A “LONGEVITY DIVIDEND?” There’s an interesting article in The Scientist about how treating the causes of aging rather than the symptoms could save a lot of money:

The experience of aging is about to change. Humans are approaching old age in unprecedented numbers, and this generation and all that follow have the potential to live longer, healthier lives than any in history. These changing demographics also carry the prospect of overwhelming increases in age-related disease, frailty, disability, and all the associated costs and social burdens. The choices we make now will have a profound influence on the health and the wealth of current and future generations. . . .

In addition to the obvious health benefits, enormous economic benefits would accrue from the extension of healthy life. By extending the time in the lifespan when higher levels of physical and mental capacity are expressed, people would remain in the labor force longer, personal income and savings would increase, age-entitlement programs would face less pressure from shifting demographics, and there is reason to believe that national economies would flourish. The science of aging has the potential to produce what we refer to as a “Longevity Dividend” in the form of social, economic, and health bonuses both for individuals and entire populations-a dividend that would begin with generations currently alive and continue for all that follow.

Given the current state of the art, they think that accelerating research now could pay off dramatically in the future. (Via Reason, who observes a shift in the debate with this piece: “This is not support for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or similar full-on engineering, damage-control approaches, but it is a large departure from the position of public silence on healthy life extension. The sea change in public opinion and awareness brought on by advocacy is creeping up on us, and factions within the scientific community are adjusting the cut of their sails in expectation of funding.”)

Interestingly, I was reading Arnold Kling’s forthcoming book on health care policy which Brink Lindsey gave me, and I noticed that he offers some support for this kind of approach, too. The disease-by-disease approach, as Arnold notes, costs a lot of money to treat frailer and frailer people with poor quality of life, as you fix the things that might kill them only to leave them feeble and vulnerable to the next thing that needs to be fixed. Better to approach root causes. I think that’s right.