Select a country to explore the impact of extending human lifespan
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I’ve seen these figures before, and it would seem like very optimistic reporting.
It’s hard for me to see how extending life for 5 years (healthy) would generate 11.7 fold the GDP of most of these countries, as this is the income from 100% of the population. I guess, maybe this would be the case if looking at the cumulative value to this for 100 years.
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Yes - I’d like to see some critical analysis on this proposed accounting; and some alternative evaluations by credible groups. I’m not sold on the calculations either to be honest. I would need to study the paper in depth, but my immediate question is why fully count the $11.5 Million value of a “life saved” for only a five year extension? And how exactly do the calculations take into account " we add the benefits of adding healthspan for unborn generations"?
We use a model developed by the economists Andrew Scott, Julian Ashwin and Martin Ellison and biologist David Sinclair*.
In this framework, individuals supply labor, consume goods and take leisure time. They discount future outcomes, so that consuming and taking leisure in present-time is more valuable than in the future. Additionally, the utility agents derive from consumption and leisure is modulated by their health status (capturing improvements in healthspan) and survival rate at any given age (capturing improvements in lifespan).
To translate this into real-world insights, the model is calibrated using the value of a statistical life (VSL), which quantifies society’s willingness to pay for preserving one life. In United States of America, the VSL is estimated to be $11.5M.
To obtain national-level aggregates, the willingness to pay for extending one individual’s life is multiplied by the number of citizen in the country. To this, we add the benefits of adding healthspan for unborn generations, according to population projections from the United Nations (World Population Prospects 2019). In United States of America, the population in 2020 was 331M. The willingness to pay for 5 years of additional healthy lifespan for present generations was $173.1T, and the willingness to pay for 5 years of additional healthy lifespan for future generations was $52.6T.
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