Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Compared to the country, it represents, Congress has gotten, to put it bluntly, old.

The median age of lawmakers in the House of Representatives is about 58,

and in the Senate, it's 65, whereas the median age of Americans in general is 38. And a lot of people

are saying the system we have is a gerontocracy, a term that refers to being ruled by people

older than the average population. And this has come

back into focus as some prominent representatives like Nancy Pelosi have announced their retirement,

and younger candidates like Zora Mamdani have seen wins. And all of this isn't just about politics.

We also have a huge generational wealth gap in this country, and Congress has played a role in shaping it.

Baby boomers hold over $85 trillion in wealth, which is nearly twice as much as Gen X and four times more than millennials.

So here to unpack the potential political and economic consequences of our so-called

garrantocracy is Owen Zadar, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Welcome to the show, Owen. Thanks for having me. So the data illustrating the wealth gap between

boomers in particular and other generations

is really stark.

But how did these numbers actually show up in real life?

I mean, I think it's a huge range of human flourishing.

So it starts at birth.

You know, the United States is one of the few countries where the poverty rate is higher for

kids than it is for elderly people because we put a lot of resources in social security and

health care, where we don't, we kind of have a patchwork for kids. And so poverty rates right out of

...