In researching The Tragedy of the Commons, reading Freeman Dyson's autobiography Disturbing the Universe, and checking out today's NY Times (subscription required--at least intermittently), I reached the following epiphany. If current trends continue, the world will either be empty or full. We will each live forever or die out because our life expectancy will go to zero. The Tragedy of the Commons was coined back in 1833 by Malthusians. Dyson quipped, "we all thought that energy was going to run out in 1937" and today's Friedman column worries that social security and medicare will eat up all the budget.

I think that it is good to have social security eat up the budget. As people start to live forever, the only way to get them to cede the good jobs is to offer them a life of leisure. Inflation will take care of any pesky budget infinities. With the right subsidies, the federal budget can be hundreds of percent of GDP. You have to recycle the subsidy dollar and tax it back multiple times per year. That brings up another thing. Taxes will either go to infinity or zero (or maybe negative infinity).

In Joe Haldeman's Late Twentieth, society has to deal with immortality. I think that there won't be a radical shift like he extrapolates. If you think of age as a percent of life expectancy, long lives are the same as short ones. Even with clinical immortality, there are always accidents and violence (as he proves in Forever Peace). But suppose we achieve RAID integrity and deaths could hit zero for a good length of time. If trends continued, to update Keynes, in the long run, we will all be dead--or alive.

Maybe I'll start fantasizing about living forever when I get older.

I probably need to restate more clearly: either something is going up in which case if current trends continue, it's going to infinity or 100% or it's going down and it's going to minus infinity or 0%. So if current trends continue, something bad will happen. Has any trend ever continued?

Something may be forever increasing and yet not reach 100% (i.e. asymptotic).

I think more likely the trends are cyclical, or only consistent within a specific society. As the society changes, the fundamental pressures driving any given trend will also change.

For example, population decline in Europe would not continue once a majority of the population is Muslim.

-S

Yeah, it's stupid how the press and writers and people abuse "trends", especially bad users are economists. Before last presidential elections in my country the press had done a gallup of the two most popular nominees at two quite close time points and predicted something like: "by this speed, candidate A will get 70% of the votes on the election day".

That was of course not realistic.

Although often such trend predictions are handy ways of expressing data. Current oil reserves of company X amount to twenty days of world total usage etc etc.. Nobody is proposing that all other companies are shut down!

It's just setting things into proportion. People do prognoses and are trying to get a feel of stuff.

"By this rate, 50% of northern european country Z's population is black muslims in year 20FF". That means that something strange is going on and demands attention.

The interesting thing is to imagine a lengthened middle age rather than a longer elderly stage.

* Folks might be far less willing to save since they'll have longer.
* Folks might be more willing to take vacations and relax a bit.
* Older people tend to be more conservative in outlook, this would could skew politics somewhat.
* You might also see a growing tolerance for suicide as some folks just get board with it all, removing a lot of the really old age problems that have always remained.

I think the combination might be good for the economy and the happines of the people in general.

Lengthening productive lifespans will be a great boon to the economy.

Think of it this way: Today, a human is born, and spends the first 20-25 years of life being a net drag on the economy - being educated, not being productive, etc. Then they enter the workforce, and spend 30-50 years being productive. Then they retire, spend 10-20 years being non-productive and a net drag again, then they die and take all that accumulated knowledge and experience with them, and we have to train new people.

If you increase the lifespan to just 100, with retirement coming at 80 instead of 60, you'll increase the productive portion of a person's life by 50%, and the ration of productive to non-productive time will change from 40-60 to 60-40. That's a massive increase in productivity. But it gets even better than that, because for most people, the years of maximum productivity come in the last 10-15 years of their working life. If we can increase the time spent working by 20 years, people will spend two or three times longer in peak earning years than they do today.

This also would lower the ratio of years spent paying taxes to years spent collecting benefits, which would improve our fiscal balance sheet.

This assumes that the retirement age will climb with advances in lifespan. If we don't do that, then it will be a disaster. No society can afford to have people work for 30 years and then spend 40 years on public assistance.

This assumes that the retirement age will climb with advances in lifespan. If we don't do that, then it will be a disaster. No society can afford to have people work for 30 years and then spend 40 years on public assistance.

I can't imagine why it would not. I am not ready at all to stop working, yet I can imagine being 'done' with work and ready to stop. Still, the idea of spending 40 years puttering around doing little meaningful work sounds like hell.

"...in the long run, we will all be dead--or alive."

Like Schrodinger's cat?

"...in the long run, we will all be dead--or alive."

So this means we'll all be wanted?

What if we achieve immortality by uploading? But all modern operating systems are time-sliced. We'll be living in Philip Jose' Farmer's "Sliced Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World" ( http://tinyurl.com/c3rpw )

So we'd live forever, but not in a row.

Good asset management should be able to support you indefinitely. As long as you don't touch the principal, the interest yield on a well-designed portfolio should be able to keep you in stylish but affordable boots as long as you like. You're still participating economically as a consumer, after all.

My guy recommends a laddered bond portfolio heavy on the tax free municipals, but it's still a ways off.

If current trends continue, the universe will be as completely full of people as possible or completely devoid of them.