longevity theory

Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan thinks that Treasurer Joe Hockey somehow deserves congratulations for suggesting that people's life expectancy may extend to 150 on the basis of some very speculative 'medical science'. [1] Futhermore, she's using this medical theory to jump on the moving retirement goal bandwagon. [2]
Is Susan Ryan, losing her marbles or simply doing what she has to to keep her job? Who do you know that you think is likely to live until they are 150 years old? And who do you know that wants to work until 70 or beyond? The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Real trends

Nevermind that people young and old are dying early from poverty associated with unemployment in this country, fancy believing on the basis of past statistical curves, that most people are going to live to 150 even if some amazingly wealthy person like Murdoch might just aim, using cloned organ replacement, diet, blood transfusions and 24 hour slaves in attendance to aim for such longevity. How can Susan Ryan not be aware that the 'developed' nations are faced with actual declines in life-expectancy due to diet-linked diseases, notably diabetes, fatty liver, and the strain of obesity on their systems (which is not necessarily always present in the raised risk of diabetes.) [3]

Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey need to read more widely instead of relying on actuarial information from the past, hitched to a junk-science wagon. In this case past trends do not predict the future. Current trends break from the past. Joe Hockey is either poorly educated in health matters or pragmatically abusing economic stats. Probably both. If he really wanted to save money on medical costs, he would call for high taxes on denatured processed food and its advertising.

The church of the workhouse

Susan Ryan, like Julia Gillard, idealises payed work. To pretend that all work is good for health, rewarding or fulfilling, rather than a depressing and onerous treadmill, or a frighteningly tense battle to please capricious bosses, shows the insensitive submission of the work-privileged to a self-serving economic ideology. Although I supported quite a lot of what ex-labor PM, Julia Gillard, appeared to stand for, I felt sorry in advance for disabled people in the new National Disability Scheme if their only chance at dignity and security could be the 'right' and thereby the duty, to work. It isn't as if the were all guaranteed positions as well-paid neurosurgeons, party bosses, lawyers or chief executives. It isn't as if most of us have jobs like that.

Conditional love

In this Australia of very conditional love and self worth we must constantly struggle against the economic measure of our status. For this reason most women must struggle all the harder, meeting demands to be 'good' and obedient at home as well as at work. The elderly must struggle even harder. We are not taught how in simpler societies simply being a member of the society guarantees you a place, shelter, worth and rights. If we were we would rally to protect traditional societies instead of consigning their masses via 'development' to overpopulation, exhaustion, malnutrition, epidemics new and old as well as the same ones as the poor in the developed world: fatty liver, diabetes and its complications, and the political irrelevance and isolation of the mass consumer.

The value of elderly people is being sold out by the likes of Susan Ryan and Joe Hockey

Not a word in Susan Ryan's celebration of wage-slavery of the fitness of citizens, the rewards of political engagement in real life rather than effective total hours lost to unfair and redundant economic systems. Nothing about the loss of natural increase in status accompanying seniority in most societies before ours.

Evolutionary theory on longevity

The wisdom of older people and their retreat from sexual and warrior competition made sense of longevity in our species. Why do we have life expectancies around 3 score and 10 years? Because the presence of old people is fundamental to knowledge conservation in societies.

On the subject of how long humans lived, Kaplan et al [4] argue that humans had potential to live for about 70 years in hunter-gatherer environments. They theorise that reaching age 65 must have played a part in human evolutionary adaptation for the acquisition of life learning and storage of environmental knowledge over long periods of time and distance in elderly humans.

On the subject of causes of mortality, they assert that the comparatively isolated populations that persisted in localized environments pre-agriculture and large-scale settlement would have become genetically adapted to local pathogens. The effect of this would have kept disease mortality low.

Of course now, in our huge and cumbersome cities, local adaptation is no longer possible, since our diets and frequentations are globally sourced and mostly beyond any individual's control. We now eat industrially produced glop that our livers cannot break down, but can only store in ever increasing fatty deposits. In our global economic culture that may be just as well, since accumulated learning is not conducive to processed food consumption or widget production. Then again, if we did allow elderly people to transmit their accumulated knowledge from a position of authority, we might outwit the consumer-economy monster.

NOTES

[1] "The first drugs that can slow the ageing process are likely to become available within five to 10 years, raising the prospect of people eventually living to 150 or more, researchers say." Source: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/drugs-may-let-us-live-to-150-20111016-1lrm5.html

[2] Source: Susan Ryan, "The economic potential of older people is being ignored," The Age, 22 February 2015, http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-economic-potential-of-older-people-is-being-ignored-20150222-13lfgt.html.

[3] For anyone interested in the theory, I refer to Dr Lustig of the University of California's and associates work on excessive fructose consumption in particular but also on excessive consumption of any simple carbohydrates. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlEuDHpE2k These epidemic problems are now affecting children within six months of birth. There are many other lectures on you tube around this subject besides this one that explores the evolutionary signficance of fructose.

[4]See Kaplan, H., Gurven, M., Winking, J. 2009, “An Evolutionary Theory of Human Lifespan: Embodied Capital and the Human Adaptive Complex,”. For: Handbook of Theories of Aging. (Editors: Bengtson, V., Silverstein, M., Putney, N., Gans, D). Springer. Pp. 39-66. Also available at http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/kaplanetal_ch3.pdf.