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>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2]

My other reply to your comment is, regretably, extremely long but I wanted to repeat this point:

Global income inequality is still very high and will stay very high for a long time

  Even under a very optimistic scenario it will take several 
  decades for the poor to reach the income level of the global 
  top 10%.

  2% is roughly the growth rate that the richest countries of 
  today experienced over the last decades (see here). We have 
  seen that poorer countries can achieve faster growth, but we 
  have not seen growth rates of more than 6% over a time frame 
  as long as necessary to reach the level of the global 10% in 
  such a short time. If the past is a good guide for the future, 
  the world will very likely be highly unequal for a long time.

This is from the source you quoted yourself:

https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#global...

In short: the developing world is nowhere near "catching up" to the West.

It's not obvious to me that dying of age-related diseases at 80 is as bad as dying of malaria and whatever given age in most people's views

>> Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria.

That's absolutely what he's arguning for. This is how he elucidates his allegorical points about dragon-administration and war against tigers and snakes:

(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.

He is clearly equating healthcare spending with "dragon administration".

If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?

Also see the point I quoted above:

(5) The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault, because he got his priorities wrong.

The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on "individual diseases".

After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of them, so we can save everyone in one go.

>> That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.

In what sense is the fact that most people die at an older age not an expansion of human life span? Are you saying we care about the mode, more than we care about the mean?

That certainly seems to be Bostrom's way of thinking. I believe he is way more interested of his chances to live to 300 than any other person's chance that their kids will live to 70.

But that's not ethics. That's just pure selfishness.

>> First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.

And yet:

    Examples of health inequities between countries:

    the infant mortality rate (the risk of a baby dying between birth and one year
    of age) is 2 per 1000 live births in Iceland and over 120 per 1000 live births
    in Mozambique;

    the lifetime risk of maternal death during or shortly after pregnancy is only 1
    in 17400 in Sweden but it is 1 in 8 in Afghanistan.

I am perhaps wrong to focus on health inequalities between countries, since there are big inequalities in health within societies:

    Examples of health inequities within countries:

    in Bolivia, babies born to women with no education have infant mortality
    greater than 100 per 1000 live births, while the infant mortality rate of 
    babies born to mothers with at least secondary education is under 40 per 1000;

    life expectancy at birth among indigenous Australians is substantially lower
   (59.4 for males and 64.8 for females) than that of non-indigenous Australians 
   (76.6 and 82.0, respectively);

But I am not wrong to say that we do have the technology to save many millions of lives lost to disease, right now, yet we don't because they can't afford it.

Quotes from: http://www.who.int/social_determinants/thecommission/finalre...

>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing

And yet again:

  The benefits of the economic growth that has taken place over the last 25 
  years are unequally distributed. In 1980 the richest countries, containing 
  10% of the world’s population, had gross national income 60 times that of 
  the poorest countries, containing 10% of the world’s population. By 2005 
  this ratio had increased to 122.

  International flows of aid – grossly inadequate in themselves, and well 
  below the levels promised – are dwarfed by the scale of many poor 
  countries’ debt repayment obligations. The result is that, in many cases, 
  there is a net financial outflow from poorer to richer countries – an alarming 
  state of affairs.

Same source.

Also, from the source you quote:

  Global income inequality is still very high and will stay
  very high for a long time

>> Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world.

How many people in the developing world have iPhones?

> If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?

Where are you getting "as many" from? You realize that it is in fact possible to spend less money on a thing without spending $0? You're acting like we have no choices between "spending 1/7 of our GDP on healthcare" and "ban all healthcare forever".

> The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on "individual diseases".

Lesser evils are still evils. We should spend more than $0 on eradicating them, but less than we spend on eradicating greater evils. That's what having proper priorities means.

> After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of them, so we can save everyone in one go.

These inferences about what he believes are nonsense and unsupported by the text.

> How many people in the developing world have iPhones?

Far more than did 10 years ago.