SOCIAL SECURITY DEBATE IN DEADLOCK

The subtle victory the Tea Partiers have gained from trashing social security is that progressive politicians are reluctant to open up the topic of modernizing the entire program to ensure its perpetuity. In some ways, their negative attitude has hardened the counter attitude of progressives, which prevents anyone from doing what both camps might agree needs doing. The social security debate is in gridlock. Society has changed dramatically in my lifetime. The health care landscape has changed and continues to change, sometimes in spectacular ways. The county’s population is becoming older for many reasons including better health care a fact, which makes clear that we as a species have to make social security more accommodating to our biology.

Disease prevention and better treatments have had a direct effect on life span and will continue to have an effect until humankind has reached the genetic limits. We are not dying of disease but more and more of old age, what ever that is. The developing disparity between length of physical life and length of productive or working life is obvious. It is not just physiological it is also mental attitude—colored by the moral hazard of a highly desired early retirement.  Using human height as an example to explain the concept, height is genetically determined.  Height is a stochastic attribute. Any given individual will grow taller with the “proper diet” but can only grow as tall as his DNA/RNA will permit. As variable as it is, and as predetermined as it is, we would expect our population average height would increase with better nutrition. Therefore, we have little but some control. Human height is variable and depends, for example, to a limited extent on diet. A basketball fan for a father does not mean that good food will allow his son to grow to a 7-feet height. Obviously, there are things over which we do not have control; height varies with gender. Although the female average height is shorter than the average male height, there are females that are taller then most males and visa versa.

Just like height, my premise is that human life span is stochastic and is approaching a genetic limit, which I assumed is about 120 years. I would expect on average we would live to be 120 years old when we stop dying of disease (and war). With that in mind, the expression long term planning takes on different meaning. To do that, we have to find what it is that contributes to long life but especially our working life or are we destined to set around like vegetables after we reach 80 or 90 or 100 years of age. Height is comparatively simple in concept; all we have to do is to put together a huge partial differential equation with each factor to arrive at an answer for final height, a figure that has little species significance. Life is different; we do not seem to have the slightest idea of what the contributing factors to long working life might be. It seems that longevity and physical height are spectacularly different in this aspect. We cannot continue to turn our backs on the problem of longevity nor can we allow our old people to starve on the streets. Height has little to do with fundamental social organization but longevity does; conservatives tell us an ant colony without workers has no future, yet progressives tell us a society that does not take care of its elderly is without a heart.  

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