Will rejuvenation biotechnologies be affordable and easily accessible to all,
or will they become a privilege for "the rich", creating a split between ever-young, ever-healthy rich people
and the poor, unlucky devils rotting in hospices, eaten alive by the diseases of aging?
This is a legitimate concern,
though more often than not, it escalates into a backward, rage-driven holy war against "the rich"
and their privileges—which equally often ends with the conclusion that
rejuvenation is a bad idea because, let's face it, it would of course be only for the rich,
and since we're the good guys siding with the poor,
we should oppose rejuvenation to save them from yet more discrimination
and prevent the rich from becoming even more privileged.
Yeah…
That's...  that's not how it works.
I mean, yes—it would suck if only the rich had access to rejuvenation therapies,
but that's only because the suckiness happens at a more general level.
It would suck if only some people had access to rejuvenation therapies, whatever the size of their bank account.
If, for some absurd reason, only the poor had access to rejuvenation, it wouldn't be any better.
it's the same problem flipped the other way around.
Somebody's been screwed over, and that's the problem.
Besides, even if at the beginning, only some people will benefit from rejuvenation, some is still better than none.
Just because not everyone can have it, it doesn't mean no one should.
If we had a miracle cure for cancer on the drawing board but it turned out to be ridiculously expensive,
what should we do?
Ban it to prevent inequality of access and screw everyone over,
or have it developed ASAP and then do our best to ensure the widest possible access as soon as possible?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
But, for the sake of the argument, say that we decided to ban rejuvenation before it was even created
to prevent any inequality of access from happening.
Who would stand to gain from this?
Well, whether rejuvenation were developed or not would change nothing for those who couldn't afford it anyway;
their net benefit is zero in either scenario,
unless they are happy to know that if they can't have rejuvenation, then nobody will.
Also, if it's extremely poor people we're talking about,
they're probably too busy trying to survive to indulge in schadenfreude.
So, we can cross out "the poor" from the list of the beneficiaries of the non-existence of rejuvenation.
Filthy rich people might not be forever young, but they'd still lead far more comfortable and
very possibly longer lives than the rest of the world, so all they'd lose is a potential benefit,
which, incidentally, everyone else loses in the process as well, because if rejuvenation did exist,
everyone would have better chances of getting it one day than they would if it didn't.
The elderly would be royally screwed and discriminated against, because opposing rejuvenation therapies
equals opposing therapies capable of actually curing and preventing age-related diseases
and keeping older people fully healthy.
Meanwhile, those who opposed rejuvenation on social justice grounds may well feel like they helped the poor,
even though they didn't, and it didn't cost them anything but the effort of raging against something,
which people very much enjoy doing these days.
Also, they don't have to worry that rejuvenation might ever be added to the list of things they have to feel guilty about compared to "the poor".
If anyone stands to gain anything from the non-existence of rejuvenation,
it's these guys, and their feelings don't outweigh the suffering of billions of people.
In short, banning rejuvenation would prevent inequality of access if the price tag were too steep,
but it would also hang everyone out to dry; so, at this point,
it might be worth looking into whether the price tag would be that steep.
The bad news is, it may well be.
Like all pioneering technology, rejuvenation therapies are likely to cost an arm and a leg at the beginning.
It's hard to predict how much, but this is to be expected,
and the reason is not that "Big Pharma" is evil and wants to milk every last cent out of you.
Drug development is ridiculously expensive and has an abysmal rate of success.
A potential new drug needs to go through different phases of clinical trials, each costing millions of dollars,
and may easily fail during any of them.
According to a 2016 study, developing a single new drug from the ground up, getting it through trials,
approved, and finally onto the market may cost up to $2.8 billion.
Different studies report different figures, but the grand total is always in the billions range.
Roughly one out of every ten candidate drugs actually makes it past that trial process and to patients,
and given that a pharma company generally works on many drugs at the same time,
most of the money they spend is thrown out of the window, never to return.
The losses are especially bad when a drug fails in later phases of the trials,
because they're more expensive and because the company has already spent tons of money on the previous phases.
Arguably, the more complex the drug, the higher the development costs,
so drugs that literally rejuvenate people are probably going to be a touch pricey at first.
Still, already now several companies are working on specific rejuvenation therapies,
and competition usually leads to lower prices and drives further innovation
that allows to produce more effective drugs at a lower cost.
On top of that, when drugs go off-patent,
other companies are free to create their own versions of the original drug,
and they generally wind up being cheaper.
Again, timeframes cannot be reliably predicted, but it's unlikely that rejuvenation treatments, or
any treatment, for that matter, would be super expensive forever.
In any case, health insurance, or governments through socialized healthcare, might pay to rejuvenate people.
In most countries of the world, around 70% to 100% of the population is covered by either health insurance
or free government healthcare, and they already pay for geriatric treatments that aren't really effective.
It might be in their best interest to pay for medicine that actually works and keeps people healthy
so that their medical expenses are mostly limited to rejuvenation itself.
People working in companies often have health insurance paid by their employers,
and the goal of rejuvenation wouldn't be any different from any other medical expense
that employers are paying for already, keeping their employees in good health and fit for work.
Also, a rejuvenated citizen can work and pay taxes for longer and doesn't have to be paid a pension until death,
which may be another incentive for governments to step in.
We have an entire episode about this if you want to check it out.
Regardless of all of this, the problem of inequality of access wouldn't exist for rejuvenation or anything else
if there wasn't such a large divide between rich and poor to begin with, and actually, we're getting there.
For starters, there isn't just rich and poor in the world; wealth is a spectrum,
and there are different degrees of poverty and richness.
The difference between the poorest poor and the richest rich is huge,
but most people of the world lie in between them, and as a matter of fact,
world poverty has been falling dramatically since the 1970s.
In the last 30 years alone, the number of people living in extreme poverty was reduced by nearly three quarters,
reaching an all-time low of 650 million in 2018.
Granted, that's still a lot of people, but it's a lot less than the 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty in 1990;
it's also true that extreme poverty is such for a reason
—it means living on less than two dollars a day—
and there still are "richer" poor people having a real hard time making ends meet.
The World Bank has a stated goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030,
and while that might be a bit too optimistic, projections indicate that we will get damn close;
less than 5% of the world population is expected to live in extreme poverty by then.
There is definitely hope that, one day relatively soon, being too poor to afford basic needs
won't really be a thing anymore, and affording medical treatment,
rejuvenation or others, may not be such a problem.
It may be obvious, but just reducing the divide between rich and poor isn't all; the way we do it matters a lot.
For example, if the rich became poorer while those who already were poor stayed just as poor as they were,
the gap between them would get smaller but the situation wouldn't be any better,
because we'd have more poor people than we started with.
Of course, if you took from the rich and gave to the poor Robin Hood style, you might close the gap,
but you might also end up causing political strife and damaging the economy.
The pie would stay the same, and all you'd be changing is how it's sliced.
However, human progress is all about making the pie larger by coming up with more and more
clever ways to create abundance, so that even if the slicing is uneven, everyone gets more than enough.
Not creating rejuvenation wouldn't make the divide between rich and poor any larger,
but it wouldn't make the pie any larger either, and no one would be better off.
Thank you very much for watching this episode of X10, and kudos to you if you actually sat through all of this,
but if you haven't had enough, there are links to sources and further reading in the description down below,
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