The Longevity Dividend
(Content borrowed from IEET wiki .)
The Longevity Dividend refers to the economic benefits of ending aging and eliminating the associated health care costs. The Longevity Dividend has been defined as"the sum of health, social and economic benefits that result from slower aging.” For a highly visual and engaging summary, see this presentation .
Emerging technologies such as nanomedicine or Engineered negligible senescence are important components of the fight against aging and essential for securing the Longevity Dividend.
IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey and other scientists in the general field have argued that the costs of a rapidly growing aging population will increase to the degree that the costs of an accelerated pace of aging research are easy to justify in terms of future costs avoided. Olshansky et al. 2006 argue, for example, that the total economic cost of Alzheimer’s disease in the US alone will increase from $80–100 billion today to more than $1 trillion in 2050. “Consider what is likely to happen if we don’t [invest further in aging research]. Take, for instance, the impact of just one age-related disorder, Alzheimer disease (AD). For no other reason than the inevitable shifting demographics, the number of Americans stricken with AD will rise from 4 million today to as many as 16 million by midcentury. This means that more people in the United States will have AD by 2050 than the entire current population of the Netherlands. Globally, AD prevalence is expected to rise to 45 million by 2050, with three of every four patients with AD living in a developing nation. The US economic toll is currently $80–$100 billion, but by 2050 more than $1 trillion will be spent annually on AD and related dementias. The impact of this single disease will be catastrophic, and this is just one example.”
David Sinclair, Ph.D., writes that"economic forecasters are already predicting a ‘longevity dividend.’ The costs of treating a chronically sick population like today’s elderly are ruinous, and the graying of the boomer generation threatens to overwhelm an already overburdened health care system. Pushing the occurrence of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer to the outermost limits of our lifespan represents an astronomical savings, both in direct medical costs and otherwise lost productivity.”
According to David O. Meltzer, M.D., Ph.D., improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life are very valuable. However, the value is undermined somewhat by the costs from greater longevity, but this is only a problem if there are not associated enhancements to quality of life (which anti-aging strategies include).
According to Ronald Bailey, the monetary worth of even a 10% reduction in all cause mortality is $18 trillion. In the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, increases in longevity yielded a value of $95 trillion, and even when taking into account increases in medical expenses, the net gain was $61 trillion.
Sources
Securing the Longevity Dividend: Building the Campaign for Anti-Aging Science