The rise of violence, the concentration of wealth and power, climate degradation and advances in artificial intelligence are all acknowledged to be among tomorrow’s most important challenges. But there is at least one other, which is all too often overlooked, and which will very quickly have major consequences: the global extension of human life expectancy.
The data are clear: since 2022, for the first time in human history, the number of adults over 50 has outnumbered those under 15; by 2024, global life expectancy will be over 70. What’s more, at least in developed countries, half of today’s children are expected to live past 90.
By 2040, the number of under-15s will have remained unchanged, while the number of over-50s will have risen by 800 million; most of these 800 million will be concentrated in 10 emerging Asian countries. By 2050, there will be 1.6 billion people over 65. So we’re entering an older world. And in a world of older people, everyone will have to work longer.
This is particularly bad news for poor, ageing countries (of which there are many), because nothing is more terrible for a country than to become old without having become rich and having set up solidarity systems.
In wealthy countries such as Northern Europe, which have developed a serious social security system in good time, this will mean devoting a growing share of public spending – and therefore of taxes and contributions – to financing healthcare and pensions. In other words, a profound reorganization of society. While we wait to see whether the successful integration of foreigners or a return to the domestic birth rate can change the situation.
In other countries, such as the USA, the market will covet solvent older people as consumers willing to spend fortunes so as not to die, promising customers for the specific products and services of a “longevity economy”, for healthcare, transport, travel, housing, food, entertainment and insurance against all risks.
This is even truer for the ultra-rich, who are beginning to spend fortunes in the hope of getting younger, and even in the illusory hope of never dying. For these transhumanists, age is merely an illness from which they hope to be cured. This fantasy is already a promising market, and one in which many companies have embarked. Among them is Jeff Bezos (who doesn’t just run Amazon and the conquest of space) and Yuri Milner (who doesn’t just run his investment funds), Altos Labs, created in 2022, with $3 billion, bringing together some of the world’s leading specialists in gerontology and genetics, promising not only to restore the health of very old people, but also to reprogram their cells to make age-related disabilities disappear. Some of these companies announce to their shareholders that they have already achieved significant results, promising that one day they will be able to identify ageing factors in embryos, provide the wealthiest people with the means to delay their own ageing, or even rejuvenate and choose the life expectancy of their children.
All this is just one of the many abuses that the combination of declining demographics, commercial greed and technological madness could lead to.
In fact, the real economy of longevity does not lie in the relentless privatization of services for the elderly, and even less in transhumanism. In France, in particular, prevention accounts for less than 2% of healthcare expenditure, compared with an average of almost 3% in Europe. And only 22% of eligible women have been screened for cervical cancer, compared with an average of 50% in the European Union as a whole, and over 80% in Denmark and Finland.
More generally, prevention would mean putting into practice a few simple rules: get a serious check-up at regular intervals (without falling into the tyranny of permanent self-monitoring of thousands of parameters), do an hour’s sport a day, stop eating artificial sugar, stop smoking, massively reduce alcohol and coffee consumption. Nothing could be simpler. And yet, nothing is less practiced. In fact, it all points to something more general: as with the environment, where it’s easier to prepare to have to adapt cities to global warming than to do what’s needed to avoid it; we prefer to wait until we have to repair damage rather than do what’s needed to avoid it. It would be so easy to do things differently.
j@attali.com
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