Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, August 13, 2010

Futurologists Fuel the Fancies of the Catfood Commission

Think tank futurologists peddling sooper-longevity research scams love to crow, utterly in defiance of sense, that "advancing technology" is on the verge of licking humanity's immemorial aging and even mortality problem. Meanwhile the more mainstream downstream futurologists on the tee-vee peddle much the same nonsense amidst pastel-hued dancing digital DNA-helices and spokesmodels clutching beakers in labcoats in breathless blessed-out paeans to "cutting-edge" boner-pills and "cosmeceutical" creams which, when slathered on the faces of sixteen year old girls still manage miraculously to leave them looking younger than post-menopausal women.



It is in this light that I think the science-fiction reference in the title of Paul Krugman's latest post on the Catfood Commission is so appropriate.

If it weren't for the endless mass-mediation for sagging superannuated Boomer consumers of loose hyperbolic futurological talk about ongoing and upcoming and ever-accelerating ever-lengthening life-expectancies I happen to think there would be far less intuitive plausibility attaching to the fantastically false notion that such looming longevity demands we raise the age of eligibility for collecting Social Security benefits.

Needless to say, if there really were a Social Security crisis on the horizon, we need only raise the cap on earnings subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security to eliminate any shortfall.

Krugman points out that life-expectancy at the actually-relevant age of sixty-five has not risen nearly as rapidly as life-expectancy in general (the feel-good metric death-denialists like to glom onto when contemplating the sands in the hourglass), and that longevity gains, to the extent that these are making any actual appearance on the scene, are skewing to the benefit of the comparatively prosperous who also depend comparatively less on Social Security in the first place. Meanwhile, none of these glib generalities connect to the actual reality of so many senior citizens doing work more strenuous and injurious and exhausting than that demanded of pampered Senate millionaires, especially when they are confronted later in life with diminished capabilities or outdated skill sets or unemployment in competitive job-markets.

As happens so often, the glossy futurological abstractions providing the rationales of the Very Serious White Guys In Charge have little substance in respect to the science they pretend to represent but have palpable substance in the elite-incumbent politics of the rich few who would peddle austerity and misery for the many.

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