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Even with non-radical life extension government and institutional policy needs to adapt
A commenter on google plus to an article that I wrote.
The commenter responded with the following wrong intuition about aging.
The assumption that if (for example) lifespan is increased 10 or 20 years, that the productive period of life will be similarly extended. If what happens is that you get too weak to work at 75, just like now, and then instead of having 5 years of bad quality of life, you have 15 – that drags down the economy. And at the current time, there's little evidence that any major increases in longevity will include major increases in productive lifespan as well.
For a worked example, see the current problems with the graying population of Japan, where there's an increasing supply of elderly who are retired
The economic problems related to social programs being structured incorrectly is not something that needs more life extension to cause insolvency. The existing amounts of longevity have already exposed the problems with the old social contracts and policies. Countries like Canada have already switched to solvent policy systems by increasing the time to full retirement benefits by adding about 3 to 4 months per year to the age of full retirement. Japan's main economic problem is that they have too few children and no immigration. Russia has similar demographic and economic problems of a shrinking population, but they do not have the increasing longevity of Japan. So how does the theory that longevity causes financial doom fit with Russia where people are living shorter lives work. Where Russia has economic problems from a shrinking population. Fewer kids and shorter lives. Should not the shorter lives be making the Russian economy stronger ?
The World Econmic Forum examined the global issue of aging populations in an 148 page 2012 study.
Another reason for an emphasis on aging today is that “doomsday scenarios” abound. These alarmist views typically assume a world of static policy and institutions, continuing trends involving low fertility, and constant age-specific behavior and labor outcomes. The resulting scenarios yield stark and shocking images of workforce shortages, asset market meltdowns, economic growth slowdowns, the financial collapse of pension and healthcare systems, and mass loneliness and insecurity.
Such tales are strongly reminiscent of the work by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s, which predicted mass starvation and human misery in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of rapid population growth, or what was termed “the population bomb”. But lessons can be learned from this experience. Although the world population did double from 1960 to 2000 (from 3 billion to 6 billion), at the same time per capita income increased by 115%, life expectancy rose by more than 15 years, and literacy shot up as primary school enrollments became nearly universal in many.
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Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/even-with-non-radical-life-extension.html
