3300 years of boredom

Blaahg raises a question which has been ignored in all the debate about pensions and social security reform. How would we fund retirement if – as some think possible – people live to be 5000 years old?

The prospect of 4935 years of retirement doesn’t seem feasible. To buy an annuity paying £20,000, index-linked at 2.5 per cent, for 4935 years would cost around £670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 trillion. Call me a gloomy Gertie, but this looks a tall order.

The obvious alternative is, of course, to work longer. Right now, it’s perfectly feasible for 40 years of work to buy us 20 years of decent retirement. Scale this up, and the retirement age could be raised to around 3300.

This raises all sorts of problems. Even if we could conquer boredom, how would job changes happen? Would you like to write a 2000-year-old’s CV? Or read it?

But maybe I am being a gloomy Gertie. The same technological breakthroughs that increase our longevity might also increase our productivity, so a given working age buys us a longer retirement.

And productivity could accelerate a lot. Robin Hanson reckons world growth is on an accelerating trend, and that GDP could double every 2-3 weeks. That’s an annual growth rate of around 640,000,000 per cent. On these numbers, maybe a long retirement is feasible. I leave it to better mathematicians than me to work out how long.

This raises all sorts of issues. Here’s a few:

1. Wouldn’t this be a fantastic test of Keynes’ paradox of thrift? If we’re all saving to fund thousands of years of retirement, where would the demand come from to generate 640,000,000 per cent annual growth?

2. How would living to 5000 years change our incentives? Sure, we’d have an incentive to work harder to fund a longer retirement. But on the other hand, if we’ve got so much time, there’s no need to get things done quickly. There’s no point building a CV too long for anyone to read. Would such long lives really be conducive to growth?

3. How likely is it that technological progress will be this balanced, increasing both our productivity and our longevity? Just compare today with the 60s. Since then, computing power has exploded whilst transport productivity has probably regressed. That’s not what Star Trek predicted. How would an economy look with immense longevity but little other productivity growth? Or with Hanson-type productivity generally but today’s longevity?

4. How great is our taste for leisure anyway? Back in 1930, Keynes wrote an essay, “economic possibilities for our grandchildren” in which he forecast that we would now be working just 15-hour weeks. He correctly foresaw rising productivity, and thought we would take the fruits of this as leisure. In fact, we seem to have chosen consumption instead. So, mightn’t some people want to work (and consume) for thousands of years?

5. Do we really want to live to be 5000 anyway? What if ever-improving research technologies discover that Kevin Williams is right?

Until that day, I guess we’re left with George Burns’ wisdom. To paraphrase: would you want to live to 5000? You would if you were 4999.

Comments

[dearieme]

I doubt if the baby boomers will reach a vast age: they will be euthanased to save pension and medical costs.
(New Labour policy: Euthanasia, Euthanasia,Euthanasia.)
Lets hope that at least we'll get a big dose of morphine, rather than being abandoned to hunger or thirst.

[Robert Schwartz]

"£20,000, index-linked at 2.5 per cent, for 4935 years would cost around 670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 trillion."

I trust that you did not mean for us to take this seriously.

[ivan]

Probably if we can live 5.000 years, of which 3000 in boredom, suicide will not be seen as an unlawfull and amoral act anymore but as something normal. Suicides would rise leading to a decrease in the average life expectancy again. So some equilibrum may be reached in the future, other things equal of course. Anyway we would be much more free. Living much longer lives than before and if you don't like it, you can always end it.