Life Shorteners

People don't live as long as they could.  This is the case in our country and in the world as a whole.  If we want to improve the human condition, then we will have to look into what the major causes of this are in order to see how we might best respond.

First we should look at the causes.  For the world as a whole in terms of disability adjusted life years lost the big culprits are lower respiratory disease, diarrheal disease, unipolar depression, ischemic heart disease and HIV/AIDS.  Here we note that the top two causes of loss of high quality life years are infectious diseases that can be prevented or treated.

In fact it is hard to escape the fact that the leading cause of death in the world is really poverty.  Now it is clear that very few countries devote a large portion of their government spending to foreign aid.  There is some thought that the little that they do spend doesn't do much good.  Much of the money goes to paying foreign governments to implement a foreign policy that we would like rather than responding to the needs of their own citizens.

If we can't get the governments of rich countries to help, we should at least attempt to get them to stop doing things that are harmful.  What I have in mind here are restrictions on trade and immigration.  We should have free trade and liberal immigration rules, as far as is possible.  I suspect that a somewhat larger portion of charitable giving crosses international boundaries.  Hence to the extent that social welfare programs replace charitable giving, they hurt the world's poor.  If rich people keep the money instead of giving it away, taking it will still have the same harmful effect.  Some of the money would have gone toward capital investment, and some of this would be in places in the world where capital is relatively scarce.  Hence the money would have raised wages for many of the poorer people in the world.

Unipolar depression and heart disease are the next two causes.  Diet and exercise help with the latter and I have heard that exercise is helpful with the former as well.  Both these are factors that have more importance in richer countries.  Drugs can be used to counteract both of these.  I suspect that factors like these will be more expensive to deal with than ones that effect poor countries.  However since countries are, on the whole, getting richer these causes are likely to assume more importance in the future.  This, along with HIV/AIDS is an area where more research into finding better drugs would be helpful.