US Survival Statistics  

Stuart at Early Warning has a look at the slowing rate of progress in extending maximum lifespans in spite of steadily increasing the share of the economy devoted to medical care - US Survival Statistics.

The above data are from the CDC and show the percentage of Americans surviving at each age for three different points in history - 1900, 1950, and 2006. I would expect the pattern to be fairly similar for other developed countries. The point, apropos of yesterday, is that there was a lot more progress from 1900 to 1950 than there was from 1950 to 2006. ...

Again, you can see that progress has been getter slower and slower, and most of the progress has come from eliminating things that kill young people, with much less improvement in the chronic conditions that see off the middle aged and the elderly.

But to achieve this slowing progress requires spending a larger and larger fraction of US GDP on healthcare ...

From “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell, 1937:

“To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense – the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; [b]look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer.[/b] Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established.”