The Context Window with David Deming Podcast
Jun 24, 2026 · 33 min · 11 segments
As long as we’ve been collecting data, new college graduates had better odds of landing a job than the average American worker. But that flipped after the pandemic. Although the obvious suspect is AI…
David DemingHost
They have a sense that the old social contract is being disrupted, that older generations are pulling the ladder up from behind them.
Back in 2022, feels like a million years ago, I worked on a bipartisan commission with the Brookings Institution on the left and the American Enterprise Institute on the right.
And we all got together across partisan lines and agreed that the U.S. government spends way too much money on seniors and not enough on kids and young adults.
Retirees are getting more than $43,000 per person from the federal government, mostly through Medicare and Social Security benefits.
Now, it's not quite as bad as it sounds because most education spending is at the state level, and this is the federal budget, but still, you get the idea.
Our social safety net was built a long time ago to solve a really serious problem of poverty in old age.
Now, people live way longer and work is more sedentary, so seniors are much healthier by the time they turn 65, and that's a good thing.
There's more seniors, they live longer, they consume more resources, and don't forget, they are highly reliable voters.
Samuel Moyn from Yale has written a new book called Gerontocracy in America if you want a book-length treatment of this idea.
For a long time, the social contract, the bargain that young people made in this country, was study hard, do well in school, and you're going to get a good white-collar office job at a good company with some opportunities for growth and maybe a managerial role one day.
They have a sense that the old social contract is being disrupted, that older generations are pulling the ladder up from behind them.
Back in 2022, feels like a million years ago, I worked on a bipartisan commission with the Brookings Institution on the left and the American Enterprise Institute on the right.
And we all got together across partisan lines and agreed that the U.S. government spends way too much money on seniors and not enough on kids and young adults.
Retirees are getting more than $43,000 per person from the federal government, mostly through Medicare and Social Security benefits.
Now, it's not quite as bad as it sounds because most education spending is at the state level, and this is the federal budget, but still, you get the idea.
Our social safety net was built a long time ago to solve a really serious problem of poverty in old age.
Now, people live way longer and work is more sedentary, so seniors are much healthier by the time they turn 65, and that's a good thing.
There's more seniors, they live longer, they consume more resources, and don't forget, they are highly reliable voters.
Samuel Moyn from Yale has written a new book called Gerontocracy in America if you want a book-length treatment of this idea.
For a long time, the social contract, the bargain that young people made in this country, was study hard, do well in school, and you're going to get a good white-collar office job at a good company with some opportunities for growth and maybe a managerial role one day.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.