Wealth & Money Quote by Richard Dooling

Cold arithmetic dressed up as moral clarity: Dooling’s line stages a triage fantasy that sounds compassionate until you notice how quickly “everybody over 50” becomes a disposable category. As a novelist, he’s not issuing a policy memo so much as poking at the way scarcity talk rewires ethics. The blunt “let’s see what’s left over” is the key phrase. It smuggles in the assumption that care is a finite pie and that someone has to be last in line. Once you accept that framing, the rest follows with almost mechanical inevitability.

The move that makes it work is the self-implication. “I’m over 50” isn’t just humility; it’s a rhetorical inoculation against charges of cruelty. By volunteering himself as a potential sacrifice, he claims the moral high ground while normalizing the sacrifice of others his age who might not share his preferences, finances, or health prospects. It’s altruism as argument tactic: if I’m willing to be deprioritized, who are you to object?

There’s also a quiet provocation aimed at American health-care politics, where maternal and infant outcomes can be grim for a wealthy country, and where seniors are the most organized voting bloc. Dooling’s subtext isn’t anti-old so much as anti-entitlement-by-default: he’s challenging the reflex that “more years lived” automatically translates into more public claim. The sting is intentional, because he’s describing a taboo bargain we already make, only usually with softer language and less honesty.