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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28508 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think it's pretty simple, back somewhere in the 70-00s we profited from a short-term demographic dividend as we could forego spending on children, which we could invest in other things (in practice mostly hedonistic endeavours). Now we're starting to see the long-term effects, which is a never-before seen crunch on retirement. As somebody else put it, "now that it's time to reap, I wish I had sown more".

How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.

Medical expenditure on squeezing out those last few years far greater than the cost of just being elderly, though. Not only is the person not being productive, suddenly they've got a raft of major intervention surgeries and therapies.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000?

A little, not much. From 2000–2019 there was a slight increase from 76.7 to 79.1. (Note: more recent data is still screwed up because of bad Covid-19 assumptions).

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

I think that lower smoking rates have played a big part in the increase. If so, health care costs would have increased as well, since lung cancer kills people relatively cheaply compared to, say, Alzheimers.

Prediction: Life expectancy will increase considerably in the next 10 years due to GLP-1 drugs.

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