There is something about the prospect of treating aging that makes people take leave of all economic common sense.
Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.
One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork.
Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things.
(Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth).
Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.
The neat graphs start about half-way down (See Chart 1 for example), but the introduction pretty much sums the data up:
"Specifically, male Social Security–covered workers born in 1941 who had average relative earnings in the top half of the earnings distribution and who lived to age 60 would be expected to live 5.8 more years than their counterparts in the bottom half. In contrast, among male Social Security–covered workers born in 1912 who survived to age 60, those in the top half of the earnings distribution would be expected to live only 1.2 years more than those in the bottom half."
That doesn't tell you much about access to medicine unless you can exclude the other relevant factors. Maybe the 60th percentile worker went from working as a factory foreman to working as an office manager but the 10th percentile worker was still mining coal. Or womens' liberation saw the women entering the workforce take a disproportionate number of the safer unskilled labor positions, increasing the proportion of unskilled men working the more dangerous jobs. Any way to rule those out?
You missed the major factor that they ultimately didn't do anything about: frailty.
"Because this mortality risk occurred earlier in history for the 1900 birth cohort than for the 1930 birth cohort, the 1900 birth cohort faced higher probabilities of death at the ages between birth and 85. Thus, individuals surviving to age 85 in 1985 may have been more robust than individuals surviving to age 85 in 2015, because it was more difficult to survive to age 85 for the former group."
In actuality, no they didn't try to factor out socioeconomic factors that shouldn't matter (like those you mention) from those that should (like better nutrition). On the other hand, they have a large sample size (I can't find it, but from one aside it looks like around two million records) and they're only comparing two groups: above average and below average. I would imagine boundary cases like your first example would average out.
"One important contribution of this study is to highlight that the segment of the male Social Security–covered worker population experiencing slower mortality improvement is large—that is, the entire bottom half of the population, rather than just a limited group of disadvantaged at the lowest end of the earnings distribution."
And a 4.6 year difference would seem to be pretty significant.
> In actuality, no they didn't try to factor out socioeconomic factors that shouldn't matter (like those you mention) from those that should (like better nutrition).
You don't think occupation has a significant effect on lifespan? Someone whose career involved breathing coal dust, spraying lead-based paint or pumping leaded gasoline, manufacturing products with asbestos or heavy metals, etc. is significantly more likely to suffer health problems later in life. Even just having to work two jobs and not getting enough sleep will catch up with you over the course of 40 years.
> On the other hand, they have a large sample size (I can't find it, but from one aside it looks like around two million records) and they're only comparing two groups: above average and below average. I would imagine boundary cases like your first example would average out.
But that's the whole problem. You don't know if they average out or not, and if they don't in the population at large then no sample size is large enough to save you.
>Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.
Actually only the wealthy have access for heart disease even know. Vast masses in developing and third world countries don't have access to such treatments.
Treatments become far far cheaper in the 3rd world. Healthcare as a service profession generally charges what people are willing to pay. So, in India treatment is still available but expensive even if the same prices would practically be free in the US. Note: A 5000 Indian Rupee income equals ~81 US Dollar/month income.
> Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear.
Which means that in the context of this conversation, "wealthy" means the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%).
If you define "wealthy" as meaning anyone living in the developed world, then maybe this is true. In the context of this conversation though, medical technologies are available to broad swathes of society. In countries with socialised medical systems, heart disease treatment which is close to the forefront of medical developments is available to everyone, regardless of means.
Extreme wealth will buy you better medical treatment, but only marginally. You can afford more experienced surgeons and the latest machinery and drugs, but within 5 years that machinery drugs will be widely available.
> the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%).
Not to be that guy, but if "society" is defined as "humanity", as it should be imo when it comes to human health, all of us in first world are the 1%.
Edit: "To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. The average family in the United States has more than three times the income of those living in poverty in America, and nearly 50 times that of the world's poorest. Many of America's 99 percenters, and the West's, are really 1 percenters on a global level."
You're distorting my meaning and trying to make this conversation thread about something that it isn't. The thread started with a discussion of healthcare advances as a means of enabling wealthy family dynasties to grow their wealth while the rest of us didn't have access to that technology. It was rightly pointed out that healthcare advances (excluding specialised labour intensive surgeries) have consistently quickly become available to the majority of people within a country.
Yes, you can always point out that elsewhere in the world people are living in extreme poverty. It's tragic, but if you try and skew every debate on inequality towards this fact you will never get anywhere. It's perfectly reasonable to have two discussions - one, to discuss the great inequalities of our global capitalist system, and a second to discuss the relative wealth equality within individual countries or countries of comparitive wealth. This comment thread was started as the second type of discussion.
Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're saying "inequality is only important insofar as it affects me".
Advances in technology (including healthcare) are usually bankrolled by the wealthy - wealthy people and corporations. The middle class doesn't pool together a billion dollars to research drugs for heart disease. University research is funded by wealthy benefactors, grants (in turn funded by wealthy benefactors), Government money (funded by taxes, a disproportionate % paid by the wealthy) and so forth. It seems fair to me that they'd get first dibs.
We're all trying to grow our dynasties, that's why we have kids. It's not inherently evil.
Unless you are throwing in history and including all of those Roman senators who received what is by todays standards practically nonexistent medical care (I think that doing that would be a mistake, for reasons that should be obvious), then it is somewhere around 10-15% of the world's population that lives in developed countries. This is before we even consider that many developing countries have functional healthcare systems.
The population of Germany alone accounts for more than 1% of all currently living humans.
In addition to the sibling comments I'll also point out that in this context of wealthy family dynasties, we're talking about far fewer than 1 in 100 people. "1%" is just the catchy branding.
Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies.
One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork.
Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things.
(Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth).
Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.