To the editor:
It’s disappointing to see Inside Larger Ed dedicate house to extending publicity for a guide with dangerous, extremist views in regards to the getting older of our nation’s inhabitants. Matt Reed’s June 22 piece, “‘Gerontocracy in America’: A Evaluate,” focuses on the newly revealed work by Samuel Moyn and offers him credit score for “making a severe try to deal with an actual downside.”
The supposed “downside,” the premise of Moyn’s guide, is the ageist trope that older individuals uniquely and disproportionately contribute to sure issues in American society.
Moyn’s coverage prescriptions vary from excessive to extraordinarily ridiculous. He has proposed weighting votes of youthful individuals extra closely than different generations, implementing age-correlated tax charges and incentivizing older individuals to go away their properties. It’s beneath the requirements of Insider Larger Ed to deliver up fringe concepts like these for severe debate. No different demographic group could be talked about in such a fashion.
People aged 65 and older are removed from a monolithic bloc in our society. We’re all getting older in numerous methods, and all of us contribute all through our lives to social applications that profit us as we age. Everybody deserves the chance to interact totally in society, reside within the properties we’ve labored arduous to afford and proceed to thrive within the communities we love.
Strengthening intergenerational connections, fairly than deepening divides, is vital to serving to our communities tackle the challenges we face collectively. Generations are collections of numerous people, not single-minded teams. Framing at the moment’s structural issues because the fault of a single technology overlooks the complicated interaction of social constructions and diverts consideration away from methods generations can collaborate to create options.
The general public well being advances which have allowed us to reside longer, more healthy and extra productive lives additionally enable us to proceed contributing to communities and fueling financial progress. As we study from the work of the Nationwide Middle to Reframe Getting older, if we additional normalize demeaning language about older adults (or any age phase), we threat embedding these attitudes deeper into our establishments and our tradition—in the end compromising the potential and well-being of all the nation.
