It’s obvious that healthy people that live shorter are better for the ‘economy’ but clearly humanity doesn’t live to optimize for the economy. If we did, we would be fighting obesity with 10x the seriousness of how we fight COVID.
"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.
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.