There's a sucker society born every generation

Randall Parker opines that the solution to the population crisis in the developed nations is a radical extension of human lifespans.
Meanwhile, in another thread, he mentions the impending bankruptcy of both Social Security and Medicare due in no small part to... extension of human lifespans.
I see no small amount of cognitive dissonance here.  Parker's utopian vision appears to be of people giving up government benefits and perhaps even tax-favored pensions in order to keep working tens or hundreds of years beyond the time when people are normally worm food.  I can just as easily see a dystopian vision, where the growing class of seniors who are either part of or about to enter a priviledged class with an ever-growing lifelong vacation ahead of them use their voting power to prevent any such thing from happening for as long as they can.  The result:  an acceleration of the coming economic collapse of governments and even whole societies.
I have no doubt that science can bring us wonders which were previously the exclusive province of dreams and fables.  I do have doubts that we have the political maturity to acknowledge and embrace all of their necessary consequences, as earth-shaking as they might be.  The pyramid schemes of the newly-freed ex-Soviet bloc nations may have surprised some of us in the West with the breadth and the depth of the damage they did, and with the number of suckers that the con artists found.  But it's hard to say that they should have known better when our own government-blessed Ponzi schemes are doing the same to us on a longer time scale, and we refuse to muster the political will to fix the problem at its various sources.

  ¶ 3/20/2004 09:25:00 PM