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May You Live For a Thousand Years

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by pnoetx in Human Welfare, Life Extension, Progressivism

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Alex Tabarrok, Ayn Rand, City Journal, Cyborgization, Glenn Reynolds, Human Ingenuity, Human Progress, Jemima Lewis, Julian Simon, Larry Ellison, Life Extension, Marian Tupy, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Theil, Priscilla Chan, quality of life, Robert Malthus, The Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, The Telegraph

didnt-expect-to-live-this-long

What if human life expectancy doubles over the next 50 years? Triples? Mark Zuckerberg and many others with money to spend, such as Peter Theil and Larry Ellison, want to accomplish that and more. For example, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged $3 billion over the next decade to “rid the world of disease”. The implications are fascinating to ponder. In developed countries, most of the life extension would come from reducing mortality in adulthood and late in life, simply because childhood mortality has already reached very low levels. Assuming that the additional years are healthful, the dynamics of population growth and the labor force would change. Family structure could take new directions, especially if extended fertility takes place along with life extension. The coexistence of six, nine, or more generations might make one’s descendants virtual strangers. And it might be possible for an individual to have children who are younger than the great-grandchildren of progeny conceived early in one’s adulthood. For love or money, your great-grandchild might couple with an individual a generation or more ahead of you. Scandalous!

Some pundits foresee dark implications for humanity. Alex Tabarrok comments on some musings in The Telegraph by Jemima Lewis, providing the following Lewis quote:

“We’d better hope they don’t succeed. What would it do to the human race if we were granted eternal health, and therefore life? Without any deaths to offset all the births, we would have to make room on earth for an extra 208,400 people a day, or 76,066,000 a year – and that’s before those babies grow old enough to reproduce themselves.

Within a month of Mr Zuckerberg curing mortality, the first wars over water resources would break out. Within a year, the World Health Organisation would be embarking on an emergency sterilisation programme. Give it a decade and we’d all be dead from starvation, apart from a handful of straggle-bearded tech billionaires, living in well-stocked bunkers under San Francisco.“

Of course, people will still die in accidents and from some illnesses that cannot be anticipated; some people will always engage in self-destructive behavior; and there will always be natural calamities that will take human life, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. Nevertheless, life-extending technologies will increase the human population, all else equal. I say bring it on! But Lewis’ attitude is that increasing life expectancy is a bad thing, contrary to our almost uniformly positive experience with longer lives thus far, including improvements in the quality of life for aging seniors. More fundamentally, her view is that people are a liability, a collection of helpless gobblers, rather than valuable resources with the promise of providing themselves with an increasingly rich existence.

Lewis’ article demonstrates a special brand of ignorance, now common to many on the left, going back at least to the time of Robert Malthus, at about the turn of the 19th century. Malthus’ pessimism about the world’s ability to provide for the needs of an expanding population is well known, and wrong. The Club of Rome‘s report “The Limits To Growth“, published in 1972, pretty much continued in the Malthusian tradition. That report predicted increasing shortages and mass starvation. Of course, the Club erred both empirically and theoretically, as Julian Simon forcefully argued in the 1980s and 1990s. The crux of Simon’s argument was the existence of a renewable resource of vast promise: human ingenuity:

“Because of increases in knowledge, the earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ has been increasing throughout the decades and centuries and millennia to such an extent that the term ‘carrying capacity’ has by now no useful meaning. These trends strongly suggest a progressive improvement and enrichment of the earth’s natural resource base, and of mankind’s lot on earth.“

There are certain conditions that must be in place for the planet to provide for ongoing advances in human well-being. Markets must be operative in order for prices to provide accurate signals about the relative scarcity of different resources. When particular resources become more scarce, their prices provide an incentive to use existing substitutes and innovative alternatives. Competition facilitates and helps perfect this process, as new producers continuously seek to introduce innovations. Needless to say, the more restrictions imposed by government, and the more the state gets involved in picking favorites and protecting incumbents, the less effective this process becomes.

From a global perspective, the human race has done quite well in eliminating poverty during the industrial era. Impressive measures of progress across many dimensions are chronicled at the Human Progress blog, where Marian Tupy writes of “Looking Forward To the Future“. These improvements fly in the face of predictions from the environmental left, and they demonstrate that humanity is likely to find many ways in which extended lifespans can be both enjoyed and contribute to the world’s productive potential.

Extended lifespans will bring changes in the way we think about our working years and retirement. Both parts of our lives are likely to be extended. Job experience utilizing incumbent technologies will become less scarce, and will thus command a lower premium. Continuing education will increase in importance with new waves of technology. There will be changes in the time patterns of saving and investment and the design of retirement benefits offered by employers, but long periods of compounding might reduce the pressure to save aggressively. Bequest motives would almost surely change. Mechanisms like family endowments benefitting members of an extended family via education funding, medical technology and end-of-life care might become common.

There will have to be many changes in our physical makeup to ensure that life extension buys mostly “quality time”. For example, it’s probably not possible for many parts of the human body to function reliably after a century of use. The technologies of skeletal, organ and muscle replacement, or rejuvenation, will have to advance significantly to ensure a reasonable quality of life in an older population. The bodies of older humans will either be cyborgized or freshly regenerated as life extension becomes a reality.

As more radical life extension begins in earnest, it’s likely to begin as the exclusive province  of the rich. However, like everything else, the technologies and benefits will eventually diffuse to the broader population as long as competitive pressures are present in the relevant markets. It will be a matter of choice, and perhaps the most unhappy among us will choose to forego these opportunities. However, such technologies, to the extent that they become a reality, would have the potential to improve the physical well- being of almost anyone.

Dramatically extending the human life span will bring dramatic change and many social challenges, but ending disease is a worthy goal, and one that most certainly will benefit mankind. Tabarrok casts Jenima Lewis as an Ayn Rand villain, though he must realize that she is simply ignorant of the forces that create growth and an improving existence. Unfortunately, she is one of many on the left enamored with a perspective that is “anti-mind, anti-man, anti-life” (to quote Tabarrok quoting Rand).

For additional reading on the left’s anti-human agenda, see this Fred Siegel piece in the City Journal, “Progressives Against Progress” (HT: Glenn Reynolds).

 

Community College Free-For-All

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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college for all, Community college, Digital Journal, Free education, grade inflation, misallocation of resources, Peter Theil, Reason, Scott Shackford, Tyler Cowen

Funny-Obama-Photo-With-Bear

Obama keeps puffing on the horn of taxpayer plenty, this time proposing free tuition at community colleges for all comers. This is a misapplication of the empirical observation that earned income is positively related to the level of education.

Supporters of “college for all” naively assume that enabling college enrollment will always translate into actual learning and success on the job market, or that college is always a good idea. Those assumptions are incorrect. Not everyone is capable of benefitting from higher education. It is a disfavor to them, and to their more academically competitive peers, to encourage them to enter an environment in which they are likely to fail or benefit less than in other pursuits, and where they will absorb scarce educational resources such as facilities, equipment, and instructor time and effort. And if less capable individuals are allowed to “succeed” under more relaxed standards, the degrees they earn will be degraded. Moreover, as Peter Theil has emphasized, we tend to think “too highly of higher eduction,” as if it is always one’s best option. In fact, that may not be true for even the most talented individuals, who may be capable of accomplishing greater things without it, and sooner!

But what real costs and benefits can be expected from Obama’s latest proposed giveaway? Scott Shakford at Reason summarizes and critiques the program, explaining that community college administrators are likely to be the chief beneficiaries. Shakford also notes that the program is likely to encourage grade inflation, based on the minimum GPA requirements built into the program. This op-ed in the Digital Journal points out that Obama’s plan will also encourage grade inflation at the high-school level, so as not to “unfairly” deny students their new opportunity to matriculate into community college.

Shakford at Reason puts the total cost to taxpayers at $34 billion, but it is based on an administration estimate that 9 million students could attend community college free-of-charge. It is not clear whether that number is net of those already attending for free. Tyler Cowen offers links to some good discussions of the plan, one of which notes that community college is already free on average for low income students via Pell grants. Higher income students obviously stand to gain, however, so the plan’s targeting of benefits is perverse. Community college completion rates are already quite low, and Cowen notes that the rate for marginal students pulled in by Obama’s program is likely to be even lower, which would further diminish the value of the degree on the labor market.

“Free stuff” always sounds so good and well-intentioned that is it difficult for many to oppose. But free stuff generally means that resources must be diverted from more highly-valued uses for little or no gain. After all, the value of the freebie to beneficiaries of a politician’s scheme can be minimal and they’ll still be takers. Taxes to fund the diversion of resources creates other perverse incentives.

Funding the education of promising but needy students may be quite worthwhile, but offering a free post-secondary education for all will grossly misallocate resources and carry a high social cost.

Can White Elephants Cheer the Public?

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by pnoetx in Uncategorized

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Big Dig, economic growth, infrastructure, Neal Stephenson, optimism, Peter Theil, Precautionary Principle, quality of life, regulation, Technology, Virginia Postrel

infrastructure bridge

Has the American public’s sense of progress been diminished by the lack of “big projects” in recent memory? No moon shots or space elevators, no Hoover dams, no ubiquitous high-speed rail? Would these types of massive projects bring with them a new sense of optimism? Virginia Postrel doubts it, quite aside from whether such efforts would be successful in technical or economic terms. In her critique of business icon Peter Theil and science fiction writer Neal Stephenson on this point, Postrel says they confuse satisfaction from an improved quality of life in the mid-twentieth century with optimism about the future impact of iconic public investments in infrastructure and technology:

“People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories — not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories — that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips.”

Postrel also points out that technology has always provoked some anxiety about the future, just as it does today. In addition, Theil and Stephenson under-appreciate noteworthy projects of the not so distant past, both public and private. That’s not to say that all of those projects were well-executed (the Big Dig?) or economically successful.

Postrel’s argument suggests that the current sense of malaise has more to do with weak economic growth and its causes. She emphasizes an excessive application of the precautionary principle. The growth of the regulatory state and arbitrary, czarist rule-making is an outgrowth of this phenomenon. As I said earlier this week, “Life’s Bleak When Your Goal Is Compliance.” Poor results of most public initiatives (e.g., public education, student loans, the war on poverty) do nothing to inspire confidence, with an increasing proportion of the population dependent on public support. Meanwhile, rewards seem to flow to well-connected cronies, a result that seems assured when resources are allocated to big public projects. There is a growing sense that not much can be accomplished without privilege or luck.

Above all, let’s hope we never take to evaluating massive projects based on their potential to foster a renewed sense of public optimism.

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