Book reviews: ‘Gerontocracy in America’ and ‘The Face: A Cultural History’
America’s old-age problem and the importance we attach to our own faces
'Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth' by Samuel Moyn
“It is a safe bet that the AARP will not be promoting Gerontocracy in America to its 38 million members,” said Alexander Zaitchik in The New Republic. The explosive growth of America’s over-65 population over the past several decades so alarms author Samuel Moyn that his dark prognosis of its consequences “casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it.” The U.S. will soon be home for the first time to as many people over 65 as under 18. Meanwhile, those seniors are six times more likely to vote than 18-to-34-year-olds, and they tend to put their own interests first. Moyn, a Yale law professor, proposes a series of policies aimed at trimming back elder Americans’ political and financial clout. Unfortunately, compared with other variables affecting our politics, age “turns out to hold little explanatory power,” and many seniors are struggling themselves.
“Despite the sometimes acerbic tone of his book, Moyn’s aim isn’t to stick it to the old,” said Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Among his suggestions for rebalancing a system that seems to favor the old is to expand entitlements for seniors so that they don’t feel they must cling to housing and jobs to secure a comfortable final chapter in life. But Moyn does want the power of younger voters amplified. Currently, the median age for members of Congress is over 60 and the median age of voters in primaries is 65. To shift the balance toward youth, Moyn offers a range of potential remedies, including making voting a requirement, as Australia does, and even allowing young people to vote twice: once for themselves and a second time for fellow citizens who haven’t yet hit legal voting age.
When he focuses on the elderly’s domination of politics, “Moyn has a point,” said The Economist. There remains no good mechanism for getting rid of lawmakers such as former senator Dianne Feinstein, who was struggling to fulfill the basic demands of her job when she died in office at 90. But Moyn favors mandatory retirement ages in all professions, a policy that may make sense in academia, where some tenured professors hang onto their posts long after their productivity spirals, but less so in other fields, where employers tend to keep paying only those who remain top performers. Also, for a book that claims to stand for youth and progress, American Gerontocracy “often seems oddly conservative,” said Noah Berlatsky in Washington Monthly. Moyn is so certain that concentrated power in the hands of the elderly is unnatural that he’s willing to curtail seniors’ individual rights to restore what he sees as society’s natural order. Because of such radicalism, his is “not a book that will age well.”
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'The Face: A Cultural History' by Fay Bound-Alberti
Until the invention of the mirror in the 17th century, said Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times, “most people’s own faces were likely foreign to them.” Fay Bound-Alberti’s “ambitious, entertaining” new book calls attention to how the rapid spread of the new technology likely changed every user’s sense of self, but she doesn’t dwell on that shift in consciousness because she has much other ground to cover. Surveying tens of thousands of years of how images of the human face have been produced and interpreted, she starts by informing us that artists depicted human figures long before they drew or sculpted human faces, then races through time all the way to today’s facial surveillance technologies. Though it’s not always clear what the book’s unifying argument might be, “the richness of the research more than compensates.”
Much of the action occurs over the past, said Max Liu in the Financial Times. While the Venus of Brassempouy, a tiny 25,000-year-old ivory sculpture found in France, is believed to be the oldest surviving depiction of a human face, it was not until the Renaissance that artists routinely attempted to capture in a subject’s face the sitter’s very soul. Bound-Alberti argues that many of the prejudices and presumptions we bring to reading faces spring from that moment, and her larger account, while consistently engaging, is “at its most compelling when it becomes polemical,” showing how the classism, racism, and sexism of that remote past still shape today’s punishing beauty standards.
Given how many of Bound-Alberti’s observations are grounded in fact, “it is a shame that The Face veers, chapter by chapter, into the abstract,” said Zoë Huxford in The New Statesman (U.K.). In the weakest chapter, a closing consideration of face transplants, she calls the very rare procedure an example of the commodification of the face taken to its extreme, and the interpretation simply doesn’t fit the evidence. “Still, The Face is a meticulously researched and unsettling book, and Bound-Alberti’s overarching message is poignant” — namely, that we should stop yearning for more perfect faces and instead seek a world that accepts the faces we have.
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