Samuel Aaron Moyn (born 1972) is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and professor of history at Yale University, which he joined in July 2017.
He was a professor of history at Columbia University for thirteen years and a professor of history and of law at Harvard University for three years.
His research interests are in modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies.
In 2007, Moyn received Columbia University's Mark Van Doren Award and its Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for "unusual merit across a range of professorial activities".
"Michael Ratner's Tragedy, and Ours" (essay adapted by the author from his 2021 book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War), The New York Review of Books, September 1, 2021.
"Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential" (guest essay), The New York Times, April 21, 2026.
David Runciman, "The Cult of Longevity" (review of Samuel Moyn, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth, and What To Do About It, FSG, 2026, 269 pp., ISBN978 0 374 60764 7), London Review of Books, vol. 48, no. 13 (23 July 2026), pp.9–12. "[In the United States of America] the elderly, who have the most to spend, get to spend the least of what they have on everyone else, and everyone else has to pick up the tab. ... The American Association of Retired Persons, founded in 1958, [is now] one of the biggest and most powerful lobbies in American history. It ... has an annual operating budget of nearly $2 billion, nearly ten times that of the National Rifle Association. (p. 10.) ... [O]n current trajectories Medicare and Medicaid look like they could soon bankrupt the federal government. ... Moyn [writes that] the solution to the problem of gerontocracy in America is the expropriation of the assets of older citizens who have far more than they need. (p. 11.) ... [T]his is an argument for socialism. ... Old age is naturally semi-socialised anyway. ... Gerontocracy in America is rooted in the unequal distribution of political influence. The money shores up the power and the power shores up the money. ... Economic inequality is exceptionally difficult for democratic systems to remedy in the absence of a massive structural shock [such as] war, revolution, famine, plague. ... During the Second World War income tax on higher earners in the UK reached 98 per cent and taxes on excess corporate profits were at 100 per cent. [T]he postwar Labour government, though effectively broke, was nonetheless able to construct an extensive welfare state, including a national health service, that persists in some form to this day. [T]he rest of the [21st] century looks wide open ... to the possibility of ... upheavals, whether geopolitical, climatic, technological, biological or something else." (p.12.)
