Julius Krein, once hailed as a pro-Trump academic, has written an insightful and important piece exploring the implications of our nation’s gerontocracy. Gerontocracy is defined as “government based on rule by elders.”

Krein writes:

…the political controversies arising from months of lockdown policies could have been largely avoided. The whining and double standards around protests, for example, were utterly farcical. The political content of a protest clearly does not affect whether it is good or bad from a “public health” perspective, but the fact that most protestors were young limited any risks. And for all the wild stories coming out of the Seattle “autonomous zone,” a Covid-19 catastrophe is not one of them—maybe because everyone there is fairly young. Likewise, rather than racialize mask mandates (as one Oregon county did) or selectively enforce them (more or less inevitable everywhere), they should be totally unnecessary unless one is in the presence of old people.

Instead, policymakers pretend that there is no difference between a thirty-year-old and a seventy-year-old. Why? Perhaps because baby boomers cannot imagine the world existing without them? Because they can’t even conceive of the existence of anyone but themselves?

One statistic not readily available is the number of young people’s lives that have been stifled or destroyed to preserve the precious egos—and assets—of the boomer generation, both now and over the past few decades.

To be sure, aging boomers are not the only problem facing contemporary science. Take, for example, the case of Neil Ferguson, who is only fifty-two. Despite a career littered with failure and wildly inaccurate forecasts of basically every major epidemic during his professional life, he remained the UK’s top infectious disease expert. And despite relying on a buggy code in his modeling for years, severely overestimating the coronavirus death rate, and violating his own health advice to engage in an affair at the height of the crisis, he is still cited as an expert in major media. A sociology of the scientific establishment that could explain the persistence of figures such as Ferguson is desperately needed. One harsh explanation is that public health is simply not a high prestige discipline in academia or the private sector (though of course it is not the profession’s fault that society prefers its statisticians to become financial speculators and the like). Perhaps that will change now, but the brutal reality is that the field has not attracted the best and the brightest over the last few decades—and it shows. [American Affairs Journal]

Read the rest here.