This will depend on details, such as: if you double someone’s lifespan, have you effectively increased their middle age, or their old age?
If it’s all middle age, then it will be in the interest of our overlords to make us live longer, so that we can be longer productive. The salaries would probably go down, because now you have more time to pay your mortgage (and you are competing on the market with other people who also have more time to pay their mortgages). Also, no one is impressed with your 30 years of experience in given industry, because that’s an average among your competitors.
Education will take longer, because other people will signal their qualities by taking more loans (they now have more time to pay back) and staying at school longer. Mere PhD will only get you a job flipping hamburgers at McDonald.
Death of society’s “old guard” may be serving a useful purpose by destroying calcified institutions and ideas, allowing better ones to bloom.
Somehow I expect this reasoning will only be applied selectively to the poor. (Yes, that includes the middle class.)
In summary, I expect the society will support those forms of anti-aging that prolong the productive years. Which is not bad, because that means more years with health. Just don’t expect that you will be the one who benefits most from your longer life; you will spend most of the extra time in the workplace, working more and receiving less. Enjoy your college, though, those will be the best 30 years of your life!
Agreed on all counts. Although I doubt it’ll be anything like “30 years of college plus a really long career,” given how quickly whole industries and career paths rise and fall these days. We’ll have to collectively get on board with life plans consisting of some kind of alternating periods of work and education, or maybe shorter worker hours per year with continuous education for skill gains.
Right now, over time we gain skills and become more valuable (but also more expensive) employees. An indefinitely lifespan would increase that, but how much depends on how long our oldest skills are still valuable. I imagine much of what made a 1950s new employee very valuable in the 1970′s as an experienced employee would be much less useful (or even detrimental) in the 2040s in many lines of work.
About the old guard: one of the reasons this is such an issue today is because wealth increases with age and, in wealthy families, across generations. An indefinite lifespan could basically eliminate inheritance as a thing, and rich people *do* still want their own children to succeed and have opportunities, so what will happen there? And if people don’t need to retire, but still become wealthier with age, then capital accumulation could go way up, and that might finally shift real returns on capital down from their 4-5% historical rate (which, and I think I first saw this pointed out somewhere on this site, just so happens to correspond to an economic doubling time of ~14-18 years, aka one generation).
This will depend on details, such as: if you double someone’s lifespan, have you effectively increased their middle age, or their old age?
If it’s all middle age, then it will be in the interest of our overlords to make us live longer, so that we can be longer productive. The salaries would probably go down, because now you have more time to pay your mortgage (and you are competing on the market with other people who also have more time to pay their mortgages). Also, no one is impressed with your 30 years of experience in given industry, because that’s an average among your competitors.
Education will take longer, because other people will signal their qualities by taking more loans (they now have more time to pay back) and staying at school longer. Mere PhD will only get you a job flipping hamburgers at McDonald.
Somehow I expect this reasoning will only be applied selectively to the poor. (Yes, that includes the middle class.)
In summary, I expect the society will support those forms of anti-aging that prolong the productive years. Which is not bad, because that means more years with health. Just don’t expect that you will be the one who benefits most from your longer life; you will spend most of the extra time in the workplace, working more and receiving less. Enjoy your college, though, those will be the best 30 years of your life!
Agreed on all counts. Although I doubt it’ll be anything like “30 years of college plus a really long career,” given how quickly whole industries and career paths rise and fall these days. We’ll have to collectively get on board with life plans consisting of some kind of alternating periods of work and education, or maybe shorter worker hours per year with continuous education for skill gains.
Right now, over time we gain skills and become more valuable (but also more expensive) employees. An indefinitely lifespan would increase that, but how much depends on how long our oldest skills are still valuable. I imagine much of what made a 1950s new employee very valuable in the 1970′s as an experienced employee would be much less useful (or even detrimental) in the 2040s in many lines of work.
About the old guard: one of the reasons this is such an issue today is because wealth increases with age and, in wealthy families, across generations. An indefinite lifespan could basically eliminate inheritance as a thing, and rich people *do* still want their own children to succeed and have opportunities, so what will happen there? And if people don’t need to retire, but still become wealthier with age, then capital accumulation could go way up, and that might finally shift real returns on capital down from their 4-5% historical rate (which, and I think I first saw this pointed out somewhere on this site, just so happens to correspond to an economic doubling time of ~14-18 years, aka one generation).