I am a primary care physician in West Virginia. I am not at all surprised by this finding. When I read the question, I did not immediately interpret it to mean that life would be extended by a given number of years of positive-health-status existence. I think that much of the poor health status that many people see among the population are often thought to be the result of lack of willpower or agency, such as overweight, lack of exercise, poor eating habits, tobacco/drugs/alcohol, etc. Adding extra years without a clearer explanation of where they would be distributed makes me think of dystopian outcomes first. I guess that's just the zeitgeist now. They assume, like I do, that adding years will more often than not just add years of less-than-optimal existence, not something positive. More years in retirement to run out of savings, more years of poor mental status/dementia, etc.
That was my thought too. The question doesn't actually specify that the extra years would be healthier, it just says that the aging process is slowed. When does it start slowing? If the aging starts to slow at 40 that is very different than starting the slowing at 70. Spending 40 extra years with all the ailments of an 80+ year old would be unpleasant, especially seeing as how knee replacements are only good for 20-25 years I am told.
Further, is it slowed via delaying aging such that 80 is the new 40 then you decline from 80-120 in the same manner as 40-80 now, or by dilating time, so that you spend longer at each apparent age, so you are effectively 70-80 year old levels of capacity from 100-120? If the decline happens equally quickly and you just last longer before the decline hits Bryan's assumptions make sense, but if you just stretch the "too old and sick to work much" from 15 years out to 30 years you might not get much benefit.
The question is poorly framed. It would take a lot of words to do it correctly so I can understand why they didn't fully clarify what they meant, but it can reasonably be parsed a number of different ways. Especially seeing as how modern life extension looks a lot like spending a ton of money on medicine and treatments to scratch a few extra months or years out that are low quality I am not at all surprised that people understood it to be an extension of that.
In polls like this I wouldn’t take the wording too literally. Not only can the wording itself be too vague, but most people simply ask what “vibe” the question is getting at.
The vibe most people assume is “do you want to be an old person longer”. Most old people I know aren’t fans of being old people. They don’t look at more years in the nursing home fondly. That’s probably how they interpret the poll. That it’s asking about doctors doing more to keep grandma clinging to life a bit longer.
"The hypothetical specifically states that we don’t just keep people alive longer; we actually “slow the aging process.”" Hmm. It does not say anything about compressing morbidity. If we live several decades longer but now experience problems of aging for most of that time, I can see how some might doubt the effects on productivity. Especially if you assume that people will still retire at about the same age. Their added years of life would not be productive. (In reality, some will continue to work, or work part-time, or do volunteer work.)
(I see that "Burnt Out Doc" made a similar point.)
"The hypothetical specifically states that we don’t just keep people alive longer; we actually “slow the aging process.” Under what scenarios does the implied fall in the dependency ratio fail to raise living standards?"
I think one short-term mechanism is that everyone still wants to retire at the same age. Look at China - they set the female retirement age at 50 (or 55 for white collar jobs) in the 1950s at a time when less than half of the population reached that age, and haven't increased it until 2024, when the female life expectancy is around 80, and people are still upset that it's changing!
So, if this tech is developed in 2025, it's very plausible that older people in 2065 will be benefiting off generous retirement programs set in the 2010s when they were expected to live a couple of unhealthy decades after retiring. And they'll be using their newly vigorous bodies to protest and vote to keep their uncommonly long retirement.
"How could any economically literate person deny that the 'economy would be more productive'? ... Under what scenarios does the implied fall in the dependency ratio fail to raise living standards? I can think of a few, but none are plausible." What I find implausible is an "implied fall in the dependency ratio." That fall takes place only if the electorate accepts a substantial increase in the retirement age. No way that's going to happen.
Separately, with 66% of respondents thinking "only wealthy people would have access" to the anti-aging treatment, and only 51% of respondents thinking the treatment "would be a bad thing for society," it's entirely possible that every respondent thinks that this treatment would be good for society if everyone could get it. At least 15% of respondents think that it would be good for society despite believing that only the wealthy would have access. Unless that 15% of respondents all consider themselves wealthy, this is shockingly generous, effectively "I think it will be great for my family, friends, and myself to age and die normally while rich people live longer and healthier lives."
(Let me explicitly state that I would love to see an anti-aging treatment become available, even if it was initially so expensive that only billionaires could get it. I'm nevertheless shocked that any respondents feel that way.)
What jobs could a 90 year old do so they could survive for another 30 years?
Laborers aren’t working beyond 50/60 years old or at least they are rare individuals if they do.
Most people in America don’t age well or have enough money to support themselves into old age today not sure extending retirement is going to improve that situation.
Plz forgive a stupid question, but does productivity always increase with population? I thought productivity = economic output / population. My assumption is that both of those numbers would rise, making productivity relatively flat. Please educate me on my mistake; thx.
I disagree. If a business bought a production machine that cost 50% more, but lasted 50% longer and produced at the same rate, there is no increase in productivity. The return is the same.
Most people are not that productive when they are under 20 or 25. So reducing the share of the population who are not yet in the economy would increase productivity, other things being equal.
I see the ability and right to live longer rapidly becoming a duty, or at least an expectation. I really don't want to live a day past when my youngest graduates from college, so my life expectancy is already ~20 years too long. I should tack another 40 on? As Quinn said on Voyager when he won the right to end his life, "Can't you see, Captain? For us, the disease is immortality." Yes, it's not immortality per se, but living 120 years versus 120 million is a distinction without a difference for humabs.
Yet, despite the above, the irrational societal fear of death means yhe social pressures will be almost unbearable to do so. The social pressures will erect legal barriers to opting out. While usually Dr. Caplan keenly understands that often the process--in this case, being alive against your will--is the punishment, here he has neglected to build in any safeguards from the tyranny of the death-fearers.
What's the view you're referring to? If it's that social pressures will lead to legal requirements to live longer, maybe you're right. If it's "I don't want to live a day longer than is economically necessary for my family," I agree few will share that view, but "should" is a value judgment over a question of pure bodily autonomy. You want to live to 20 or 120? Have 0 kids or 10? Get 1 tattoo or 50? I really don't care, and I don't know why anyone else would, either.
"Yet compared to the U.S. public, economists once again prove themselves to be an island of common sense in a sea of misanthropic folly." There's a touch of arrogance that runs through many of Bryan's posts - this one is worse than usual. Not everyone has the comfortable life of an economist, particularly tenured professors who travel the world and write books for personal gain. Many people live relatively miserable lives (better than a century ago, but still miserable). To them, the idea of working unpleasant jobs or scraping by in run-down rented accommodation for a few more decades isn't appealing. You should give it a try, Bryan.
And yet the demonstrated preference of the poor peasants whose lives you think you could manage better than they do is to not commit suicide and often to have more children.
Professor, have you shared life with a person in their 90s? I'm 80 - in December - in quite good health, generally. In the last 5 or so years I have noticed a rapid onset of age related issues. Mostly joint and muscle pain that constrains some activity. Certainly reduces the enjoyment. Walking is not fun. Anyway, my dad lived to 90, my mother to 95, my maternal grandmother 96, paternal grandmother 102. My father in-law shared our home the last 3 years of his life which ended calmly at 95. End of life for my dad was accelerated by med induced liver deterioration, my mother, without my father wanted her life to end. My maternal grandmother lived with my family from the time I was 10 until she died from a slow metastasizing cancer. My paternal grandmother died from aspirating food in the nursing home where she lived. My father-in-law, a robust man, an athlete all his life, at the end was consciously welcoming the end of his life. As Burnt Out Doc suggests, the survey questions may have left too much to the respondent's imagination. The 7 to 10 years that conventional wisdom says I have left are far too few. What I will feel like in 10 years, may alter my ambition.
While I agree that families/children often have a lot to deal with in the final years a parent's life, if that parent were 120, their (still vigorous) 90 year old children and 60 year old grandchildren might be more numerous so that the burden could be spread over more descendants. Also none of the children or grandchildren would still be taking care of their own children simultaneously, only the great grandchildren in their 30s would be.
Additionally I think the kind of people who would read this blog and thus be in the thread are people with somewhat well-organized lives, for whom their 20s and 30s and 40s were a golden age, and everything after a lessening because of arthritis and other physical maladies.
Others may have a very different experience, when their 20s and 30s was a time of stupidity, hormonal derangement, addiction, compulsion, and only their 50s and 60s, if they survived, is calmer and less stressful. For those people an extended late middle age free of aggression or sexual compulsion might be very welcome.
Tangentially related, and I wrote about it in my own substack on kids who supposedly commit suicide because they are "gender divergent," the states with higher suicide rates (largely the mountain west) has a high correlation with states where fewer people are religious.
How would that necessarily imply a lower dependency ratio? It is politically difficult to justify raising the age of pension. Macron’s reform in France is an extreme exemple of that.
There could be trickier ways of doing that. Companies, and then perhaps governments (if government retirement systems are not bankrupt and gone), could offer a second pension for people who continue working from 65 to 85, 95 etc.
I am a primary care physician in West Virginia. I am not at all surprised by this finding. When I read the question, I did not immediately interpret it to mean that life would be extended by a given number of years of positive-health-status existence. I think that much of the poor health status that many people see among the population are often thought to be the result of lack of willpower or agency, such as overweight, lack of exercise, poor eating habits, tobacco/drugs/alcohol, etc. Adding extra years without a clearer explanation of where they would be distributed makes me think of dystopian outcomes first. I guess that's just the zeitgeist now. They assume, like I do, that adding years will more often than not just add years of less-than-optimal existence, not something positive. More years in retirement to run out of savings, more years of poor mental status/dementia, etc.
That was my thought too. The question doesn't actually specify that the extra years would be healthier, it just says that the aging process is slowed. When does it start slowing? If the aging starts to slow at 40 that is very different than starting the slowing at 70. Spending 40 extra years with all the ailments of an 80+ year old would be unpleasant, especially seeing as how knee replacements are only good for 20-25 years I am told.
Further, is it slowed via delaying aging such that 80 is the new 40 then you decline from 80-120 in the same manner as 40-80 now, or by dilating time, so that you spend longer at each apparent age, so you are effectively 70-80 year old levels of capacity from 100-120? If the decline happens equally quickly and you just last longer before the decline hits Bryan's assumptions make sense, but if you just stretch the "too old and sick to work much" from 15 years out to 30 years you might not get much benefit.
The question is poorly framed. It would take a lot of words to do it correctly so I can understand why they didn't fully clarify what they meant, but it can reasonably be parsed a number of different ways. Especially seeing as how modern life extension looks a lot like spending a ton of money on medicine and treatments to scratch a few extra months or years out that are low quality I am not at all surprised that people understood it to be an extension of that.
In polls like this I wouldn’t take the wording too literally. Not only can the wording itself be too vague, but most people simply ask what “vibe” the question is getting at.
The vibe most people assume is “do you want to be an old person longer”. Most old people I know aren’t fans of being old people. They don’t look at more years in the nursing home fondly. That’s probably how they interpret the poll. That it’s asking about doctors doing more to keep grandma clinging to life a bit longer.
"The hypothetical specifically states that we don’t just keep people alive longer; we actually “slow the aging process.”" Hmm. It does not say anything about compressing morbidity. If we live several decades longer but now experience problems of aging for most of that time, I can see how some might doubt the effects on productivity. Especially if you assume that people will still retire at about the same age. Their added years of life would not be productive. (In reality, some will continue to work, or work part-time, or do volunteer work.)
(I see that "Burnt Out Doc" made a similar point.)
"The hypothetical specifically states that we don’t just keep people alive longer; we actually “slow the aging process.” Under what scenarios does the implied fall in the dependency ratio fail to raise living standards?"
I think one short-term mechanism is that everyone still wants to retire at the same age. Look at China - they set the female retirement age at 50 (or 55 for white collar jobs) in the 1950s at a time when less than half of the population reached that age, and haven't increased it until 2024, when the female life expectancy is around 80, and people are still upset that it's changing!
So, if this tech is developed in 2025, it's very plausible that older people in 2065 will be benefiting off generous retirement programs set in the 2010s when they were expected to live a couple of unhealthy decades after retiring. And they'll be using their newly vigorous bodies to protest and vote to keep their uncommonly long retirement.
"How could any economically literate person deny that the 'economy would be more productive'? ... Under what scenarios does the implied fall in the dependency ratio fail to raise living standards? I can think of a few, but none are plausible." What I find implausible is an "implied fall in the dependency ratio." That fall takes place only if the electorate accepts a substantial increase in the retirement age. No way that's going to happen.
Separately, with 66% of respondents thinking "only wealthy people would have access" to the anti-aging treatment, and only 51% of respondents thinking the treatment "would be a bad thing for society," it's entirely possible that every respondent thinks that this treatment would be good for society if everyone could get it. At least 15% of respondents think that it would be good for society despite believing that only the wealthy would have access. Unless that 15% of respondents all consider themselves wealthy, this is shockingly generous, effectively "I think it will be great for my family, friends, and myself to age and die normally while rich people live longer and healthier lives."
(Let me explicitly state that I would love to see an anti-aging treatment become available, even if it was initially so expensive that only billionaires could get it. I'm nevertheless shocked that any respondents feel that way.)
What jobs could a 90 year old do so they could survive for another 30 years?
Laborers aren’t working beyond 50/60 years old or at least they are rare individuals if they do.
Most people in America don’t age well or have enough money to support themselves into old age today not sure extending retirement is going to improve that situation.
Plz forgive a stupid question, but does productivity always increase with population? I thought productivity = economic output / population. My assumption is that both of those numbers would rise, making productivity relatively flat. Please educate me on my mistake; thx.
Shocker - member of group says group has better views than those not in the group (using the member’s values as the standard)!
I disagree. If a business bought a production machine that cost 50% more, but lasted 50% longer and produced at the same rate, there is no increase in productivity. The return is the same.
Most people are not that productive when they are under 20 or 25. So reducing the share of the population who are not yet in the economy would increase productivity, other things being equal.
I see the ability and right to live longer rapidly becoming a duty, or at least an expectation. I really don't want to live a day past when my youngest graduates from college, so my life expectancy is already ~20 years too long. I should tack another 40 on? As Quinn said on Voyager when he won the right to end his life, "Can't you see, Captain? For us, the disease is immortality." Yes, it's not immortality per se, but living 120 years versus 120 million is a distinction without a difference for humabs.
Yet, despite the above, the irrational societal fear of death means yhe social pressures will be almost unbearable to do so. The social pressures will erect legal barriers to opting out. While usually Dr. Caplan keenly understands that often the process--in this case, being alive against your will--is the punishment, here he has neglected to build in any safeguards from the tyranny of the death-fearers.
A view few will, or should, share
What's the view you're referring to? If it's that social pressures will lead to legal requirements to live longer, maybe you're right. If it's "I don't want to live a day longer than is economically necessary for my family," I agree few will share that view, but "should" is a value judgment over a question of pure bodily autonomy. You want to live to 20 or 120? Have 0 kids or 10? Get 1 tattoo or 50? I really don't care, and I don't know why anyone else would, either.
"Yet compared to the U.S. public, economists once again prove themselves to be an island of common sense in a sea of misanthropic folly." There's a touch of arrogance that runs through many of Bryan's posts - this one is worse than usual. Not everyone has the comfortable life of an economist, particularly tenured professors who travel the world and write books for personal gain. Many people live relatively miserable lives (better than a century ago, but still miserable). To them, the idea of working unpleasant jobs or scraping by in run-down rented accommodation for a few more decades isn't appealing. You should give it a try, Bryan.
And yet the demonstrated preference of the poor peasants whose lives you think you could manage better than they do is to not commit suicide and often to have more children.
Professor, have you shared life with a person in their 90s? I'm 80 - in December - in quite good health, generally. In the last 5 or so years I have noticed a rapid onset of age related issues. Mostly joint and muscle pain that constrains some activity. Certainly reduces the enjoyment. Walking is not fun. Anyway, my dad lived to 90, my mother to 95, my maternal grandmother 96, paternal grandmother 102. My father in-law shared our home the last 3 years of his life which ended calmly at 95. End of life for my dad was accelerated by med induced liver deterioration, my mother, without my father wanted her life to end. My maternal grandmother lived with my family from the time I was 10 until she died from a slow metastasizing cancer. My paternal grandmother died from aspirating food in the nursing home where she lived. My father-in-law, a robust man, an athlete all his life, at the end was consciously welcoming the end of his life. As Burnt Out Doc suggests, the survey questions may have left too much to the respondent's imagination. The 7 to 10 years that conventional wisdom says I have left are far too few. What I will feel like in 10 years, may alter my ambition.
While I agree that families/children often have a lot to deal with in the final years a parent's life, if that parent were 120, their (still vigorous) 90 year old children and 60 year old grandchildren might be more numerous so that the burden could be spread over more descendants. Also none of the children or grandchildren would still be taking care of their own children simultaneously, only the great grandchildren in their 30s would be.
Additionally I think the kind of people who would read this blog and thus be in the thread are people with somewhat well-organized lives, for whom their 20s and 30s and 40s were a golden age, and everything after a lessening because of arthritis and other physical maladies.
Others may have a very different experience, when their 20s and 30s was a time of stupidity, hormonal derangement, addiction, compulsion, and only their 50s and 60s, if they survived, is calmer and less stressful. For those people an extended late middle age free of aggression or sexual compulsion might be very welcome.
Fascinating Pew poll. How much of the answer is due to religion?
Or to dreading the experience of somatic decline?
Tangentially related, and I wrote about it in my own substack on kids who supposedly commit suicide because they are "gender divergent," the states with higher suicide rates (largely the mountain west) has a high correlation with states where fewer people are religious.
How would that necessarily imply a lower dependency ratio? It is politically difficult to justify raising the age of pension. Macron’s reform in France is an extreme exemple of that.
There could be trickier ways of doing that. Companies, and then perhaps governments (if government retirement systems are not bankrupt and gone), could offer a second pension for people who continue working from 65 to 85, 95 etc.