When 65 is Young: The Politics of Life Extension

The Political, Economic, and Cultural Implications of Radical Longevity

Photo by drmakete lab on Unsplash

I have a new piece out in Queer Majority looking at nearly a century of sex research and survey data and crunching some numbers: “Why Not Both: Could Bisexuality Be the Norm?”

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For decades, futurists, transhumanists, and science fiction writers have dreamed of a world where breakthroughs in pharmacology, medical science, genetic engineering, and biotechnology radically extend the human lifespan. The scientific community has long maintained that increasing human longevity far beyond its current parameters is theoretically possible. There’s nothing in principle that renders this project infeasible. Given past advances, the rate of medical and technological progress, and the lack of any known law of nature barring it, radical life extension appears, if not immediately probable, at least possible. The first thing everyone wants to know is how specifically it can be achieved. The question seldom asked but nearly as important is what happens if we do achieve it? The benefits and appeal of living much longer need no arguing, but such a leap forward would also be profoundly disruptive. What would the implications of radical life extension be for society? How would it impact the economy, culture, and political landscape?

When speculating about the future, the natural first place to consult is the past. Since 1900, global life expectancy has more than doubled. This increase is correlated with a number of other trends. These include the rise of women in education and the labor force, deferred marriage and childbearing, falling birthrates, and expanding healthcare systems to treat aging populations. We have seen the advent of one’s “golden years”; a period of life many previously didn’t live to enjoy, or enjoyed only very briefly, or suffered through in too much discomfort and infirmity to enjoy. There was a shift in long-term planning from relying on one’s offspring to care for them late in life to financial instruments such as pensions, retirement plans, insurance policies, and social security. There has also been a rise in age among people in positions of power.

History can certainly provide us with some useful insights for the future, but there’s a limit on how much we can glean from the past. For one, these changes occurred gradually over generations. While a century may be a mere blink of the cosmological eye, it’s an ample amount of time for humanity to absorb and integrate big changes without shock-induced systemic collapses. The advent of radical life extension, by contrast, could transpire over a few years.

More importantly, the rise in life expectancy in the modern era has not, for the most part, been an extension of the human lifespan as much as it has been a reduction in preventable forms of premature death. Through sanitation, improved nutrition, consumer protections, declining violence, advances in medicine, and better access to medical care, we have greatly reduced infant, maternal, and childhood mortality. We have reduced the number of people who die of starvation, suffer violent deaths, or perish in freak accidents, as well as those cut down in the prime of life by disease.

More people live to see their 100th birthdays today than did centuries ago, to be sure, but the lion’s share of the modern rise in life expectancy has been a result of us raising the floor, not the ceiling. We have vastly improved prenatal and neonatal care, created antibiotics, eradicated smallpox, and become slightly more civilized — we have not slowed our aging process, or invented methods to rejuvenate ourselves. That difference matters. Realizing the natural human potential is a different project with different implications than dramatically transcending that potential at scale. Radical life extension would be a new frontier, not the continuation of an existing dynamic.

To begin exploring this possible future, imagine a society where life expectancy is 150 years, instead of today’s average of around 80 years in developed countries. People reach puberty and adulthood just the same as they do now, but aging in this hypothetical world occurs relative to these elongated lifespans. In other words, a 50-year-old in this future would be biologically akin to a 27-year-old today. A 100-year-old would have the body of a 53-year-old. What we now think of as the age of retirement, 65, would then be 122. By this point, in our scenario, all of the kinks, complications, and side effects have been worked out, and scores of other technological and medical advances have of course been developed over these intervening years.

What might the economy of this society look like? For one thing, the population may be far larger relative to an alternate timeline without radical life extension. This might seem counterintuitive, as current trends have seen a rise in life expectancy correlate with a drop in birth rates. This is mostly attributable to birth control and women’s rights. With the ability to control their bodies and lives, women have increasingly chosen to explore life’s many opportunities. Most still choose to have children, but on their terms, and a little later in life. The decrease in unwanted pregnancies combined with narrowing the window of fertility is why birth rates have fallen. In our hypothetical future, however, women will have a decades-longer fertility window, not to mention the probable advances in artificial pregnancies that could functionally extend that window for women’s entire lives. Given this, there is little reason to suppose that birth rates would be lower than they are at present — and they may even be higher. Add that to the fact that people will be living longer, and that makes for a population boom.

Massive populations in developed countries means massive economies, and high levels of economic growth. The number of industries, businesses, ventures, and organizations such a market could support would be equally vast. Markets don’t necessarily mean employment, though. Artificial intelligence and automation would severely depress the number of jobs available relative to the size of the economy, a problem made all the worse by the population boom. Inequality in such a society would, if unchecked, soar to such unfathomable heights as to make our current situation seem like a communist utopia by comparison. In the early days of radically life-extending procedures, treatments, or drugs, the cost is certain to be affordable only to the ultra-rich. Once life extension comes down in price, however, and even if it’s made free, the disparities it will likely lead to are staggering.

The job market, which will already be anemic due to the comparatively low need for human labor, might become dominated by generational cliques of people who find themselves in control of a certain company, conglomerate, industry, or sector. With prestige, influence, money, autonomy, and 60 additional working years, those at the top will hang around for decade after decade consolidating their power, shoring up their positions, and becoming institutions unto themselves. All of the younger folks who would ordinarily ascend the ladder as their elders step down will be left frozen out and stalled. Whole industries could become impossible to break into.

The near doubling of lifespans will also disrupt the natural flow of generational wealth from parent to child, as many people could be centenarians by the time they inherit. And with longer retirements, there may not be much to inherit to begin with. As retirees collect for decades on end, and with the health and vigor to make much fuller use of their golden years, overburdened pension funds and entitlement programs may collapse into insolvency, even with considerable raises to the retirement age. Death has always been the great equalizer, but what happens when the powerful don’t die? They become a caste of demigods.

What would the political implications of radical life extension be? The obvious first assumption is that a country with a much higher average age would shift politically rightward. Folk wisdom has long held that people grow more conservative as they age, and the folk appear to be correct. Most people have a strong sense of this based on their own anecdotal observations, but it’s backed up by voting records and research data. Even within the leftmost half of society, we see generational divides, with the young skewing woke and economically hard left, and older people veering more philosophically liberal  and moderate.

Millennials, however, appear not to be shifting rightward as much as previous generations, leading some to speculate that this cycle is changing. But the majority of Millennials are still not old enough to conclusively determine whether they are defying this trend or simply being repulsed by the sudden appearance of far-right candidates cropping up in conservative parties over the past decade. The left-right generational divide is considered one of the oldest rules in politics. Momentary hiccups notwithstanding, it’s safe to expect this rule to persist in any hypothetical future — and a future with far older people may be not only more capital “C” conservative, but more small-c conservative as well.

A population where the average age is 60- or 70-something and where perhaps one in five people are over 100 years old may lead to a more cautious, risk-averse, static society; one less open to change and new ideas. A society where the status quo is more intractable, and where the power of inertia is amplified by an order of magnitude. Whatever the landscape of laws, policies, norms, and values look like when life extension first takes off may become frozen in place, only to thaw by tiny increments over many decades or even generations. If that’s true, the years just prior to the longevity boom would be critical to defining the long-term character of society. If, for example, liberal democracy experiences a backslide during these transition years, that state of affairs might thereafter calcify into an immovable object. The risk of authoritarianism will be high, as the levers of power will be wielded by people with more to lose, and as skyrocketing inequality precipitates inevitable generational backlashes, dissidence, protest movements, and even political violence.

Ruled by a gerontocracy who holds most of the wealth, desirable jobs, and political power, the young people of this hypothetical future will seethe in resentment and anger. If the elders of this society have more to lose, the young have more to lose out on. Ageist movements, some of them violent, might emerge. The escalation that could then transpire may very well end in a place eerily reminiscent of the anarcho-capitalist hellscape. Picture centenarian haves feasting in lavish estates guarded by private security and ringed with crenelated walls and electrified razor-wire fences, while the underclass of younger have-nots sit in their tenements and anesthetize themselves in virtual and chemical escapisms. The threat of violent coups would likely also be elevated, not only from the disgruntled masses, but from rivals. Holding onto power for several generations means making more enemies, accumulating more skeletons in one’s closet, and providing more time for rivals to scheme.

One modern trend that probably won’t survive a longevity boom is people becoming more religious as they age. Religiosity in the developed world has already been declining for decades, a trend that Pew projects will see the US — the most religious Western country — become majority “no religious affiliation” by 2070 if the current trajectory holds. Increased religiosity has historically been correlated with age because of the uncertainty, fear, and angst of mortality. In a future with radical life extension, however, not only will the “over the hill” period of life arrive much later, but mortality itself will increasingly be seen as an engineering problem for humans to solve, not a fate ordained by deities. A society where people live to 150 is a society where people’s faith may shift from meeting god and grandma after they die to the hope that new innovations and discoveries will extend their lives even more.

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The picture I’ve painted of a possible future where the human lifespan has been greatly increased is, of course, a highly speculative one. And it’s always easier, when sailing into the dark waters of the unknown, to envision dangers and risks rather than benefits and good fortune. The difference between good outcomes and bad depends almost entirely on the conditions we set up. Ensuring that everyone has affordable if not free access to life extension is an essential first step to blunting hyper inequality — but only a first step. Redistributive policies such as universal basic income will keep the wealth gap within sustainable levels. The scarcity of coveted jobs can be stretched by instituting shorter workweeks. Progressive, age-based income taxes and other economic incentives could encourage more people beyond a certain advanced age to retire. 

Cultural changes would be equally important. Stronger norms around the virtues and civic duty of passing the torch to the next generation, and taboos against hoarding wealth and power could be transformative. A culture of volunteerism as a sort of social currency could help mend the societal fabric. Having a prosocial way to virtue signal, gain prestige, and derive personal meaning while improving one’s community and helping others might fill a large part of the void left by the shrinking job market and decline of religion. Perhaps most important of all would be making sure that liberalism is as robust as possible if and when dramatic life extension first takes off, locking in a resilient liberal status quo.

Radical life extension is a worthy and admirable goal, and a project I wholeheartedly support. It may not be realized in our lifetimes, but like it or not, it will, in all probability, be achieved sooner or later. Unless we’re wiped out or bombed back to the Stone Age, scientific, medical, and technological progress will march on, human nature will persist, and ultra-wealthy benefactors will continue pouring money into this area of research. To stand in the way of the future is to die on the most futile of hills — perhaps with the added ignominy of being the last schmuck to do so. 

Progress cannot be stopped, but it can be directed. Now is the time to begin thinking through the implications of what such a leap forward would mean for human society and begin laying the cultural and political groundwork for stewarding human longevity into the most ethical, prosperous, and non-zero-sum outcome possible. The famed physicist Max Planck once observed that as new and better ideas arise in younger generations, aging dead-enders carry their outdated notions to the grave. Progress thus advances “one funeral at a time.” The great challenge of the future might be figuring out a way to make progress advance “one birthday at a time” instead.

See also: “To Win the World, Innovation is Our Most Powerful Weapon”

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