Inequality

There was one philosopher I saw on a podcast somewhere who said that he cared more about life expectancy than GDP. I think this represents a good set of moral and ethical values. It is really quite crude to place more importance on money than people. However we also need to face the cold hard reality that it takes resources to keep people alive. We should view the accumulation of those resources as a means toward an end, that of extending the human lifespan.

How would things look if we were to take this approach. One thing that I note is that this would have different implications for how we view inequality. If we really care about people more than money, then we must also care more about inequality in the human lifespan than in income. This would tell us that inequality is much less than is commonly believed and is actually declining in our country. Lifespan inequality is about one fourth as much as income inequality and was less in 2006 than in it was in 2000, when it was still less than it was in 1990.

Many of the ideas that ethicists have about inequality seem puzzling to me. For instance many see it as being terrible that the richest people in our society don't pay more in taxes. I wonder how they would see the issue if we were to point out that the two richest people in our country, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have both supported charitable activity to lengthen the lives of people. If we view all human lives as being of equal value, as Bill Gates has claimed, it is not immediately obvious that we would improve the human condition by taking money away from these causes in order to finance the war in Iraq and Social Security payments for American retirees. In fact I would say that they were practicing much better ethics than the U.S. government.

Of course there is another point to consider. Suppose the government could act in such a way as to bring about greater lifespan equality. Should they do it? Is it really just to shorten one person's life in order to lengthen another's? Suppose that you could increase the span of one neighbor from 39 to 40 by decreasing that of another neighbor from 85 to 84. Would you feel morally justified in doing so?

Many people say that our health care system is not as good as many others. In their opinion switching to a more socialized system would improve our system. However, our system can not be thought of as being isolated from other health care systems. One important point to note is that the 80% of all innovation in health care occurs in the U.S. A fair empirical comparison between our system and theirs would require that we isolate each system from any and all effects of the other. This would mean that people who are in one part of the world would not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of innovations that were developed in another part.

Of course it would be inhuman to perform such an experiment. Perhaps much of the innovation would happen in any case. On the other hand, it might be that some advances were made in other countries with the idea in mind that they would lead to profits in the U.S. For example, suppose a foreign drug manufacturer develops a drug for the U.S. market. Of course they would also make it available to people in other countries, but they might not have spent the resources needed to develop it in the first place had they been unable to make as much money on it in the U.S.