Longer Life Spans

Aging angst' has become a booming industry among scholars.For example, the ethicist Leon Kass and others argue that, on a personal level, increasing longevity may deprive life of its savor and undermine the quest to achieve.Kass states, "If you push those [mortality] limits back, if those limits become out of sight, we are not inclined to build cathedrals or write the B Minor Mass, or write Shakespeare's sonnets and things of that sort." 1 Kass never says how much of an increase in longevity is too much, only that if science were able to slow aging, it would put humankind on a slippery slope to immortality, with all its seductive and corrosive effects.Meanwhile, on a societal level, economists like Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns worry that the growing percentage of the elderly in the population portends economic calamity: Let your mind wander toward the future.Move, slowly, to the year 2030 . . . .What do you see?You see a country [the United States] whose collective population is older than that in Florida today.You see a country where walkers outnumber strollers.You see a country with twice as many retirees, but only 15 percent more workers to support them.You see a country with large numbers of impoverished elderly citizens languishing in understaffed, overcrowded, substandard nursing homes.You see a government in desperate trouble.It's raising taxes sky high, drastically cutting retirement and health bene1⁄2ts, slashing defense, education, and other critical spending, and borrowing far be

Political science · Global Health Care Issues · Healthcare Policy and Management · Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management · Medicine · Gerontology