Glenn Reynold’s recent Tech Central Station article contains his proposal for real social security reform:
While people are debating Social Security reform, I want to make a more ambitious proposal: Let’s get rid of Social Security. And let’s do it by making sure that people will live so long that the idea of “retirement” will become largely meaningless.
He continues by conflating Social Security retirement, Medicare, and Medicaid, but that’s a subject for a different post. I think that his post makes a good companion piece with this one:
BOSTON (AP) – A new study from the Harvard Medical School suggests that older doctors generally know less, provide lower quality care and expose patients to greater risks than physicians recently out of medical school.
The Harvard team analyzed nearly 40 years of research into factors that shape health care quality and found older doctors were less likely to know or follow current treatment standards on everything from surgery to treating children’s fevers.
One study found that heart attack patients were 10 percent more likely to die in the care of a doctor 20 years out of medical school, compared with a recent graduate.
Now that’s a prospect that’s full of hope: a doctor who lives forever and does a worse job the longer he lives.
To go on I recognize that it’s anecdotal but anybody in any technical field will tell you that it’s progressively harder to hold onto your job with every year past 45 and that much harder to get a new job in your field as well. And technology is a river you just can’t step into twice: once completely out of a field substantial re-education is needed to regain your place and the prejudices against you are nearly insurmountable.
Glenn, is there any reason to believe that older lawyers are more capable or more hireable than young lawyers (unlike all other skilled professions)?
Living longer is less likely to mean that you’ll have that much more time to enjoy life as you’ll be forced to work longer (presumably forever as well) in decreasingly skilled and responsible positions.
I suppose there’s nothing like ten years of unremitting pain as a result of an untreatable chronic pain condition that prevents you from leading a normal active life to make the idea of eternal life sound less appealing but I find the idea excruciatingly dystopic. So here are my predictions for the social developments that eternal life would bring:
- If eternal life became a real possibility it would be construed as a right. Remember “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? I know that’s not in the Constitution but it’s part of the fabric of our social thought. The rich will not be allowed to separate themselves from the common lot of the rest of us.
- If life expectancy goes up dramatically, scarcity (particularly of land) will re-emerge as a real issue. Consequently prices of scarce items and particularly housing will rise dramatically. Nearly everyone will be compelled to work all of their lives (and, as I suggested above, in decreasingly skilled and responsible positions). These are words we’d better all learn: “Would you like fries with that?”
- Prejudices against the old will endure long past their social utility and the ability of technology to prolong life.
As much as I hate to defend Evil Glenn, killer of bunnies just to hear their screams, I think you misunderstand what he is speaking of. The “live forever” phenomenon is actually being fueled by an area of science that creates anti-aging drugs. Not drugs that prolong life, but actually HALT the aging process. Meaning once they come on the market, you would look about 20 for say 20 or 30 years if you wanted. Age discrimination would be harder to do because people would age at a glacial pace, and the problems of aging, such as arthritis and wearing down of the body, cease with them. You’re not old for a long time (though you get that way eventually), you’re pretty much young for way longer.
Go to http://www.futurepundit.com and look at anti-aging articles. It describes the phenomenon Glenn is getting at more clearly.
I’m aware of the idea. No therapy will repeal the calendar. Check my post again. The problems I’m pointing to have nothing to do with greying and getting feeble. They have to do with the passage of time.
“The problems I’m pointing to have nothing to do with greying and getting feeble. They have to do with the passage of time.”
Not necessarily.
Older people are tired most of the time. While younger people can spend time researching and playing with new techniques in addition to their job, older people have less energy for that sort of thing. Stay younger longer, and you can keep up with your field indefinitely.
In fact, all that money that people have to save for retirement, and flush down the Social Security toilet, could be saved up instead for taking a few years off every 20 years and going back to school, either in your own field or in some completely different field.
Also, there’s a limit to how valuable a technical person can be, but there’s no real limit to the medical costs that someone suffering from more advanced stages of that terminal disease called the aging process can rack up. Since employers are on the hook for medical expenses, and all employees are thrown into a risk pool together, the only way to stay desirable to employers is for your value to keep going up as you age; i.e., you’ll have to go into management at some point. (If you were buying health insurance all on your own, your expenses would keep going up while your salary stayed the same; you’d have a better time getting someone to give you a job, but your disposable income would get really low unless you went into a higher paying field.) If you didn’t age, all of this would be moot as your medical expenses remained nearly constant.
I’m not so sure of that, Ken. I think it has less to do with energy and more to do with increasing reponsibilities and obligations as time passes. These reponsibilities and obligations absorb a greater and greater amount of one’s time as one accumulates them. It’s pretty difficult to engage in continuing education and all of the obligations that merely begin around longer brings to you.
Also I seriously doubt that we’re going to do much about the connection-forming in the brain (at least not in a positive sense) during your, or my, or Glenn’s lifetimes. And the accumulation of neural connections conveys both the benefits of experience and the decreasing flexibility of an old brain.
“I’m not so sure of that, Ken. I think it has less to do with energy and more to do with increasing reponsibilities and obligations as time passes. These reponsibilities and obligations absorb a greater and greater amount of one’s time as one accumulates them.”
And what responsibilities and obligations would those be? Children leave the nest, and afterward family obligations go back to what they were when you first married. At work, if you take on increasing responsibility, you tend to get paid more, but here you’re assuming that people will end up with less responsibility. What’s left? How do they keep accumulating and become permanent?
Also I seriously doubt that we’re going to do much about the connection-forming in the brain (at least not in a positive sense) during your, or my, or Glenn’s lifetimes. And the accumulation of neural connections conveys both the benefits of experience and the decreasing flexibility of an old brain.
Jade Borg
http://www.gpjobsaustralia.com/