Despite being lauded for working 20 hours a day, at 79 years old, Donald Trump is the oldest president ever elected in American history. The domination of ageing politicians like Trump is not an anomaly but a norm. Since 1993, four of the last five American presidents were born in the 1940s. Comparable patterns can be observed across Europe and other countries, where electorates consistently return leaders drawn from the baby boomer generation born between the 1940s and 1960s. For all intents and purposes, the gerontocracy once used to ridicule the stagnation of the Soviet Union has returned to haunt the West.
The baby boomers are the most fortunate generation in human history. The generation born after the 1940s emerged right after the end of World War II, allowing them to escape the worst upheavals of the twentieth century while reaping the dividends of postwar reconstruction. The bloodshed and destruction of the war eliminated entrenched social barriers and vested interests, ranging from aristocratic families to industrial oligarchs; even centuries-old cities were rebuilt from scratch. According to Mancur Olson, the renowned 20th century American political scientist, the postwar global economy constituted a “clean slate,” in which organized interests that distributed economic rents rather than fostered productivity growth had been neutralized. The result was nearly 30 years of inclusive growth: OECD economies expanded rapidly at a rate of around 5 percent per year, while the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, declined steadily.
An unprecedented degree of social mobility ensued, as postwar capitalism rewarded genuine talent. The resulting meritocracy was further cemented by Cold War ideological competition. The Soviet bloc emphasized the democratic nature of socialism in equally distributing the means of production while accusing capitalism of institutionalizing hierarchy and infinite exploitation. Facing this challenge, capitalist societies were compelled to demonstrate equality of opportunity to counter socialism’s promise of equality of outcome. State subsidies made law schools affordable even for the working class, something unimaginable today. Most importantly, stable careers were guaranteed in the expanding postwar economy and governmental bureaucracy. This helps explain why Joe Biden, whose family experienced bankruptcy during his youth, could enroll in the law school of Syracuse University, a mediocre institution at best, and nonetheless succeed in becoming the youngest senator in U.S. history. Similarly, Bill Clinton, who grew up in a middle-class family, managed to attend Oxford University and Yale Law School, eventually becoming the youngest governor and the third youngest president in U.S. history.
However, this emphasis on the “opportunity” also provided the ideological foundation for neoliberalism. In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued that market systems with minimal government intervention were the most effective tools for achieving both efficiency and equality, precisely because they operated through fair competition under conditions of open and shared information. Milton Friedman went further, asserting that “a society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.” The subsequent neoliberal revolution in economics and politics also upended social relations. Individual achievements and efficiency gains were celebrated as worthy of extraordinary compensation.
Such arguments are deeply self-serving. The notion of performance-based reward is conveniently engineered for those who already enjoy the perks of privilege and are in structurally advantageous positions to capture the expansion of the economy. The boomers, who by the 1980s had ascended the ranks of leadership in public and private sectors, once again became the great winners under this new regime. With the end of the Cold War further validating the promise of neoliberal capitalism, a wave of financialization that tied management performance to shareholder value swept across the global economy. Old models of management that prioritized leadership experience, institutional knowledge, and workers’ welfare gave way to professional management that favors “outsider thinking” and short-term value generation which later switched to pure extraction.
Many boomers became the backbone of this flourishing Professional Management Class, leading multiple companies in short stints.
Today, boomers have secured entrenched dominance over the economy. The assets they accumulated in the last century saw their values skyrocket following the bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2025, boomers owned approximately 51 percent of total wealth, while Generation X—born after the 1960s—held around 26 percent, leaving Gen Z, born in the 1990s and 2000s, with barely 10 percent of total wealth. This uneven distribution of wealth is set to worsen even further, as the returns on existing assets show no sign of declining. Natural causes are not a solution either. In the next decade, approximately $38 trillion in wealth is set to be transferred between the boomers and their successors, mostly in Gen X, leaving Gen Z even further marginalized.
In the face of this almost monopolistic grip on wealth, it is no surprise that boomers continue to occupy leadership roles. Jamie Dimon (born in 1956) remains a central figure in global finance; Larry Summers (born in 1954) continues to serve as a key intellectual architect of global economic policy; and Francis Fukuyama (born in 1952) serves as a principal theorist behind capitalist democracy.
Beyond the leadership, an epistemic hegemony is also evident. The zeitgeist of the twenty-first century revolves around free markets, lax taxation, and generous pension funding. While these ideas, which function as iron laws within social consciousness, are not necessarily neoliberal, they have nonetheless locked in the generational advantage of the boomers. The result is a self-reinforcing loop: pro-boomer theories justify pro-boomer policies; those policies then validate the lived experiences of boomers, reproducing the data points that provided the scientific justification of the pro-boomer theories in the first place.
This is perhaps why the interests of boomers are untouchable across the West. Despite an increase in life expectancy of more than 10 years since the 1950s, the retirement age is nearly impossible to raise, even as the funding gap for pensions becomes ever larger. As a consequence, Western governments are accumulating astronomical amounts of debt that burden future generations. The Gen Z is powerless to resist this, as they are structurally outvoted by the boomers, who have significantly higher voter turnout. Solutions that empower the young and address generational inequality exist—such as compulsory voting and inheritance taxes—but they remain at the bottom of the political agenda despite their popularity, largely due to the electoral chokehold of the boomer generation.
A broader historical loop is thus observable. After explaining the “clean slate” responsible for postwar growth, Olson predicted in 1980s that advanced economies would enter a state of “sclerosis,” in which new interest groups arising in the postwar economy would form “distributive coalitions” that operate to seize disproportionate benefits for their members at the expense of society. His prediction has come true. After enjoying the windfall of their era, the boomers decided to deny such opportunities to future generations. It is a typical case of “pulling the ladder up behind you.”
The consequences for younger generations have been devastating. Facing intergenerational inequality, Gen Z across advanced economies is far less likely than their parents to believe that their own lives will surpass those of the previous generation. This pessimism has manifested in delayed marriage and declining fertility, which has fallen precipitously from roughly 2.5 in the 1960s to around 1.5 today. Even more unsettling has been the hollowing out of the nuclear family, as marriage rates collapse and a growing share of children are born out of wedlock. The isolating experience of these new family arrangements has rendered Gen Z particularly vulnerable to the attention economy, as their livelihoods and identities are increasingly captured and manipulated by social media platforms. The proliferation of non-human interactions, cyberbullying, and algorithmic validation has made those born after 1996 the most emotionally fragile generation on record, with youth mental illness rates reaching unprecedented levels.
Education, long regarded as the last vehicle for intergenerational mobility, has also failed to counter these dynamics. Although roughly 40 percent of Gen Z is obtaining a college degree, making it the most educated generation in history, a deep institutional dysfunction has set in across higher education. The expansion of higher education was not driven primarily by labor-market demand or a collective commitment to knowledge. Instead, it reflected the restructuring of educational institutions along neoliberal lines. Since the 1980s, public funding for universities across the West has been slashed, with U.S. tax subsidies falling from roughly 60 percent to around 20 percent today. Universities, forced to operate by the laws of the market, began operating as real estate enterprises and private equity funds: they expanded admissions to generate larger student cohorts and charged higher tuition fees. The school fees earned were then recycled into ever-expanding campuses.
To satisfy the expanded enrollment, university departments created new degrees, such as gender studies, that reflected faculties’ ideological preferences rather than coherent bodies of knowledge, in part because they were inexpensive to teach and easy for students to graduate. Business and finance programs proliferated for similar reasons, requiring minimal academic investment while demanding low intellectual inputs. Even in STEM fields, curriculum increasingly lag behind technological reality.
Postgraduate education expanded even more dramatically, especially at elite institutions like the Ivy League, as universities monetized prestige through professional schools and certificate programs such as EMBAs. In 1995, Columbia University established the School of Professional Studies, offering postgraduate degrees in areas like Negotiation Tactics or Sports Management—subjects more appropriately taught as undergraduate modules or vocational training. The profit motive here is so transparent that it produces a historic irony: Columbia, once an intellectual center of the New Deal and a critic of capitalism’s excesses, has become one of its most effective practitioners. By 2025, its endowment exceeded $15.9 billion and continues to grow, skillfully conducting tax evasion on behalf of its donors in the name of academic freedom.
The cumulative effect has been the degradation of education itself. The functionalist role of education, which refers to the transmission of skills relevant to the labor market, has effectively collapsed with the proliferation of useless degrees. Today, nearly all high-skill jobs require graduates to undergo months of additional training even when their degrees match the job description exactly. The interactive role of education, which involves the socialization of students into a shared civic and professional culture, has also weakened. World-renowned professors, who should serve as mentors, increasingly function as institutional brand ambassadors, with teaching delegated to adjuncts and temporary staff who are often unqualified to teach. These factors have effectively reduced universities to diploma mills, with graduates are certified based on their ability to endure years of mundane blandness rather than demonstrate intellectual mastery.
One may wonder whether this model of education is sustainable, given that the cutthroat competition of today’s neoliberal economy would seem to require ever more skilled human labor to sustain itself. However, such analysis only betrays the limitations of our understanding. The truth is that a cohort of mediocre or even incompetent graduates is exactly what large corporations are looking for. Thanks to neoliberal economic theory, which preaches the virtue of standardized workflows and flattened organizational hierarchies, the division of labor within major companies has become so routinized that a high school dropout can become an analyst in an investment bank after receiving three months of vocational coaching. In addition, massive corporate consolidation in recent years has all but eliminated the competition that supposedly makes markets efficient, allowing dominant firms to enjoy predictable flows of profit. In this cartelized oligopoly, the greatest threat comes not from external rivals but from internal employees who could launch rival businesses using insider knowledge. Consequently, firms devote considerable effort to preventing workers from fully mastering business models or developing the capacity to form future competitors.
This is why hiring in elite industries such as banking and consultancy increasingly resembles a case of reverse selection. New employees are selected on random or even political bases to satisfy the façade of Environmental, Social, and Governance goals or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion requirements. To further insulate against future rebellions, firms compensate employees with assets like stock options rather than wages that vest over a period of years. Employees are trapped by “golden handcuffs,” as early exit means forfeiting income embodied in stock value. Additionally, short exercise windows force employees to pay strike prices and taxes in order to extract vested options, which can be prohibitively expensive without immediate liquidity, further discouraging them from leaving to launch rival ventures.
The result is a bifurcated labor market. For the first time in history, those who secure elite positions enjoy both high incomes and substantial asset ownership, a combination even Marx did not anticipate. Yet they are compelled to work extreme hours, not out of necessity but as a defensive strategy against replacement. Much of this labor is performative, consisting of meetings, compliance rituals, and organizational churn that validate their existence without producing value. For companies, these inefficiencies are necessary: they blunt the creativity and originality of employees, rendering them so attired that they become wholly dependent on their employers.
At the other end of the bifurcation lies an overproduced cohort of graduates facing chronic underemployment. Thanks to new corporate dynamics, degrees from even elite institutions no longer guarantee stable careers. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, an inevitable product of an economy oriented toward labor-saving and cost-cutting technologies, threatens to render even STEM credentials obsolete.
It is clear that a dangerous future looms. As underemployment becomes permanent for an increasingly large number of the brightest Gen Z, disappointment and frustration arising from denial of elite inclusion will become politically dangerous. Eventually, a “counter-elite” that refuses to play by the rules of the game will emerge and wreak havoc on the existing system. This is by no means a distant forecast of doom, even recent history is replete with such cases. The revolutions in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s were led by young, excluded elites against ossified establishments, from the right-wing military dictatorships of Portugal and Greece to the communist governments of Eastern Europe. The Arab Spring that toppled aging leadership in the Middle East in the 2010s can also be explained by similar dynamics.
The West is by no means immune to the same forces. As educational institutions remain addicted to profit and technology continues to displace labor, the overproduction of Gen Z counter-elites will only accelerate. A critical mass will eventually be reached unless concessions are made. This logic helps explain why Donald Trump assembled the youngest cabinet in U.S. history and elevated J.D. Vance, a Gen X figure born in the 1980s, to the vice presidency. But whether this represents a blip or the beginning of a V-shaped recovery in the fortunes of the young remains too early to tell.
Across the world today, generational succession planning remains elusive. As aging populations further entrench the power of the elderly, incentives to launch a final “all-or-nothing” gamble to alter the dynamics become increasingly attractive for the frustrated Gen Z. And if internal structures remain too rigid, provoking international conflict may become the only viable option. During the Kosovo War in 1999, British General Michael Jackson famous uttered that ‘I’m not going to start World War III for you’ when ordered by Americans to attack Russian troops at Pristina Airport. Such restraint may be hard to sustain today. So the hard question is, can the world step back from the brink?
Editor: Charriot Zhai
