The economic value of targeting aging
nature.com
nature.com
I see several people in this thread complaining about the economic analysis here or how old people are messing up our world and thus we should fix those things first. For the former question, I see this analysis as adding ammunition to the debate, because many people that determine where we should fund base their decisions on economics. This paper isn't aimed at you, it is aimed at them (speak to your audience). For the latter, I question the premise. Culture has moved too fast that it cannot be purely explained by younger generations dictating the change. This also falls counter to old people controlling everything. So I don't buy the premise. The truth is that if people were living to a thousand years old that society would fundamentally change. Who we consider children and adults would fundamentally change. The truth is that we don't know what this society will look like until we open the box, and until the dust settles. We should be questioning if this is good or bad (we should challenge all ideas) but we need to recognize that this would be such a fundamental change in society that we have no real baseline for determining how we would change. My personal belief is that we do not go quiet into that dark night. There is a lot to fear, but often our fears are irrational. This would save billions of lives, and so I believe it is worth the risk and worth the hardship we will face as society transitions into this new paradigm.
[0]https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
[1](Animated by CGP Grey) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
I think many do. One of my takeaways from the pandemic is that there are people--intelligent, informed, unoppressed people--who will self select away from benefits. Even seemingly obvious ones.
The fictional dystopias of the last century would have had an immortal elite keeping aging treatments from clamoring masses. I don't think that's how it would turn out. Many people--including leaders--would choose not to get the treatment. Still others would push their societies to ban treatments for everyone.
I don't know how you model this. It's a different form of haves and have-nots than we're accustomed to. But it would undoubtedly feed into and ameliorate the concerns brought up in this thread.
The important distinction between longevity and the situation surrounding the pandemic is not the rejection of a benefit, but the construction of a fantasy that allows the rejection of the benefit by re-framing it as a detriment. The pandemic itself is recast as 'not that bad' or a 'falsification', further removing the contemplation of the immediacy of death. And with the immediate obstacle removed the subject is able to slip back into fantasies of eternity, of one kind or another, whether implicit or explicit.
Considering how most Western societies (and many others) view suicide, it seems unlikely to me that it would be considered socially acceptable for someone to choose to live half as long as they had the technical option to. Taking the average age of death as 72, would the mental health of someone who chose to die at 36 from a preventable illness not be taken into question? As with sterilization, and other medical procedures such as birth control more broadly and assisted suicide for those suffering extreme medical conditions, bodily autonomy that runs against greater social expectation is resisted.
Or, if the technology had to be administered early, would those who withhold such treatment from their children be considered guilty of child abuse? Again, in current terms, if a child suffered from a medical condition that would kill them at 36, but which was treatable, would it seem likely that the parents, in our present society, would be charged with child abuse?
It's simply a matter of sliding the mark. Cultural attitudes could (and probably would) remain the same. Our fundamental fantasies already provide the basis for and are predicated on eternities. So the reality of longevity merely slots into extant dispositions. So it may not be as revolutionary as suspected.
There would, of course, be those who rejected the technology, but most would do so, I would say, because they believe themselves to possess an alternate way into eternity, perhaps religious, or to be abducted by aliens, but the goal would be the same, whether the efficacy is up to snuff or not.
To me, that is not very appealing... Living a healthier live at my 60s and 70s, and be able to be rock climbing with my grandsons and daughters definitely is... Most probably that will translate to longer life expectancy, but I don't think that by itself should be the goal.
The market balances itself so that the cost of living adjusts so that an average person would need to work until retirement age. That's why the cost of living is significantly higher in the bay area.
For better and worse, this capitalistic dynamic is what makes the US so productive as a country.
I'm unsure with what the issue with this is. But this also isn't true. People have been living longer in retirement. This is often a talking point when people talk about social security. There's a growing gap between when people retire and when they die, and this means people need to save more and that there is more being drawn from social security.
But I do see a huge difference here. If you can live a thousand years then what's the issue of working your first 100? Or 500? Or 900? You talk about capitalism but recognize that capitalism is about consumption. If you generate enough money to live on passive income you don't stop consuming and the wheels don't stop turning. No one stops consuming till they die, capitalism or not. The rich still get rich. But I'd rather have 100+ years of retirement than 20, even if nothing else changes.
I'm in my 30s so not in need yet but I'm keeping a close eye on the science.
For example, this clinical trial [0] is studying the safety of various dosing schedules of Rapamycin, and a planned followup study will use the safest dose with a larger group and longer timeline.
[0] https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/pearl-participatory-evalua...
edit: fine, maybe more than 10 years but within my lifetime :)
I think you forgot an extra zero
It's an interesting area, and at least some empirically useful work is being done, but both the expectation and the timeline here seem pretty ambitious.
Can't wait for a time when trying to delay your death requires serious justification and approval from some asshole whose only authority comes from 5+ years of overpriced formal education.
they are not saying that taking metformin slows aging, merely that it delays development of chronic illnesses. What we should be asking is if metformin is actually slowing down the biological aging process. https://www.afar.org/tame-trial
So if you have a great way to cure aging but are worried that the FDA does not recognize aging as a condition, that's how you get the treatment to market.
If you have a cure for aging, I'm decently sure you can earn your ROI without respect to the FDA.
Clinical trials are expensive. To fund them you need billions of dollars. Pharmas won’t fund research in anti-aging directly because it’s not considered a disease, can’t get FDA approval, and thus couldn’t be sold.
So, yes, you need to find another route to approval, similar to metformin and rapamycin.
Off label use in endemic, and it does give a path to play with some things clinically; however if you formed a company around this idea and could have been demonstrated to do it, you'll be pulled off the market so fast it will make your head spin.
What you are really talking about is about funding the research that wont work, in the hopes that eventually you hit on something that does.
If you do hit on that and can rigorously demonstrate it, market access will not be a problem.
I've done none of the research, just imagining, but if you were to open up a compound in Somalia or somewhere, make the appropriate political contributions, would you really be bogged down with lots of red tape? Could you just experiment and iterate fast enough to develop convincing therapies cheaply and then bring them to mature markets?
I think it's a bit racist for you to generalize my description of a poor and under regulated state, like Somalia, as being equal to "black people". Not all countries in Africa are like Somalia, you know. I suggest reading a bit more about Africa. I personally enjoy watching YouTube videos made by creators in different countries, African countries have a wide range.
As Mark Twain said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice". Today, we can virtually "travel" with the click of a button. Not all black people are poor Somalis!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_experimentation_in_A...
Just great.
Who the fuck did they get to determine willingness? Most people don't have the money to spend. If it takes you years of extra work to pay for a one year life extension, why not just retire years earlier and enjoy that time? After all, you could still die from an accident after paying the sum at birth/60. It seems highly inappropriate to use a population based metric like life expectancy to have individuals decide if they want a one year increase (likely the individuals don't understand life expectancy as well as).
Let's hope we don't need to deal with critical race theory / unconscious bias trainings at work and open derogatory statements against non-minorities for more than another 5-10 years, for example... I have to say it's making work a lot less pleasant than it used to be.
And maybe if we're extremely lucky some of the VC money will become more widely available to people based on competence rather than connections and personal wealth.
The way I understood it it's the poor nations that are really screwed. They cannot afford to relocate, and some of them have the worst weather already (feeding into why they're already poor).. .
1. A lot of the things are either very expensive or very difficult. Ex: the probiotics david sinclar takes is like hundreds of dollars, NAD/NMN are expensive etc. Other things are difficult for my current life like getting access to heat exposure therapy (very hot dry sauna) or fasting protocols. Inside tracker with inner age is like $600 each time?
Also I realized that if I donated to methuselah foundation, I'm investing money into the future for others' treatments I'm unlikely to be able to afford myself (or marginally worse, I would have been able to afford, but I donated $$$ over time such that I marginally no longer could..)
2. There was little point looking at the extreme ends of longevity because I was missing major first steps like dropping my BMI from 31 to 23.
But some percent of the population makes a lot more than that. And much like all things in the economy as they start to consume the products it gets cheaper and moves down classes until it becomes ubiquitous kinda like food is today.
It was always, "When I retiree I will be able to do this, and that, in comfort."
There was always the big decision of shouid I retire at 25 years (25 year old working 25 years), or get a few hundred more if I wait until 65?
I knew a person who worked accounting at the union.
She told me the average retire whom waits for the bigger pay day, cashed 3 checks.
3 checks----dead. (I was so shocked by this I never told anyone including my father.)
The wives did get 1/2 of the retirement, and lived off that for 10-20 years.
(I guess I should have been content with any work that offered a retirement?)
This is part of why I'm so adamant that I think pensions and the like are scams. I want to run my portfolio and my next of kin can have every cent (less taxes)
It would be nice if companies paid more into the 401k though, and didn't necessarily require the match. The 401k system is also letting companies off the hook with measly amounts. I'm mostly thinking about the people working at places like Lowe's and Walmart making $10-15/hr. Even 4% of $30k is only $1200 per year. Some of the people I knew who were working there were only contributing 1-2% (so 2-4% total with the match) because they couldn't afford to contribute more.
It's kinda weird that I can only contribute $19k but if my company matches more can go in? That makes no sense. The limit should be the limit regardless of the graces of your employer.
I came to similar conclusions about calorie restriction. These schemes tend to slow or restrict growth and energy levels, which is a real side effect we should be discussing more.
Rapamycin seems promising though. It appears you can cycle on and off it and get most of the anti-aging benefits, while limiting the effects of blocking protein synthesis.
I heard the effect was effectively not much, so you should be OK exercising. Just that your muscle gain will be a little bit less. This is just what I heard from other people though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Even if hinder muscle growth by 50%, I might still take it.
I came to similar conclusions about calorie restriction. These schemes tend to slow or restrict growth and energy levels, which is a real side effect we should be discussing more.
I doubt calorie restriction actually works for us. I find intermittent fasting easy.
"These findings are exciting not only because they represent a scientific advance in understanding aging, but also because they herald the first real anti-aging product that could come to market. Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3,000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030." [3]
[1] https://www.aging-us.com/article/103418/text#fulltext
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00297-8
The only way this changes is if against all odds diy biohacking scene arrives and outright breaks the law by doing human experiments. I got interested a few years ago and concluded until dna synthesis becomes cheap and more reliable for longer sequences it's a pipe dream. That would require a fundamentally new technology (enzymatic dna synthesis?) as current tech is just marginally improved 1970s tech.
Thus I see any aging treatment that doesn't fix dna damage as fundamentally a blind alley. And conversely if someone manages to fix dna damage, then the rest should just be some small details.
A few years back, there seemed to be a desire to justify cigarette taxes with a "it costs the state money when you get cancer" rationale. Some of the analysis seemed to indicate opposite results. Lung cancer, for example, tends to kill more quickly than age related diseases, saving on nursing home costs and palliative care. Everyone dies of something after all, and death is expensive as is aging.
Either way, it seems kind of strange to place economic values on life itself. I mean isn't economic utility premised on life?
In any case, it seems trivially true that economic measures will always correlate with either population size working age population size, depending on the model.
I feel like these kinds of papers only exist to be cited in support of cheap rhetoric.
Agreed. The authors already made up their mind regarding the conclusion before writing the paper. This is an analysis that should be done by a group not involved in aging research so it's 'unbiased'.
You invest some amount of effort into the action and the action has some amount of efficacy, so you can always divide the two to find a valuation. I agree that this exercise usually winds up as cheap rhetoric, but I'm not fully convinced it's the fault of the exercise.
Refusing to calculate a value doesn't mean the value doesn't exist, it just means we are letting our instincts decide the value for us, and our instincts are prone to doing silly things like spending the wrong amount of attention on anti-terrorism vs heart disease.
I'm not suggesting that all our decision making is good. Terrorism vs heart disease just don't really compete. A model of the world where everything competes with everything isn't a good one for decision making. Just like "don't build a particle collider until we have solved poverty" is not a workable approach.
Terrorism & heart disease don't have the same consequences, socially, politically or geopolitically. We're not machines. Even in machines' decision making, such moral calculus doesn't really play. Self driving cars won't, and don't need to solve the trolley problem any more than we do.
..and don't underestimate our instincts. They may not be as "perfect" as legible reasoning, but they are far more complete.
Any time you help people is a contrived scenario? Uhh... I certainly hope not. Putting a valuation on life is not a result of philosophical debate, it's a direct, unintentional, unavoidable consequence of any real-world action we take that helps people. The only way to avoid it is to avoid helping people. Which is ludicrous.
> Terrorism vs heart disease just don't really compete.
They sure compete for tax dollars and public attention.
> We're not machines.
No kidding. That's why we prefer chasing Bin Laden to chasing heart disease.
The "value of a life" discussion is an accusatory finger that says "yeah, actually we did have a choice there, and our choice had consequences," and I understand how that's uncomfortable, but that's exactly why we need the tool to hold our instincts accountable, such as we can.
They do actually. Both for budget and for misery.
When you have guaranteed pension funds for an ever growing number of bureaucrats, you HAVE to find new ways to tax. Taxing unpopular things is the easiest thing (and doesn't hurt for reelection).
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-wall-street-tobacco-d...
It also helps with mental health (which we have an epidemic of in the US).
By all means, this research should continue. But we do already have very good solutions to aging which are sorely overlooked.
Not my observation so feel free to caveat me away, but I'm just regurgitating what some doctors who studying aging observe and perhaps I'm not remembering all the evidence they provide.
Luckily human life is more than just economy (as expressed in GDP) optimization.
Individuals optimize for their own (often short-term) economic benefit. That's it.
The corporate overlords at ACME don't care about fighting obesity, because there are more than enough non-obese workers for them to exploit, and they don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable line of products that obese people need (i.e. insulin).
Governments are composed of individuals, and the structures we have to hold these individuals accountable to their constituents are weak, so they still end up using their levers of power for their own gain, and for the gain of their corporate sponsors (also often short-term).
Despite ~70 year lifespans, it seems that most of the population can't even be bothered to optimize for medium-term outcomes. This isn't going to change just because we invent a magic pill that lets you live youthfully till ~150.
The problem isn't lifespan, the problem is that humanity is innately selfish and short-sighted. If this can't be fixed, we are completely fucked.
Don't go to too far with this sort of atomistic analysis. Large firms are better at enforcing coordination than "society at-large" or other groupings. The fact that at different scales the coordination is markedly different has a huge affect.
We're not an "economy of households" as the orthodox macro might have one model.
The "large firms" that I'm familiar with are cesspools of political infighting, gamesmanship, and backstabbing. People in positions of power at these firms use their influence to achieve their own goals, often at the expense of the firm and its employees.
The counterexamples to this are so singularly rare that they are the exception that proves the rule.
There's another recent HN topic about how IBM's size prevented it from competing successfully in the PC market:
The fact that people fight over how to divy up a budget vs have completely separate revenue and accounts says a lot, despite all the stuff you talk about.
The communists tried pretty hard to do that, and just made things much worse.
We remember the Inquisition and the Vikings but they are small fry compared to Communists (and Nazis).
I'm not saying Communists are inherently evil - most of them are well meaning I think - but almost every single time it has been tried it has ended in genocide!
The one single exception I am aware of is the Israeli Kibbutz system.
Edit: communism has killed more people than nazism, probably because most people realize nazism is more or less pure evil while communism looks nice (edit:) on paper.
My original point was only that the Kibbutzen didn't end up massacring their inhabitants like almost every other communist experiment.
He probably means those final decades are completely unproductive and taxing on the whole economy, so a productive person dying just before becoming unproductive would be optimal.
Naturally, if you give people more productive years then it changes.
"Obesity steals more years than diabetes, tobacco, high blood pressure and high cholesterol -- the other top preventable health problems that cut Americans' lives short, according to researchers who analyzed 2014 data."
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20170424/the-top-5-condi...
"Obesity is associated with nearly 1 in 5 US deaths, according to a study published online August 15 in the American Journal of Public Health."
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809516
It should also be part of the climate change discussion:
"Overall, being obese is associated with about 20% more greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) than being a normal weight"
https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obe...
Because it's been going on in the background so long, that it became part of the background.
Also, it's not like it's not noticed by public officials. You hear all the time in recommendations and guidelines we should lose weight and get more exercise.
That said, I would also note that current public health policy is basically a failure in that we largely failed to move the needle regarding the obesity pandemic or getting the recommended exercise dose.
We also don't understand it, not well at least. You can't go to Walgreens, get a shot and be cured of obesity.
Societies with easy access to calories and sugar/carbs/sat fats and reduction in movement and increase in sitting have more obesity, right?
I am doubtful that easy access to calories means more obesity. The Japanese is a wealthy society and is less obese than the American, for example.
Also, societies that move more doesn't necessary have an increase in TDEE as society that move less. Your basal metabolism adjusts and accounts for physical activities. you would probably need to go to extreme to adjust your TDEE upward.
I have seen many, many reports, news specials, CDC website reports about being overweight and obese driving increases in health risks. Michelle Obama, as First Lady, was on top of it and reformed the food pyramid nonsense.
Of course, it's all a bunch of hypocritical bs when other, safer, more useful drugs are banned or restricted for stupid reasons.
I don't think the problem with Congress is that members are in their 70s. The problem is that ideally they would have real jobs till their 60s THEN run for government. Instead they bum around various government roles till they get elected in their 30s and once they are there dig in like tics.
Also: "...like tic[-tac-toe]
Also, they are the ones who are supposed to fix that problem.
Big difference going from 50 to 70; proportionally less going from 600 to 700, even if the world isn’t changing in a way that makes recent experience count for more than ancient experience.
A distracting thought: isn't it striking how "real property ownership" has returned as a marker of better societal status? A mere 50-60 years ago, even working class could own (arguably not very nice) dwellings in coastal California etc.
The same development can be seen in Europe.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be an owner of 3-4 nice pieces of real estate than a highly qualified professional. This is a certain return to feudalism, in a sense.
As for your original idea: going from 600 to 700 is not a big deal. But the intermediate phase is going to be a big challenge. The first generation that enjoys the possibility of life extension to, say, 120, is going occupy their positions of power for a disproportionately long time and will need to be persuaded to step away; possibly in exchange for a lot of money.
Yet when we design an economic system by the exact same principle, people wonder why we get ten shrieking megaphones instead of a magical tidal wave.
(Sarcasm)
Edit: I forgot HN does not enjoy sarcasm
I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly recommended and very current overview of the field of aging research.
That group will be composed of the insane/irrational, those who value power at extremes, those who value improving the world over their own lives, and those who have lived long enough that they're ready to move on. The last two categories are great candidates for empowerment, but one is rare and grows rarer, and the other doesn't show up for upwards of centuries. Until then you mostly get the first two, which suck. Eventually, I think, we burn through everyone willing to make the trade-off and we're left with no power centralization.
Unless you mean they only face death for the duration that they are in power, as an enforcement of term limits. I don't think that is materially different from other enforcement of term limits- if a dictator is able to compromise the military, they can probably also compromise whoever has the power to stop their impending death.
It's hilarious to me how shortsighted this whole thing is, if immortal dictators rule humanity indefinitely, how long do you think they'll let you live?
At the country-level scale, that certainly sounds better than everyone aging and dying.
But what would individuals do on a smaller scale? Would this also incentive a lot more violent death among the rest of the population too, to change things up in a world where probably everyone is their own long-lived dictator of some little domain they carved out. Sure, this would be illegal, but you can only catch and prosecute so much crime; what if it becomes unmanageable? Would people create unnatural death to serve the role natural death causes today? I think so. But I think this could still be potentially "better" than today in some measure - you're comparatively healthy and pain-free before your demise, instead of a slow painful decades-long decline.
I kind of like somthing along the same lines as the idea intended in Altered Carbon - everyone gets 100 years of generally healthy life, but then everyone dies at 100. Not realistic at all, but seems highly equitable. Any artificial constraints will be evaded or manipulated at some point, even in the name of what's best for humanity (ie what if Davinci or Einstien were still alive; eventually the people in power would say I'm president, so presidents should live forever too, etc).
Regardless, the bigger issue would be overpopulation.
OK. Do you want to die? I don't want to die.
Life is already inequitable as it is. The rich live a little bit longer. The pleb dies short and miserable life.
At the very least, everyone should be able to live as long as they like.
Any artificial constraints will be evaded or manipulated at some point, even in the name of what's best for humanity (ie what if Davinci or Einstien were still alive; eventually the people in power would say I'm president, so presidents should live forever too, etc).
There's also no absolute law of politics that dictators rule forever or indefinitely if they also happen to be immortal.
Regardless, the bigger issue would be overpopulation.
No, the problem is ecological disaster.
There's so much energy coming from the sun that humanity can't even begin to harvest a fraction of it, but we cannot scale to the sun because doing so will poison the Earth.
Someday, yes.
"Life is already inequitable as it is."
Which is why my statement was commenting on the equitable nature of lifespan in the fictional system.
"At the very least, everyone should be able to live as long as they like."
How do you propose to achieve this? Specifically, how would resource availability/consumption and indignant support systems be able to support it?
"There's also no absolute law of politics that dictators rule forever or indefinitely if they also happen to be immortal."
Nobody suggested what you are saying.
"No, the problem is ecological disaster."
For which increasing population would greatly contribute. Population is a major driver of consumption and there's no evidence that we can even support our current population sustainably. Your comment about scaling seems to be implicity acknowledge this.
It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different than the ones we have. I know individuals can work very hard to avoid this outcome but most people don't.
Natural selection doesn't act upon humans for the sake of humanity, nor did it ever asked what humans want or need.
It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different than the ones we have. I know individuals can work very hard to avoid this outcome but most people don't.
Citation? I would argue that adults are better at learning languages, because we have the benefit of hindsight, experience, and reasoning.
Whereas children are merely subjected to immerse learning environment from which to acquire languages pretty much every waking hours of their life.
Regards compounding interest, the economic markets have a basis in reality and so can't keep compounding forever.
Also even if it does compound forever, your trifling savings compounded for 100 years means very little compared to all the elder around you who have also compounded their much larger wealth(having compounded across previous centuries too) across that time. Which means you will still be significantly outbid by most of the customer base for anything you could want.
I agree. But unfortunately my understanding of history suggests that cultural and political change is reactionary, not forward thinking. I'd love it if it was forward thinking but I'm not hopeful that this time it'll be different. But if I'm right (and I think most people will agree) then there's no real point to this aspect of the argument because it's not something we can solve.
> Regards compounding interest, the economic markets have a basis in reality and so can't keep compounding forever.
Do you have evidence of this? This is essentially what generational wealth is.
> your trifling savings compounded for 100 years means very little compared to all the elder around you who have also compounded their much larger wealth
I have a bit of a controversial opinion on this (though I'm not sure why). I don't think it is about how far the ladder goes up, I'm more concerned with where the lowest rung is. If moving the lowest rung up requires shortening the ladder, so be it. But if it doesn't, so be it. If you can have a house, food, healthcare, and all your basic needs taken care of (which I presume will continue to increase as we take care of more needs. Moving goal post) then that is a win. I don't care how high the ladder goes if the lowest rung is post scarcity. If every person can has all their needs taken care of I don't care if there's a few x-airs that have quantum space yachts with holodecks. You don't have to compare yourself to everyone else. Everyone doesn't need to be equal. That's not a requirement to create a post scarcity world where everyone can pursue their dreams without worry of hunger or health. Inflation adjusted, food has become become a lot cheaper over the last hundred years, so at least one of those things is on the right track. What we're talking about would put healthcare on the right track (especially if you're pro single payer). Seems the other ones will similarly decrease in price as they become necessary (again, back to the reactionary nature).
Maybe you disagree though. But as long as there are people, like you, pushing for these things, I have good reason to believe we will obtain them.
As a newcomer, you won't be able to buy a home. Similar to now, there will be many other more wealthy people who want to buy that home "as an investment" so they can keep growing their wealth in relation to their peers.
I already fear we are heading towards economic feudalism. Throw in living forever and I fear something more akin to SLA Industries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLA_Industries
As you say though, with people pushing for things, hopefully significant societal change would avoid such a disastrous future.
edit - more concise.
I’m really sick of people equating working for someone else with slavery.
It makes me wonder if the US system will break down the same way the USSR broke down. As the politicians from the "early days" age out, it's difficult to replace them with people who are similarly bought into the system. And you end up with a Gorbachev or equivalent. I'm not sure if our Gorbachev is an AOC-like or a Trump-like or something else, but it's possible we'll have difficulty filling in the ranks of the Pelosis, Schumers, McConnells, etc.
Effectively, having "unapproved" children results in the children being executed, the parents gaoled for criminal/mental health issues.
It's another sign of the selfish immaturity ingrained into our culture.
Selfish immaturity? It seems that you yourself is a reflection of culture.
One of our very first epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh basically railed against immortality and accepting one's fate.
If someone lives forever, they don't evolve physically. This is basic. To the degree we evolve culturally, most of our culture comes to us in our eponymous "formative years." Leaving those behind tends to result in comparatively little change in culture over the remaining course of our lives.
> Selfish immaturity? It seems that you yourself is a reflection of culture.
I rest my case.
> One of our very first epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh basically railed against immortality and accepting one's fate.
This was not a call to try and live forever, this is a call to live boldly, take risks and not to fear death. Striving for immortality is the absolute opposite, the coward's response to the challenge made in the poem.
you skipped some lessons in biology class; you're not doing any evolving over the course of _your_ life. regardless of how long or short it is.
If a population lives forever, do you really think they'll continue having kids the entire time? Of course not.
That is not a law of physics or biology. People get heart implants, or even exercise and become stronger.
I rest my case.
Rest your case how? You didn't demonstrate that it is selfish and immature to desire to live, perhaps indefinitely.
This was not a call to try and live forever, this is a call to live boldly, take risks and not to fear death. Striving for immortality is the absolute opposite, the coward's response to the challenge made in the poem.
I assure you that I do not make conscious decisions about whether I live a thousand years if I undertake a given activity. I am also pretty sure that I routinely undertaken relatively dangerous activities that would kill me.
I doubt most people who becomes immortal will become the sort of conscious decision makers deciding not to take risk lest they jeopardize their thousand years+ lifespan. That doesn't seem to jives with human nature.
There's a heluva lot I wish I could tell my 20 year old self. Sometimes I counsel my friends in their 20s, but they don't believe me, as I didn't believe this stuff in my 20s.
Like?
Likewise it is impossible to communicate what 20 years of adult experiences feels like to someone who is barely an adult; not all years are the same. And then when they get to 40, likewise, communicating another 40 years of life experience to them doesn't work either. Growing up and aging can only be done first hand.
Compound this with the fact that some old people are just dumb and angry. So young people can and should just shrug off some of what old nutters say.
If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets. This study doesn't seem to think about how those things could actually negatively impact economics.
Eventually if you're intelligent and you're trying to self-fund your retirement you build up assets that are growing at a sufficient rate that you can live off the growth without touching your principal. Once you hit that, work becomes unnecessary.
If everyone goes from retiring for 20-30 years to suddenly possibly retiring for 120-140 years things get all kinds of strange things happening, the percentage of the population working would diminish. But then that would negatively impact companies due to increasing difficulty in finding workers, which would negatively impact markets, which would then feedback into ruining the investments allowing all these retirees to live off investments & savings. The current system couldn't work without room to greatly expand the population of living people to ensure growth of the workforce.
I have seen these ideas explored in Science Fiction occasionally, but not many other places.
There is another aspect as well, if you lived 200 years, what if you ended up having multiple successive families? Raise a family, your kids grow up, then you raise another family 50 years later?
Re-structure? Sure. De-rail? No. One could imagine our current low-interest rate environment (interest rates and time horizons are fundamentally linked) as a first step towards that world.
You're highlighting a problem of retirement savings running out and the labor pool diminishing. These problems offer an obvious solution.
People might stop having kids too, then there will be no new workers entering the work force eventually if lifespan was extended indefinitely.
For instance, I think we'll see close to 100% technological unemployment before we can extend human lifespans by 200 years. In that type of environment, most humans would be effectively retired.
Even if we have less than 100% technological unemployment, birth rates are generally declining, so there's lots of ways that could interact with increased longevity.
EDIT: fixed mispelling
That said, even in a hypothetical primarily-human labor-market, market-dynamics would fix the problem anyway.
For example: say food becomes scarce because no one's farming. Then the remaining farmers would become rich (they could raise their prices tons) while everyone else would end losing their money to buy the food. Eventually folks would start going into farming until the imbalance is corrected. And, yes, this would mean that those who'd refuse to go into farming would end up draining their retirement funds away -- a retirement fund wouldn't be a permanent no-work ticket, at least in an economy where labor was in too short of supply.
At least, in an ideal free-market economy. In practice, we tend to simplify things and have regulations for practical reasons. Such deviations from an ideal free-market economy might mess up the correction-process.. at first. However, if such regulations did prove to be problematic and prevented the economy from working, then we could just change the laws/regulations to fix that problem -- the simple approach would be to simply repeal problematic regulations.
In short, the stuff you're worried about can't happen (because AI will take the jobs anyway) and wouldn't be a problem even if it could (because market-dynamics fixes such things).
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Separately, might be worth noting that the big future problem would likely be population-control. Once we have good AI/robotics providing exploding wealth, and then clinical-immortality, it'd be all too easy for people to just keep having endless babies. Doubly so when we have good enough 3-D printing to literally print people, and easy test-tube babies before that. That may be an issue society'll need to address.