Reply To Karl Smith
On Friday I wrote:
[Imagine] a fountain of youth pill … [that had] to be … given to everyone over thirty … [and] required dosage doubled every decade [of age]. … Eventually we’d run out of money to pay for these pills; we’d have to say no to some people, and then they’d quickly die. And the longer we waited before admitting to ourselves that we couldn’t afford to give effective treatments to everyone, no matter what the cost, the worse it would be.
Karl Smith replied:
Why would it be worse the longer we lived in self-deception? That really needs to be spelled out because off the top it sounds like Robin is describing a scenario in which we maximize the the total amount of human life we can support. We are also doing this without implicitly valuing anyone’s life over anyone else’s. We save everyone we can, as long as we can, until we hit capacity. This could easily be a utopian scenario.
Again, its probably not the scenario I prefer but one has to be explicit about exactly why throwing everything we have at an extremely effective method of preserving enormous amounts of human life is bad idea. It seems like something the average person would regard as a great idea.
Well first we might not smoothly transition to a maximal sustainable state, but instead borrow too much, fail to maintain infrastructure, etc. Second, the steady state might have a pretty low quality of life, from spending everything possible on pills. Third, we could support much more human life by having new young kids who wouldn’t need any pills for another thirty years. If the choice is between a million folks kept to age 200 or a billion folks keep to age 100, I’ll take the billion any day.
Given the simple and unrealistic assumption that per capita income is constant, regardless of the size of the population, it becomes a question of how much people value income vs. length of life - spending more on pills does not change the maximum possible population.
Another scenario that would justify consuming lots of pills is if the size of the population is overwhelmingly constrained by the amount of land available. (Suppose that on a world capable of supporting 1 billion people, it only takes 10,000 people to farm all the land, and any additional labor would not increase food production significantly.) If the population is already at its maximum level, spending more on pills would not reduce the amount of food available, and the tradeoff between longevity and income again becomes the only factor.
"Slave labor has been employed to do lots of things."
Wake me up when slave labor starts designing power plants and making the next generation of micro processors.
The west got rich by letting people keep some of their efforts, and people can produce orders of magnitude more when they have the time, motivation, and resources to utilize their minds.
The rest of your reply is neither here nor there. The issue at hand is whether society should devote ever increasing shares of its real resources to declining assets, the elderly, who are often net negatives for society (consume more then they produce). To me the only justification of diverting real resources to the elderly is if doing so creates a credible commitment among the young to save (i.e. reduce consumption and invest in real capital) in the understanding that doing so will lead to a comfortable retirement. Such capital formation can raise the whole societies standard of living. When entitlements are not tied to capital formation they merely represent parasitic drain.
In a conflict between two societies of scarce resources then most efficient one will win. If one society decides to devote ever increasing shares of its real resources to the maintenance of rapidly declining assets (old people) while another invests its real resources in appreciating assets (young people, infrastructure) then the latter society will eventually win the war for scarce resources.