Charles C. Mann, in the May 2005 edition of The
Atlantic Monthly, gives us "The
Coming Death Shortage," one of the few mainstream
articles that both takes the idea of radical longevity
seriously and explores its implications. It's not a perfect
article -- some of its conclusions are a bit alarmist -- but
it's a good one. The full text online is available only to
subscribers, so I would encourage you to either pick up the
issue or find it in your local library. Hit the extended
entry here for some excerpts and discussion.

Mann's depiction of what a world of radical longevity
would be like falls closest to the "Dorian Gray" scenario I
outlined in my "What
Would Radical Longevity Mean?" article last year
-- a succession of otherwise-desirable medical technologies
making it possible for people live longer and longer healthy
lives, without "immortality" ever being the intended result.
His article doesn't address what might happen should
longevity allow for a physiological "reset" (a la Holy
Fire), admittedly a less-likely near-term pathway to
longevity.

He doesn't shy away from recognizing the scale of the
changes emerging from extreme life expectancy:

From religion to real estate, from
pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect
of society is based on the orderly succession of
generations. Every quarter century or so children take
over from their parentsa transition as fundamental to
human existence as the rotation of the planet about its
axis. In tomorrow's world, if the optimists are correct,
grandparents will have living grandparents; children
born decades from now will ignore advice from people who
watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Intergenerational warfare ... will be but one
consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober
social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant
seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted
adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance
companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the
coming army of centenarians will be marching into a
future so unutterably different that they may well feel
nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.

This passage also hints at Mann's general disapproval of
the idea of radical longevity. He doesn't explicitly suggest
that medical science leading to life extension should be
banned; it seems more of a lament that it's going to happen,
regardless. And when it does, in his view, the inevitable
result of life extension is increased social inequality.
Some of that will come from older people in positions of
power refusing to give up their seats to new generations;
some will come from differential access to the life
extension technology. And some will come from compound
interest.

...a twenty-year-old who puts $10,000
in the market in 2010 should expect by 2030 to have
about $27,000 in real termsa tidy increase. But that
happy forty-year-old will be in the same world as
septuagenarians and octogenarians who began investing
their money during the Carter administration. If someone
who turned seventy in 2010 had invested $10,000 when he
was twenty, he would have about $115,000. In the same
twenty-year period during which the young person's
account grew from $10,000 to $27,000, the old person's
account would grow from $115,000 to $305,000.
Inexorably, the gap between them will widen.

The result would be a tripartite
society: the very old and very rich on top, beta-testing
each new treatment on themselves; a mass of the ordinary
old, forced by insurance into supremely healthy habits,
kept alive by medical entitlement; and the diminishingly
influential young.

Mann draws a parallel between this notion of the
deathless refusing to give up power to the young and the
current situation in Japan. Japan has the world's oldest
population, the highest percentage of working senior
citizens of any developed nation, and one-third of its young
adult population unemployed or working part-time, many still
living with their parents. This is the first hint of a flaw
in his scenario, however, as he later asserts that increased
longevity will inevitably lead to fewer couples having
children, raising the specter of fewer young people working
to subsidize the retirements of older generations. But
wouldn't many older people, still healthy and mentally fit,
want to continue working, as seen in Japan? That wouldn't
matter -- companies will ruthlessly dump expensive older
workers in favor of... well, what will replace them is
largely left unsaid. If there's a baby bust associated with
radical longevity, there are fewer "cheap" young workers to
replace those oldsters forced to retire, and with fewer of
them to go around, the less "cheap" they'd be to hire.
Conversely, if radical longevity doesn't result in a
drop in the birth rate -- because, for example, potential
parents recognize that they have more time to build careers,
and can afford to focus on having kids early on, or because
the medical science extending healthy lifespans also allows
for healthy pregnancy and birth no matter how old the mother
-- then the fear of too-few young folks is a non-issue.

Most importantly, Mann makes no room in his scenario for
society to change in response to (or in co-evolution with)
changes in lifespan. He seems taken in by the speed with
which technology itself changes, and extends that pace to
technology's results. But demographic change is a slow
process. Non-catastrophic changes in birth rates and death
rates take decades to have substantial results. Even if
radical life extension became available today, its broad
social effects wouldn't be visible for many years. As a
result, this could well be a technology-driven change that
society will have time to grapple with. This does not mean
that the adjustment will be painless, or that we'll get our
choices right the first time. More likely, we'll see
indignant public debate, politically-inspired legislation,
repealed legislation, judicial proceedings, ethical
rumblings, and on and on. In short, the slow pace of
demography means that we should have time for our culture to
adjust, and to learn from its mistakes.

This doesn't mean we can put off thinking about the
issue, however. Mann quotes geneticist Aubrey de Grey as
noting that society can't wait until the last minute to
start planning for this eventuality, as "you live with
longevity for a very long time." Society may have time to
learn from its mistakes, but those mistakes will mean
suffering for real people. It is imperative that we start to
think now about our options. We won't get all of our
scenarios right -- in fact, we'll get most of them wrong --
but they'll still be testing grounds for how we will
eventually proceed. The more people involved in these
discussions, the better; even if I take issue with some of
Mann's conclusions, he has done a terrific service to our
society by bringing these issues forward intelligently and
coherently in a mainstream non-techie publication.

Too often we are dazzled by the strange and often
troubling implications of change, forgetting that change is
not new. Too often we give insufficient credit to the
resiliency of human cultures. We adjust and we learn -- and
all the better when we can help that along with a bit of
forethought.