An Ageist Wolf in Progressive Clothing

A TED Talk Star Blames the Old for the Plight of the Young.

Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University, says he’s on the side of children. In his recent TED Talk, he claims that their future has been stolen—not by climate change, not by social media, not by AI, and not by the threat of nuclear war, but by old people.

He calls the phenomenon “intergenerational theft,” a crime carried out via policies and programs that have enriched the old at the expense of the young.

Galloway’s talk was met with thunderous applause. It has received more than 6 million views. I guess large swaths of our fellow Americans are pro-children too.

As well they should be. From depression and self-harm to high obesity rates, drug overdoses, and gun deaths, children and teens aren’t doing well in 21^st century America.

But why the need to tar and feather us oldsters? Are we really the greedy geezers he makes us out to be? Or are we the latest in a series of scapegoats blamed for the sorry state of our society? Scapegoats that include city dwellers, liberals, racial and religious minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and immigrants? What’s behind the viciousness of his attack?

In seeking answers to these questions, I spoke with two progressive economists: William Tabb and Doug Henwood. Both of them said the intergenerational warfare idea is nothing new. Both deconstructed Galloway’s mean-spirited argument and his odd delight in vilifying a vulnerable target by calling out the policies that have shaped the way America taxes and spends, or fails to.

Cut, cut, cut

Remember “The Deficit”? For decades, it has been trotted out as the major reason why we need to cut social programs. Why not raise taxes on the wealthy, you may well ask? That should please the “balanced budget” types, wouldn’t it? Uh, no. The wealthy don’t want to pay higher taxes, and they’ve gotten their wish via the 3 largest tax cuts in history, carried out by Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump.

That’s the number-one culprit driving massive levels of inequality in the richest country in the world. So says William Tabb, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of the newly published Financialization and the Future of the American Economy.

Because of our addiction to the principle of low taxes, year after year and generation after generation, we keep our version of a welfare state underfunded and thus incapable of providing anything close to the cradle-to-grave security enjoyed by other OECD countries.

In 2004, I lived in Copenhagen to study global health and got to experience Denmark’s social state firsthand. Along with my student visa, I received a “social security” card that entitled me to receive medical care. Me, a foreigner! Let that one sink in for a moment, my fellow Americans, before we move along to the heart of what’s really bugging Galloway and his cronies in and outside Congress.

They’re coming for Social Security

Despite its enduring popularity, Social Security continues to be a target for anti-big government conservatives. Why? Well, it’s big. All that money could be used for better, more virtuous purposes, like helping young families with children. Or less virtuous ones, like massive loans to private equity funds.

Galloway and his ilk see the world, and the federal budget, as a zero-sum game. There’s a fixed pie of money, they believe, that needs to fund everything the country supposedly needs, from the military to highway maintenance, public education, and Medicare.

The government is supposed to be able to levy taxes so that it can build all manner of needs and priorities into the federal budget. It’s called fiscal policy. But as far as Galloway is concerned, Social Security is the means by which the old are impoverishing the young, so it should be drastically scaled back.

Doug Henwood, a prolific journalist and former publisher of Left Business Observer, responded to that extreme position by saying the following: “The strength of Social Security is that everybody gets it.” That’s how FDR and his advisors designed it—precisely so that it could never be cut.

Galloway proposes that Social Security be provided only to those who need it—not to “anyone who has a catheter.” Okay, that stung. He openly admits to being ageist, but if you had any doubts about his ageist bona fides, that one should remove them.

Henwood counters that it would be “much easier to cut if it were turned into an anti-poverty program. It would be easier to stigmatize, like welfare.”

Even the economic rationale for cutting the venerable social program is pretty thin, he says: “As a share of GDP, Social Security has been pretty flat in recent years. But Medicare is a different story. It’s expensive, and it’s growing for two reasons: the ageing of the population and our screwed up healthcare system, every aspect of which is inflated, from hospital stays to administrative costs and Band-Aids.”

Medicare for All, or some comparable way to provide universal healthcare, would solve most of the problem, he says—and I agree.

Just how rich are the old?

Taking averages can be problematic, yet that’s exactly what Galloway does when he insists that the old are unconscionably wealthy.

Sure, a sizable chunk of the baby boomer generation is rich. But earlier in life, they enjoyed such advantages as postwar prosperity, unionization, hefty public and private pensions, and good jobs with benefits. Over the past 45 years or so, most of these have been eroded.

Let’s get back to the dubious statistical practice of calculating the average level of wealth and income of 55.8 million people—the number of Americans who are over 65 as of 2024. All you need are a few billionaires and a smattering of centimillionaires to skew the result.

About 20% of older households own stock, Henwood says. That’s way more than younger households do, but oldsters were young once, and most of them started out with as little as the young have today. Over the course of a lifetime, some of them were able to earn, save, and invest. And most of them own their homes.

But the old draw down their assets over time. The richest cohort is age 55 to 64; 65 to 74 is the second richest; and people over age 75 tend to do less and less well with each passing year.

What’s more, many of them—I mean us—struggle to make ends meet, Tabb says. “Even immigrants are ageing fast, and they have no benefits, including Social Security. Our country is facing a huge problem with a fast-ageing population. We’re completely unprepared for it.”

What’s behind Galloway’s ageism?

So here’s my not-very-original theory: It’s about demographic change. Galloway’s target is the old, while for some Americans, it’s immigrants, people of color, or religious minorities. As the country ages…as it becomes less white…as it absorbs more and more immigrants due to climate change, persecution, war or all three…we can expect more blame and more anger and more scapegoating over supposedly scarce resources. Over that budgetary pie many believe to be fixed and immutable.

Here, I betray my own political proclivities: a mix of Keynes and the New Deal plus a healthy dose of William Morris, Nancy Fraser, the Sunrise Movement, and Bernie Sanders. I say the pie is expandable. So is our population. Everybody counts. But there’s one group that would stand to lose just a little: the billionaires and centimillionaires. If they were to pay their fair share in taxes, as Bernie suggests, there’s practically no economic problem we couldn’t solve—at least in the short-to-medium run.

No, Scott, it isn’t about age. It’s about class. Do you really believe wealthy boomers would deliberately compromise their own children’s future? Come to think of it, they might. Especially if they decide to drag them to Mars. But other than that?

Galloway supports an array of ostensibly progressive reforms such as raising the minimum wage, boosting public health spending, progressive taxation (but not progressive enough, I suspect, to guarantee the future of Social Security), and programs to benefit young families with children. That’s why his audience greeted his TED Talk with such enthusiasm.

But I’m here to urge them not to be fooled by this ageist wolf in progressive clothing.