Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

BioNTech has a lot of potentially groundbreaking mRNA therapies in its pipeline, some of them against various forms of cancer.

https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...

https://biontech.de/science/individualized-cancer-medicine

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03072-8

I am really looking forward for such solutions, fuck cancer.

That said, the economic impact of such cures isn't clear to me. If your population gains, on average, say, a year or two of life, the pay-as-you go pension systems that are already under strain in greying Europe will come under even bigger strain.

So it seems that each discovery like that will be balanced by us working longer. Personally, I as a 42 y.o. in Czechia, do not expect to get any meaningful state pension ever. There will be just too many of us.

View on HN

We should be increasing the retirement age for public pensions as quality-adjusted life years increase. Unfortunately people don’t want to spend extra years working, or contribute more to pensions during their working years, so we wind up in this unsustainable system.

> don't want to spend extra years working

How many 60+ people do you know? Do you honestly think they should still be working?

Both my parents are 60+, my father is in his mid seventies, and they are as productive as ever.

Congratulations to them. My dad has worked manual labour since he left school aged 15 - first as a shipbuilder and then in the oil industry. My mum retired from teaching a year ago then developed lymphoma.

Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.

We don't need to extract more productivity, sure, but it would lead to decreased medical costs.

So instead we should extract a few more percent of productivity out of everybody who is pre-retirement age for every additional year of life expectancy?

The alternative seems to be keeping the young under employed

Are you referring to the "lump of labor" fallacy?

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...

No, that refers to job openings across industries, specifically mentions agriculture jobs declining as other industries grow. Look at the median age of say politicians or tenured professors to see what I'm talking about.

I know many people in their sixties who choose and want to work, including my parents. They are lucky in being able to choose to work at a reduced level and not out of absolute necessity so that changes the implications, but they do not want to retire completely.

It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.

My grandpa is 89 and refuses not to work. He thinks he'll fall apart once he does.

My grandpa is 94 and still enjoys working. Drives to Home Depot every day to pick up supplies for our family company, and other errands around the city. His view is that he enjoys it and helps him stay active.

could it be explained as a generational gap?

that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work.

the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.

If the current generation is looking for all possibilities to not work they're sure doing a crap job at it - the number of people working multiple jobs has shot up... Or did you mean that stereotypical millennials are lazy and thus all young people are lazy?

the people working multiple jobs is due to how the jobs have gotten 'securitized' - people have become specialists in low skill jobs, leading to no growth at all.

A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs.

i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.

> the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.

You're getting downvoted for this statement, which is utterly ridiculous.

From what I see around me, the current generations work as much, if not way more, than previous generations (such as boomers).

i differentiated between between people working and people wanting to work.

it is also true that if a generation is chronically overworked, they will not be interested at all in working till their death.

> It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.

You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.

You may not view it as "not particularly healthy" because of the frame of reference, not because of "a fact" that not working is unhealthy.

If people "retired" at the age of 25, could you reasonably argue that we'd have an unhealthy population?

> You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.

But it is true. An internal study at a megacorp I worked at showed that people who didn't retire ended up living longer.

It makes a ton of sense. Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.

If anything that proves inactivity is unhealthy, not a life without work.

Not all activity has to be done in the service of providing value to a corporation. You can retire and take up fishing or rock climbing, play chess, write a book.

This idea that we've been conditioned to, that the only valid life is the life we trade for money, is insidious.

> Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.

Nobody argues with this. But thinking that paid work is the only source of mind stimulation and body movement is just silly.

I know a lot of people over 60 and almost all of them are still working.

Retirement age in Germany is 67, so you'd kind of expect that.

Current 60 year olds aren’t relevant to the hypothetical of “what if we cure more stuff?”, rather “what will 60 year olds be like if we cure more stuff?”

Hell yes.

My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements.

We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.

This will be challenging since the epidemic of obesity (which kills far more than covid) now effects > 50% of society and leads to disability at younger and younger ages.

Obesity is a critical risk factor for COVID-19. And obesity also increases the risk of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and hypovitaminosis D which are all co-morbid conditions that further increase COVID-19 risk.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm

if obesity was tackled with the same intensity as covid, we would have seen far better outcomes...

but too many financial hurdles in its way...

If obesity could be prevented with a $20 shot twice a year, I don't think it would be much of a public health problem.

Is this sarcasm? The US has free vaccine shots and free masks (most chain stores hand them out for free), and people still won’t use them.

But I don't get a heart attack if you're obese.

But if you're under 60 and yourself fit and healthy, you'd probably not even notice if you caught covid and recovered. Everyone getting fitter is a huge collective win. Even outside the context of a pandemic--fat people have a hugely disproportional impact on national healthcare spend. All of our insurance would get cheaper and cheaper if we reduced the national BMI.

And, if you do get a heart attack, which happened to my very fit professor when he died right before finals, you might not have the specialists available immediately for care because they are crunched for time dealing with a health crisis (obesity has made COVID much worse for example).

You still can get damages in heart, kidney and lungs from corona, even if you are asymptomatic and didn't feel anything. The first cases were reported from italian divers you can't work in their job anymore because of lung damages.

And the costs wouldn't really get lower, you just change the illness. If you are healthier, you live longer and your final illness most probably will be cancer. Expensive long te treatment. Obese people die faster and cheaper.

Organ damage is definitionally symptom for a disease.

Maybe I am now paying for your health care heart attack? Costing me more, so I have some interest in weight of other people now. Maybe I am getting more financial trouble, which cause stress, which linked to heart disease: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/stress-...

I think cancer treatment is more expensive. Heart attacks have a pretty death rate.

But you get a fatter bill because of the obese population due to the way health care and insurance is structured.

this means, in the current world, you get to fat-shame the obese people, have color coded id cards based on their BMI, have them off flights etc till they prove that they ran on their treadmill today...

The financial hurdles do exist - but it is mostly the political lobbying that prevents a real attack on obesity in the US. Sugar is big business and, by extension, obesity greases a lot of people's palms.

The US could take a serious look at addressing massive over consumption - but the last serious take on that was the sugary drink ban in NYC and that turned into a "you'll pry my big gulp from my cold dead hands" affair pretty quickly. The US is in too deep celebrating the exploitation of the health of their populace to turn things around - but other countries might have a chance.

Covid is hardly a benchmark for lethality. Since the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more people have died of diarrhoea. (comparing official numbers for both)

Diarrhea isn't comparable to COVID, as it is a symptom of numerous other causes (both infectious agents and otherwise) not a single infectious agent.

Working an office job when you're 67 isn't too bad. But most people who've spent their whole lives doing manual labor are worn out and broken by that age.

And likely much earlier than that. They might not even live to their pension date.

If there is actually productivity growth (which I strongly believe there is) - then this can be shared between 4 groups - the workers, the non-workers, the retired, and the capitalists.

I think most workers would like to see 100% of these gains go to workers. I think most shareholders would like to see 100% of the gains go to them. I think it'd be fair to share these evenly - and so higher taxes could make it so that the non-workers and retirees get some of the benefits of productivity increases.

Why? As productivity increases, shouldn’t some be allocated to leisure?

Any gains are generally directed towards chasing status. Rather than being allocated towards leisure activities, they end up being used to push up property prices and the profits of luxury goods companies.

Leisure itself is a marker of status.

If only... I think generally the people who have achieved the means to enjoy leisure time are the people who are driven by ambition to keep attaining higher status. It takes someone with the ability to step back and assess what's important in life.

the link proposed is not not clear to me. Wouldn’t requiring people retire later keep them in jobs near the end of their career, giving them even more money to “push up prices”?

I guess this might be the case in America but seriously? Economic gains up here in Canada tend to either go into reinvestment or leisure since life is your thing and having a fancier car than your neighbor is silly. I think that due to limits on the supply of leisure goods you will find that your second sentence is accurate - but I think that's due to the increased demand of leisure, not due to the increased demand of status (outside of a small portion of the population).

No. Housing prices are even higher in Canada than the US, despite lower wages. Canadians are funneling almost every dollar into housing.

This is sad but I feel probably true in some sense.

Just because some don't work physically demanding jobs doesn't mean you can raise the retirement age for everyone. Even so, many hardly reach retirement age in good health. Before that, it would be better to ensure that all incomes and all gainfully employed persons are taken into account for the pension fund and that such pointless things as a contribution assessment ceiling are eliminated. Then the contribution could even decrease.

Many countries already (plan to) do that. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a05b71b5-en/index.html?i...:

“The normal retirement age of men will increase in 20 out of 36 OECD countries by an average of 3.5 years based on current legislation. The highest increase is projected for Turkey, from 51 currently to 62 years. Assuming that legislated life expectancy links are applied, also Denmark, from 65 to 74 years, and Estonia, from 63.3 to 71 years, will rapidly raise the retirement age.“

Probably massively oversimplifying things here, but why does the government have to provide us pensions anyway?

Can't they just reduce the tax we pay and instead state that everyone is responsible for their own pensions, so if you save up enough you don't have to work longer...

Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension. And sure, that is on them for being irresponsible stupid young people (i.e. young people), but then it becomes a societal / national problem when every old person is destitute, straining all other systems in the country. If I, selfishly, do not want to be surrounded by destitute old people that lower my quality of life, I have to ensure that there is some (national) system that ensures these people prepare a pension for themselves.

Also, on the more utopic/hippy views, it is just nice to help others, so why not institutionalize/codify helping others.

> Because then too many people will not actually prepare their own pension.

It is worth noting that if your goal is just to handle the people who didn't make wise decisions when young, the current system does more than needed, and there's a much better way to accomplish that. You can simply force people to save n% in a retirement savings account, managed by the government; ie. take the current system, but keep everyone's money separate rather than merging it into a common pool. This is how Singapore's Central Provident Fund works.

The current system really solves 2 problems: people who choose not to save enough, and people who didn't earn enough to save enough. You can solve the 2 separately: the first with the solution mentioned above, and the second with something like a negative income tax.

Now, the problem with separating the 2 is that there may not be enough political will for the second system, because it makes it obvious that the amount you receive in retirement is not in proportion with what you contributed. That's the case now too, but it's obscured by the structure of the program.

Because people generally cannot work anymore at a certain age, and most western countries do not think it is acceptable to let elderly people starve, even if they could have taken decisions to prevent that.

Because you cannot expect all of the population to individually make wise financial decisions spanning multiple decades well past the years they can even generate income if they wanted. A lot of people already have problems budgeting for next month.

Because spreading out the "risk" of living much longer than you anticipated prevents destitute 95 year olds.

If I make dollars, I am trading time for money, some part from my life. I am never regain these years I spend earning. Now some other person is saying hunger from no good financial decision, means I now must give some of my dollars (years)? No, these policys are taking part of my life. I will give charity if such is my choosing but no government can take some from my life for sustaining of others.

Because economics be a cruel mistress that leaves a lot of people in permanent financial distress and working people into the grave because they still haven't saved up sufficiently is incredibly dismal and depressing. Pension related taxes exist to both ensure that everyone acts responsibly and to redistribute the wealth created over our lifetimes to ensure that everyone gets a chance at a pleasant retirement.

Life is about happiness - it isn't about work.

Then what happens to the people who choose not to invest in their pension? Are we comfortable allowing these elderly people to live on the streets?

I don't think we should increase age for public pension.

Life is made to be lived, not for working.

We should increase taxes income by making everybody pay their fair share, and these include multinational corporations, and implement some sort of UBI. Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.

>pay their fair share

Define fair share, it's not clear to me what that is.

At the very least the same percentage that a small business, less than 50 employees, pays in taxes.

There has to be more to it than that. You haven't even argued why this is fair by the way. "Fair share" is an emotionally charged political slogan that means something different to everyone. Probably why it's used by so many politicians.

I don't have to convince you.

That it is my opinion, and you can discard it.

But I believe that if we tax small business a certain amount, big corporations should pay, at the very least, the same amount.

Again, it is not a scientific argument, it is a political one, and honestly I don't want to be dragged in a technical discussion about taxation.

You say political, I say emotional.

And I suppose your political views are based purely on reason and logic?

Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.

>And I suppose your political views are based purely on reason and logic?

Yes actually. And I definitely don't try to couch my political views in moral stupidity like "fairness" which you are not even capable of explaining.

>Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.

Of course it's not inherently bad. It's definitely bad when you can't even explain your position coherently but feel strongly enough about it to get into heated arguments.

It's delusional to believe you can form political beliefs without emotion coloring the decision in any way. In fact, a rational, logical being would be well aware of how emotions guide our behavior at a subconscious level, and that we can never be totally free from emotion-based decision-making.

That doesn't mean we've slaves to our emotions, or must make irrational decisions based on our whims.

But it is a foolish thing to say you are 100% free of emotions in your views, especially when that incorrect view is wielded as a cudgel against opposing viewpoints (which we apparently aren't even "capable of explaining").

> But it is a foolish thing to say you are 100% free of emotions in your views

No it's not. You just make all these statements that are baseless. I can say my political beliefs are based on rationality because my political beliefs are simple.

I never said my views are free from emotion. I said my views are 100% based on reason. I vote in my direct self interest, my values are based on my self interest, my goals are to advance my self interest.

I wonder whether you interact with other people, and if you do, what's in your self interest WRT their material and emotional state, free time etc, and then their that of their contacts, etc.

E.g. Is it in your self-interest, that people live in a system where 1/300 are toiling away till they can't, so a guy can sit on a rocket? Is it an incredibly simple answer?

when i go with a friend to get pizza and we each eat half pizza, we each pay one half bill, fair share. why then have we seen some concept of "fair share" in tax change to fit budget needs? "fair share" is fixed amount but i hear no fixed amount proposed.

I mean if my friend is Jeff Bezos or Rhianna, I might be a little surprised if they suggest we split the bill.

If it was Jeff Bezos, I wouldn't be surprised.

Then here we have core difference: I would have no such suprise. I think there is some fundamental difference in our understandings of fairness.

Because in public services everyone is worse off if someone doesn't get a good care - the pizza is infinite.

The whole point of taxes is solidarity. If you don't understand basic principles of being civil then good luck in your life.

Then you make a new contention that you want more money past a "fair share" because you have the policy goal. Fairness has not its definition set by government budget needs. What mean you here with "solidarity"? What has this to do with "civility" or its lacking?

> Life is made to be lived, not for working.

> Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.

Who will choose to work rather than get something for free?

I'll tell you: the same people who would pay taxes if it were not mandated by the threat of jail - that is, people who contribute to charity.

That is typically less than 1% of earnings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...

I believe very few people will choose to work, and therefore "decent lives" for the masses can not be maintained with this little work.

Life expectancy maybe increased a few months, but it is extremely bad science that you can just increase pension in consequence. The age is rising because fewer people die prematurely because of better medicine. Doesn't mean people can now work until a later age, they will suffer the exact same health problems.

You can bet that some parts of life even became more unhealthy. I don't expect to live longer than my grandparents that were children in WW2.

It depends where in life you gain those two years. Two extra years of being 20 is a lot nicer than two extra years of being 99.

True, but cancer is typically a disease of the old age. I do not remember it exactly, but your chances of developing cancer at 70 are several thousand times higher than at 20.

It's not quite that dramatic. Globally [1] it's closer to 100x-200x for an early 20 something vs early 70 something.

For the US [2] it's 3.4 per 100k at 20-24 years of age, and 659 per 100k at 70-74 years of age (call it 200x).

A large number of people 50-70 die of cancer however. For the 60-64 group, the rate spikes to 331 per 100k. 50 to 70 can be high quality years for a person. In response to the parent comment that mentioned solving cancer only adding a few years, the lives to be saved in the 50-70 group is a very potent counter argument for the economic value and considerable high-quality years that can be added rather than dying at eg 55 or 63.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-by-age...

[2] https://rivercountrynews.com/an-update-on-cancer-deaths-in-t...

Not enough people realize this early in their life and spend their youth toiling away for some imagined perfect retirement life - only to reach it and have their pensions disappeared by their company's management firm gambling it away on the stock market, being struck with disease and mobility issues that prevent travel, and losing their loved ones early on into their imagined golden years.

Life doesn't last forever; keeping your head down and being a "good worker" doesn't get you shit. You need to actively fight to make sure those years in your youth are worth it - since it's always quite possible that cancer strikes you down in your thirties.

> That said, the economic impact of such cures isn't clear to me. If your population gains, on average, say, a year or two of life, the pay-as-you go pension systems that are already under strain in greying Europe will come under even bigger strain.

And the alternative is? I mean people keep doing this "A is bad" ... okay what's B? Sometimes there's this implied, horrible option B. Sometimes there's just nothing.

Never mind that there is still pretty decent child mortality from cancer. And if you count every disease that mRNA can fight ... there's a few really bad ones in there.

> So it seems that each discovery like that will be balanced by us working longer. Personally, I as a 42 y.o. in Czechia, do not expect to get any meaningful state pension ever. There will be just too many of us.

If medicine can keep us in a fit enough state, physically and mentally, I say bring it on!

If not, there isn't a discussion to be had, because it won't happen.

Child cancer treatments are going to be driven by fundamentally different causes and require totally different treatments, fyi.

Of course we won't stop medicating people who can be saved just to protect the pension systems. At least democratic states won't, the politicians would be eaten alive by the grey voting bloc. And in this case rightly so.

But that means that we really need to push with certain research forward. If you can live to be 90 and in good health, you won't mind working longer. (Though some people may mind if that means that, say, judges stay in their offices for 60 years).

It is the intermediate stage that is bad. In that stage, people suffer from chronic diseases and bad health for decades, unable to enjoy life fully and work.

I know that this isn't easy to solve. Biology of aging is complicated like hell, to the degree that not too long ago, aging was considered inevitable, untreatable and incurable, thus attracting almost no funding and scientific attention.

This has been changing lately, but it will take some time before we see results in humans and not just in mice.

> Of course we won't stop medicating people who can be saved just to protect the pension systems. At least democratic states won't, the politicians would be eaten alive by the grey voting bloc. And in this case rightly so.

Why rightly so?

Up until now, the number young people has been increasing in pretty much all societies such that society continuously had a greater supply of labor to continue meeting the bed pan changing demands of increasing number of old people.

You introduce women’s independence and easy to use, cheap birth control (IUD), and that very well can change the parameters under which society operates, which necessitate changed to how it can operate.

We are nowhere near technology where 50+ year olds are regularly able to contribute to the workforce in manual labor jobs, especially turning people over, bathing them, and otherwise laborious work it takes to take care of extremely old populations.

We are already seeing this tussle in the US, where there are vast nursing and nursing aide “shortages”, or another way to look at it is society trying to figure out how many of its resources (pay for that kind of labor) to allocate to caring for sick/old people.

It very well may be that society could be better off investing more in its young rather than old.

"rightly so" because I feel that denying people life saving treatments (and I really mean life saving, not prolonging life by a bare month in pain and misery) just for demographic reasons is immoral.

Society does not have unlimited resources, so I think a more useful way of characterizing it would be a better allocation of resources to accomplish society's goals.

For example, my one of my grandparents' kidneys stopped working when they were mid 90s. In the US, they were entitled to taxpayer funded healthcare benefits which allowed them to receive dialysis. So US taxpayers paid for a van to come pick them up in a wheelchair 3x a week, perform the dialysis at the center for a few hours, bring them back. And they had to have a translator available since they did not speak English.

This went on for 4 years until they died at 99. Even though it was my grandparent, I still think that was a ludicrous waste of society's resources. They should be given an option for assisted suicide.

I hope that I can figure out a way to take myself out if I ever come into that kind of situation. I see no purpose for me to burden others with providing me with chronic care.

I love how we are now seeing suggestions to just skip the whole communism part and go straight to almost mass-murder "to keep society stable", and claim that such is reasonable to make life easier for young people. So while we're not doing communism, we're still using the same reason and central decision making to do the mass-murder bit.

If you want to see real "medical waste", by the way, you should see how much is spent on a 2 year old that gets diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Or, up until 10 years ago, a kid born with HIV. Now THAT is wasting money. In their case, the kid has never worked, will need MUCH more (essentially constant) medical attention for 30 years, expensive medicines for all that time, the treatment will fail, it's just a matter of when, and they still won't ever be able to contribute to society. By the time they're of working age they'll be so disabled they can't work (ok maybe the HIV baby could work for 10 years, tops). It's not reasonable to even have them type on a keyboard after maybe 14 years of age.

Let's kill em all! (especially now with mRNA vaccines we're pretty close to a cure) ...

How is giving someone the option of dying peacefully, as I suggested, equivalent to mass murder?

Do you think societies have unlimited resources to spend on everyone? Should they be directed only to people with healthcare problems? What about people that suffer non healthcare tragedies?

Not spending $2M of resources to keep a baby alive that has a 99% chance of not having any quality of life is not “killing people”.

> . If your population gains, on average, say, a year or two of life, the pay-as-you go pension systems that are already under strain in greying Europe will come under even bigger strain.

But if these tools can also dramatically lessen the cost for medical care, wouldn't that more than balance out?

If you can actually cure some cancers, it will probably be a net positive economically.

For example, in medical circles in my home country, smoking-related cancer prevention campaigns are widely believed to pay for themselves easily, despite low efficacy. (Sorry, I have no citation for that, but it is what is taught to students in medical school.)

In countries where the social safety net fully pays for such health issues (this includes Germany), the cost of cancer patients is itself a tremendous strain on the system.

Additionally, the decision for social security to reimburse (i.e. cover) such drugs typically involves long term economic impact computations. Access to such treatment is almost surely a win for everyone.

> In countries where the social safety net fully pays for such health issues (this includes Germany), the cost of cancer patients is itself a tremendous strain on the system.

This is a great point, and there are also knock-on effects to consider. Say, the parent, child or sibling that removes themselves from the workforce to give daily care and ferry a patient to and from treatments.

The cost savings in medical expenses can balance out a lot, this becomes even more apparent as aging itself is cured and the costs associated with diseases brought on by aging, especially expensive end-of-life care, disappear.

Since your attitude is already set, there's less resistance to ending such pension plans for younger people now even as they continue paying in to support their elders. The sentiment with social security in the US is the same. If an administration ever actually tries to gracefully end it, I think it will be easier to pull off than they expect.

Similar to how smokers actually cost the healthcare system less, since they get cancer early and die closer to retirement age, which is cheap compared to long term care spanning an extra decade or two before a major illness sets in.

> BioNTech has a lot of potentially groundbreaking mRNA therapies in its pipeline, some of them against various forms of cancer.

This is good news. In the last year I've lost 2 close ones to cancer.

For me, too.

In my family, we rarely suffer from heart attacks and we only had one dead in last 40 years or so that died from cardiovascular disease. He was a heavy smoker and his non-smoking brother outlived him by almost thirty years.

But cancer is our faithful family enemy, even though it mostly comes late in life. Every tool against it will meet my approval.

Thankfully cancer doesn't run in my family, but somehow (bad luck I guess) I have lost a shocking amount of young friends or acquaintances to cancer now (all 40 years or younger). All were very healthy too (none were smokers, heavy drinkers, etc...).

I'm dreading hearing about more cases since Covid restrictions included delaying a lot of cancer screenings.

Moderna as well: https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline

Don't worry, they are working on population reduction... I think it's more likely most of us are not around in 20 years. So we don't have to worry about it. :)

This is the problem, all pension systems are pyramid schemes. Plus you add extra overhead to administer over direct benefit contributions. You can claw some back by keeping the shares of those who die early but it isn't enough. Additionally, dying early should still benefit your family and would do so under direct benefit schemes. You mask ask "what happens when people run out?" and the answer is the largely the same, it becomes a social program that is needs based just like it does for all the people today who have no pension.

Surely the economic impact is mainly in providing thousands of jobs in the health industry. We may be able to afford less in others areas.

Just the pension plan? Imagine a world where 50%+ of the people voting were born 1 century ago.

To the downvoters: if we don't also manage to improve neuroplasticity decrease in old age as well as breaking generational cultural norms, we're doomed, don't fool yourself. Especially since older people are politically more active, as a group.

Everything is a trade-off.

On one side, old people are less likely to support new trends, starting with fashion and ending with political causes.

On the other side, they carry a lot of experience. If a sizable minority personally knows the misery of war or hyperinflation, repetition of those miseries becomes less likely. Plenty of political criminals built their careers on naivete of the young.

I think that we will end up with the best of both worlds eventually. If longevity tech succeeds, brains will stay young, but memories will accumulate regardless.

I am not worried only about better healthcare. Population growth, climate change, waste, .. so many more thing to worry.

For me humanity is up for a massive shrinking. Either because we do it or (some decades later) mother earth does it.

What do you make about Elon Musk's prediction that the biggest threat in the future may actually be population collapse [1], rather than overpopulation?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44Klhl81K7g

Worth checking out the book The Great Demographic Reversal

This looks very interesting, just picked a copy on Audible. Thank you for the recommendation.

I would say that while it is a plausible hypothesis, Elon Musk has no particular reason to be seen as a credible source in this space, and that opening with that citation feels like its asking for discussion on the merits of Elon vs. the idea itself.

Fair enough, I'll refer to his most salient point:

A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian. So if life extension technology gets implemented with something like mRNA technology, then it seems like that would have to be balanced out by higher birthrates.

We don't need to worry about mRNA vaccines doing this. You'd need to actually reverse aging. Stopping diseases one by one will never work. They're simply not preventable in the long term.

The population dynamics of such a situation would be dwarfed, imo, by the political and wealth inequality problems. Society is structured firmly around an average human lifespan.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean mRNA technology in the sense of vaccines, but rather gene therapy techniques that could reverse or slow down aging processes. Like the top post in this thread mentioned, there are new mRNA medicines coming out to treat cancer, for example, and if that pans out and the technology is really up and running then I imagine things like life extension would be on the table.

Nah don't get your hopes up. "Treat a cancer" is very different from a general cure for cancer, which is simply never going to be possible with a generic injection or anything like that. These approaches will fundamentally ever work.

Life extension in the sense of average lifespan marginally increasing is possible, but in the sense of reducing aging is a very very different problem.

Personally, I think that artificial wombs will be operational before widespread aging reversal.

==A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian.==

Using the word "enslaved" will successfully paint anything as a dystopian future, that doesn't mean it is the inevitable path of mRNA vaccines. If we have life-extension technology, maybe people will start having more kids, maybe twins/triplets will become more common, maybe the poorest countries will never achieve the technology, nobody knows.

Maybe this puts some context around it. The first nuclear power plant came online in 1951. 70 years later, only 32 countries have nuclear power plants and the content of Africa has 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

I'd give it about as much credit as I gave his "COVID will be gone by April 2020" tweets.

The man is phenomenally effective in certain engineering contexts and deserves to be listened to if he's talking about rocket engines or something. He's no more credible in public health and population modeling than any other rando.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com