Please find below an extended copy of my remarks at today’s online Round Table of the Business Coalition for Healthier Longer Lives, jointed hosted by the UK’s APPG (All Party Parliamentary Group) on Longevity and Longevity Leaders.
(The stated goal of today’s Round Table is “Development of values for the Business Coalition for Healthier Longer Lives”.)
I’m David Wood, and I’ve been researching future scenarios for over 30 years.
The concept I want to put on the table today is that of the Longevity Dividend.
It’s actually a kind of second coming of the Longevity Dividend, since the idea was first proposed some 14 years ago by a quartet of distinguished longevity researchers (PDF).
It’s a good concept, but didn’t take hold in its first coming, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.
The core idea is that it is economically sensible – that is, financially wise – for society to make investments in research,
- not just into individual aspects of aging,
- nor just into individual diseases of aging,
- but rather into the common root causes of many of the diseases and other adverse characteristics of aging
– that is, research into items we would nowadays call the hallmarks of aging.
The argument is that such investments wouldn’t just be positive from a humanitarian point of view. They would also be very positive from a medium-term financial point of view.
We can sum up their likely benefits in the age-old saying, a stitch in time saves nine. Healthier long-lived people are better contributors to the economy, and better consumers of the economy, rather than being a nine-fold drain.
To move forwards with this concept of the Longevity Dividend, we have to acknowledge that the calculations of costs and benefits are inherently probabilistic.
There are no guarantees that any particular research investments will prove successful. But that’s no reason for society to avoid making these investments into the hallmarks of aging. VCs already know well how to adjust their portfolios on account of probabilistic calculations.
The reason the first coming of the Longevity Dividend didn’t get very far, in the public mind, was that people implicitly rated the probabilities of these therapies succeeding as being very low. Why speculate about potential economic benefits of biorejuvenation interventions if these interventions have little chance of working? However, with lots of more promising research having taken place in the last 14 years, it’s no longer possible to wave away this calculation of significant benefits. So it’s time to bring the Longevity Dividend into the centre stage of public discussion.
The Longevity Dividend has a partner concept: that of Super Agers. They’re people who reach the age of 95 with minimal experience of cancer, heart disease, dementia, or diabetes. Of course, these Super Agers do succumb to one or other disease in due course. Often an infection. But the total healthcare cost of these people, throughout their long lives, is usually less than the total healthcare cost of people who have shorter lives. Quite a lot less total healthcare cost.
So one way to realise the Longevity Dividend would be to put more research into understanding what’s different about Super Agers.
But why isn’t this happening (or not happening much)? We need to go deeper into this topic.
We need to reflect on the general poor regard that society places in practice into any measures that prevent diseases rather than curing them.
Previous discussions in this series of Round Tables have highlighted how our societal incentive structures are deeply flawed in this regard.
Without addressing this misalignment, there’s unlikely to be much progress with the Longevity Dividend.
So one of the big outcomes of our collective deliberations must be to demand sustained attention to the question of how to alter society’s overall priorities and incentives.
And there’s an important lesson from history here, which will be my final remarks for now. That lesson is that the free market, by itself, cannot fix problems of flawed societal incentives. That kind of thing needs political action. But the politicians can be aided in this by industry groups stepping forward with specific agreed proposals.
It’s similar to how factory owners actually helped pressurise politicians in this country, two centuries ago, into changing the law about children working in their factories.
These factory owners saw that economic incentives were pressurising them into employing children, against their own humanitarian instincts. Many of these factory owners, as individuals, felt unable to stop hiring children, for fear of being out-competed and going out of business. It needed a change in law to cause that practice to change. And networks of factory inspectors to ensure conformance to the law.
Working out a similar change of law in the early 2020s is surely a key practical activity for this business coalition, so that prevention moves to centre stage, and with it, the concepts of Longevity Dividend and Super Agers. Thank you.
Further reading
For an extended analysis of the economic arguments about the Longevity Dividend, see Chapter 9, “Money Matters”, of my book The Abolition of Aging.
For the reasons why people disregard the economic and other logical arguments in favour of society investing more in a potential forthcoming radical extension of healthy human longevity, see Chapter 10, “Adverse Psychology”, of the same book.
For the example of the coalition to change the laws on child employment, see the section “When competition needs to be curtailed” in Chapter 9, “Markets and fundamentalists” of my book Transcending Politics.
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