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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century

In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.

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I think your graph is a good illustration of the loss of productivity. Compare the gains between 1900 and 1920 and 2000 and 2020. The earlier period saw an 11% gain in life expectancy, compared to a 2% gain in the latter period. Just looking at the line in your graph you can tell progress is slowing down.

Why did we make more progress before and less later? We have better tools, computers, and software. We have more people, both in the US and coming in from worldwide along with a greater portion of the population being college educated and free to work on scientific and engineering problems. We have better developed theories of biological, chemical, and physical systems. And yet, when we knew very little, had little resources, and few people working on the problem - we made huge strides. Now, not so much.

Maybe this issue is that we've already plucked the low hanging fruit. That doesn't seem quite right to me though. Even if we have, we should be equipped, via the advantages I referenced earlier, to pick higher fruits.

I wouldn't be at all surprised that there's going to be slowdowns of growth in various areas, some things are by definition going to be constrained in terms of space/resources. (e.g. growth of # home units in New York City) I don't think infinite liniear or infinite exponential growth is the expectation.

That having been said, for this particular example (life expectancy) it's typically a bit better to look at life expectancy at age x, often 5, 10 or 15 are chosen.

It's because infant mortality used to be sky-high, as 25% (one in four) in 1900 and 16% (one in 6) in 1950 worldwide, to < 2.9% today, with the best countries now around 0.2%.

If say one in four humans becomes virtually zero years old, that skews the average down a lot, e.g. from 65 to 40. But it doesn't mean that the average person who makes it through the first few years would've died at age 40.

If we look at improvements of life expectancy for those who already raeached age 10, it looks like this and is a pretty straight line with fewer indications of slowing down. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-10...

I think you’re reading too much into “life expectancy at birth”. Life expectancy at age 20 hasn’t moved nearly as much. The big wins were reductions in deaths during childhood.

Not to sound harsh, but the main economic benefit is that now people need to have fewer children to maintain a stable population.

In the late 80s life expectancy in Italy was around 70, now it's well above 80, and a large part of the difference is due to how many died 55-65 to cardiovascular problems or cancer.

A lot more of my relatives died of heart attack or cancer in the 80s than those from the next generation did in the last ten years. In fact in the last few years I witnessed many people getting surgery for those same heart issues or cancer that would have killed you a couple decades back.

Frankly, as a parent, I think "fewer dead children" is a pretty big deal. Perhaps one of the biggest improvements in human welfare that one would hope to see in society.

I've heard this argument a surprising number of times, and I must say I find this degree of callousness about dead children to be utterly horrifying.

> It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Which appear to be uniquely dangerous and ineffective, so it's odd to use them as an example of progress. Besides that, mRNA is not a new thing. What's new is the EUA.

>In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

This has nothing to do with productivity rise and where do we see its results (what is discussed here), but about the merits of technology.

Even so, the raise in life expectancy at birth is about those low hanging hygiene practices (nothing to do with post 1950 techology) and a few vaccines (most of which available before 1950s).

Not any big technological breakthroughs, like artificial hearts and so on (which hardly make a dent), and with extremely little to do with any post 1950s tech.

So the question of the article in the domain still remains, where's all this benefit from the productivity rise.

As you can see from my link, life expectancy at birth was around 67 in 1950. There has been an 18% increase since then.

You continue to make claims that are inconsistent with the data.

>We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time

But can you show me the exact breakthrough that came by this pouring of resources into the research, and that enabled such vaccines, by removing blockers that blocked such vaccines for decades?

The main vaccine “innovation” was that the FDA decided to finally approve an mRNA therapy. Moderna’s been trying to get such things approved for about a decade.

So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

>So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

So as I doubted.

Naturally, the next question would be "What was the questionable bureaucratic barriers" that was temporary suspended. It really blows my mind that the answers to this is not widely known. It is kind of disturbing..

>Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

What about the quality of life? We know that people are getting sicker at a younger age, and if we consider that in addition to the ever increasing cost of the treatments, it does not appear to be a net positive.

I would guess that those who are getting sicker at younger would just have died.

Let's say hypertension is now diagnosed at 50 instead of 70. How many people used to die of a stroke between 50 and 70 due to undiagnosed hypertension?

How many people used to NOT have hypertension, and other cardiovascular issues, for want of exercises and other physical activities? Thanks to increase tech addiction in form of 24x7 chitchat using smartphones and video games..

So it technology take away some and then give back some (not without a huge cost, mind you), how can you evaluate its impact on human existence?

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