Lately I’ve been trying to parse out some of my thoughts on the economic matters associated with longevity research, the ramifications of healthy life extension, and disability. The way I see it, longevity research is a good thing regardless of how much it costs—just as sanitation and clean water are good things if people need them, regardless of how much they cost.
But right now, one of the most widely-known longevity research initiatives is The Longevity Dividend. I am definitely in favor of any initiative that seeks to help make sure people who need particular kinds of health care in order to stay alive and healthy get it—but part of me always squirms a bit when I read about the supposed “catastrophic” financial burden of caring for sick people. Now, I’m not trying to deny that cost is a monumental difficulty to deal with—I just find it rather sad that it might take an economic argument to garner widespread support for healthy life extension research and medicine. Mind you, this doesn’t mean I don’t support the Longevity Dividend or similar potential efforts—it just means that, just as I am not satisfied with the idea of 80-or-so years of life, I am also not satisfied with a society that needs some kind of financial incentive in order to recognize the value of people’s lives.
Explicating further, one of the two top killers of American adults is heart disease. Changes in the body associated with age generally lead to an increased susceptibility to heart disease. If the bodily changes that increase susceptibility to heart disease (e.g., hardening of the arteries) could be diminished or decreased, people would be less likely to get heart disease, and therefore less likely to experience the pain and mortality associated with heart disease. This is intrinsically a good thing. (And I should note that in all my readings of disability rights literature, I have never once come across anyone in opposition to treatment of heart disease, or health practices likely to decrease the incidence of heart disease. The same goes for cancer. Ditto for pneumonia.*)
Of course, some expenditure is required in order to successfully treat anyone’s heart disease, cancer, or pneumonia. And of course, the money associated with the treatment of these conditions (a) needs to come from somewhere, and (b) be appropriately managed and organized. However, the main reason we treat things like cancer and heart disease and pneumonia is not—or at least, should not be—the fact that people without cancer tend to be more productive workers than people with cancer. We treat cancer, heart disease, pneumonia (and think in terms of preventing these conditions) because of the suffering and death they impose upon us and those we care about. In this context, “aging” should be considered no different from any of the aforementioned conditions, because without some kind of intervention, it will most assuredly kill you. There is absolutely no basis for arguing that somehow it’s good for people to die of aging but not good to die of anything else—the exception people tend to make for age-related death is unacceptable and hypocritical.
If it’s bad for people to suffer and die against their will, then it shouldn’t matter what the source of that suffering and death is. And it also shouldn’t matter how much it supposedly “costs” to permit people who would otherwise die to live—obviously it costs something, but what could possibly be more valuable than the lives and health of irreplaceable persons? All I’m saying is, people ought to get their priorities in order.
As mentioned earlier, it might be necessary, at times, to invoke primarily economic arguments when dealing with people whose own main argument in opposition to healthy life extension is that “older” old people will decrease the amount of resources available for activities not related to health crisis management. Here, the economic argument is appropriate in the sense that it corrects what is more than likely factually untrue from an economic standpoint—it is obvious that if a person doesn’t get heart disease, nobody is going to need to spend any money to treat heart disease in that person, which means that money is free to be used elsewhere. But the reason we want to prevent heart disease—at least, the primary reason—isn’t an economic one, but one that I hope stems from compassion.
Heart disease left untreated will most likely kill you. Aging left unaddressed will definitely kill you, whether indirectly or directly. So of course I’m in favor of things like longevity research—because it has tremendous potential to save many, many innocent lives. Sure, it might end up having a particular economic effect that will make some people happy, but even if there was no chance of that, I would still support such research. The dragon is bad, it destroys people.
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