was made by people who were not paying the cost.

Surveillance and censorship. The Online Safety Act passed in Britain in 2023. Say something the government deems harmful online and you can be arrested. Freedom of expression, which every open society was built on, is quietly being dismantled.

Digital currency. Cash gives you privacy. Digital currency gives the government a record of every transaction you make, and the power to block any purchase they disapprove of.

Mass surveillance. Facial recognition cameras. Data tracking. Phone monitoring.

Wherever you go, you are being watched. Old people who fear crime are happy to pay this price. Young people pay it with their freedom.

Mass immigration. Elderly wealthy people need nurses, cooks, drivers, and gardeners. Young people from overseas are ideal: educated enough to be useful, economically desperate enough to accept poor conditions. The immigration policy that appears to be about demographics is also, quietly, a cheap labor policy.

Prisons. Old people fear crime. More prisons mean more visible enforcement. They also provide something else: near-free labor for industries that need it.

Wars. This is the most direct form of gerontocracy. Old people in power are perfectly comfortable sending young people to die for strategic goals.

They have the authority to start wars. They are not the ones who fight in them.

This is what the phrase "death by gerontocracy" means. Not a metaphor. A description.

Why Young People Cannot Stop It

The obvious question is: why do young people not fight back?

The answer is biological.

Every social species on Earth is wired to respect its elders. Young animals defer to older ones. Human children are taught from birth to obey their grandparents.

This instinct is so deep it does not respond to logic or evidence.

Even when you understand the system clearly, you still feel the pull to respect it. That is why old people can send young people to war, and the young people go.

That is why pension funds will be protected even as schools and hospitals are cut. That is why no political party in any Western democracy has successfully stripped power from the elderly.

We are biologically engineered to defer to the people who are exploiting us.

The Cycle That Does Not End

When the current generation of elderly finally dies, the generation behind them will step into the same role. The people who are mature today will become the elderly of tomorrow, with the same instinct to hold on, accumulate, and resist change.

And modern medicine makes the problem worse. A wealthy person with access to the best healthcare can be kept alive for twenty years past the point where they could function independently.

The person is a vegetable. But they are a wealthy vegetable with assets, votes, and a legal team.

Old people were supposed to die at 72. Now they live to 100. The pension system, the housing market, and the political system were all designed around a world where that was not true.

The riots, the housing crisis, the assisted dying policy, the surveillance state, and the wars all make sense once you understand who benefits. They are not the result of incompetence or accident. They are the result of a system shaped over decades by a generation that had the time, money, and institutional access to make it serve them.

Understanding this does not make it easy to change. But it makes it impossible to misread.

The next post asks a harder question: what makes certain groups impossible to destroy? The answer starts with an island and 100 strangers who have no way out.