Idrees Kahloon has just published an insightful piece on ageing in the Atlantic, entitled “A Fine Country for Old Men: Geriatric Americans are hoarding wealth and power”, in which he also cites some of my work:

“According to Tim Vlandas, an Oxford political economist, advanced democracies around the world are reaching the point of “gerontonomia”—his term for a stagnating political economy set up to prioritize elderly citizens. These citizens punish their elected governments for inflation, which lessens the value of savings and pension payments. They are much more tolerant of unemployment, because they no longer work; slow growth, because their wealth has already accumulated; and high public debt, because their descendants will pay it. The result, Vlandas argues, is lower wage growth for those still working, and also worse outcomes for their children, as a result of lower social investment over the course of their lives.”

The underlying reseach is presented in the following journal articles (and can be freely accessed on Research Gate):

Vlandas, T. (2026) “Aging Advanced Capitalist Democracies: The New Electoral Politics of Economic Stagnation.” World Politics, 78(1): 48-90. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/wp.2026.a980470.

The population of advanced capitalist democracies (acds) has aged substantially in the last decades. Yet we know little about the consequences of aging for the electoral politics of economic performance. This article develops a novel theoretical framework linking aging to lower economic growth in four interrelated steps. First, elderly voters care more about pensions than other voters do, but less about policies related to child care, family, and education. Second, elderly voters are less likely to penalize governments for low growth and unemployment. Third, gray power pushes governments to protect the growing share of budgets allocated to pensions at the expense of more growth-enhancing policies, most notably social and public investments, while also weakening policy responsiveness during recessions. Fourth, this policy reallocation undermines economic growth. The author tests this theory using multilevel and fixed-effects regressions, an instrumental variable approach, and causal mediation analysis on micro- and macrolevel data across twenty-one acds from the 1960s onward. The results show that aging fundamentally alters the electoral politics of economic stagnation in acds.

Vlandas, T. (2023) “From Gerontocracy to Gerontonomia: The Politics of Economic Stagnation in Ageing Democracies.” The Political Quarterly, 94: 452-461. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13301

One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. This article explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation.