How to get rich? The single best way is to live a long time, ideally working much of that time while amassing savings that compound, and compound some more. The vast majority of Warren Buffett’s wealth compounded well after traditional retirement age.
What a change. In the past, old age signaled a chance to slow down, spend down limited wealth while relaxing after a lifetime of work. What an awful way to grow old.
To see why, consider the advances taking place in the battle against Alzheimer’s disease. As is so often the case in the marketplace, problems set the stage for solutions.
One challenge as people have lived longer is that their minds haven’t always kept pace with the overall health of their bodies. Enter Eli Lilly, Biogen-Easai, and surely countless other pharmaceutical companies intent on finding ways to not just enhance bodily health in old age, but mind health.
As Alyssia Finley recently explained it in the Wall Street Journal, “A trove of new Alzheimer's research suggests that medicines and lifestyle changes can not only slow but prevent, even reverse, the debilitating disease.” Crucial about the lifestyle part of the drug/lifestyle equation is that one improves the other.
While Lilly and Biogen-Easai seemingly have us past the doorstep of drugs capable of stopping and reversing Alzheimer’s, it must be stressed that this is occurring at a time where the nature of work is changing for the much, much better.
While the excessively anxious wring their hands about AI putting much of the world into breadlines, it will more realistically and happily remove from work some of its most tedious and backbreaking qualities. Yes, the erasure of all sorts of rote work will free truly capable people to specialize in ways they never imagined.
In short, the work of the future will increasingly be of the kind that we can’t get enough of, and that will be true exactly because the work of tomorrow will elevate the unique skills and intelligence of workers formerly suffocated by the difficult parts. All of this is tailor made for old people.
Thanks to AI advances, the capacity for individuals of old age to continue contributing on the job will grow and grow. So will the necessity of elderly contributions. What erases work functions multiplies work while raising the value of each capable worker.
This matters in consideration of the lifestyle changes that are said to delay the onset of Alzheimer's, including (per Finley) “regular physical and cognitive exercise.” Yes, work tailored to the specialized skills and knowledge of old people will pair well with pharmaceutical advances similarly geared toward reversing the mind erosion that hits too many way too early.
What’s ahead is exciting on its face, but it also raises questions. As is said here frequently, politicians are intent on “bending the healthcare cost curve downward,” while President Trump has it in his head that U.S. consumers should pay the same for the fruits pharmaceutical advance as people in other countries do. No thanks, and that’s not just because Americans are so much richer than the rest of the world.
The better reason is that Americans want to be first in line for healthcare advances, and they logically never want their supply of what will elongate and improve life limited by price controls that are nothing more than a euphemism for scarcity. Which is a comment that old age can be great again, assuming we let it.
