Nothing adds to rational discussion like snarky one liners.
The economy doesn’t define lifespan, it is merely a correlation. Beyond that,
most measures of economic activity are only correlated with actual economic
activity.
If you are interested in actual numbers, they are right here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-per-capita ;
<https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-per-capita>
You can, of course, pick outliers. Japan does famously well due to cultural
intolerance for obesity. The US slightly underperforms due to enormous obesity
and lax to nonexistent driver’s licensing standards.
Of interest, Japanese-Americans outlive the Japanese by a year or two,
depending on the measure.
The Hong Kong of my father’s childhood had a lifespan far below the Hong Kong
of today. My relatives died of simple industrial and household accidents that
would have been easily prevented by equipment that they could not afford or was
not invented.
The correlation is of course imperfect, as are all measures of health. There
are fat people and smokers that live to one hundred, and athletes that die at
forty. There are years of no growth and long life, and years of fast growth and
short life.
Over large populations and long time periods, the correlation is rock solid, as
the numbers above suggest.
You may of course emote against this.
On Mar 26, 2020, at 7:48 AM, Jake Anderson (Redacted sender "jake" for DMARC)
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 26/3/20 11:44 pm, Kevin Ho wrote:
Your life in a first world society has caused you to forget a simple fact:
Life is unnatural. It is death that rules nature.
The enormously complex machinery of modernity, most of which is coordinated
through economic means, produces this unnatural outcome where most humans
live not only to reproductive age, but to their children’s reproductive age.
When this machinery breaks down, people start dying. Most obviously, when
the sewage infrastructure starts to decay, people die. When road signs fall
down and don’t get replaced, people die. When the cold chain for
refrigerated food starts to hiccup, people die.
Less obviously, when the web of innovation that creates ventilators and road
signs and crumple zones starts to slow down, people die.
As Bastiat says, people naturally react to that which is seen, but they
forget the unseen effects of their actions (or more perniciously, the unseen
non-effects of their non-actions)
The performance of the stock market isn’t the goal, it’s merely a measure of
economic activity, and economic activity is strongly correlated with
lifespan and health span. All your emotions about what you want and feel
don’t change these facts.
If you have the economy of Japan, you’ll end up with the lifespan of Japan,
and that’s good.
If you have the economy of Bulgaria, you’ll end with the lifespan of
Bulgaria, which is already ten years less.
If you have the economy of Somalia, you’ll end up with the lifespan of
Somalia.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they
really know about what they imagine they can design.” - Hayek
If economy defines lifespan why is the lifespan of Americans shorter than
Japanese?