So, as a totally random connection, it seems like being obese is better for tax-payers dollars and that the burgeoning middle classes of the third world will ruin the environment. Cheers eh?
Interestingly enough, it appears that if we wanted to target the most expensive group to eliminate their costs of health care as burdens on taxpayers, we should go after octogenarians, not the fat. Despite the number of studies discussing how expensive state-subsidized health care and prevention of obesity is to the tax-payer, it emerges the elderly consume a far greater proportion of the tax pie. In fact, despite the elevated costs of direct treatment associated with obesity, the decrease in life-span ends up saving money (although I don't think the years of unearned wages, i.e. tax revenue, is factored in). It's a good day when we can argue that letting people die of heart failure is their patriotic duty to help balance the budget and cut profligate spending, no?
Likewise, the per capita costs of sustaining a middle class on standards of living on par with the US and Europe would obliterate the environment. These effects extend beyond just the direct exhaust of cars (although the Tata's "People Car" will do a great job in making it cheaper and easier for everyone to pollute... isn't development great?) to include food production or oil. Even if we accept their exists sufficient carrying capacity of the globe to sustain the current population, I seriously doubt (although I don't have the stats to back this up) that the globe has a carrying capacity to sustain the current population at least middle class standards. Issues like the price of foodstuffs and potable water is already causing social upheavals and violent conflict.
So the confluence between these two articles is that in two actions more or less regarded as indisputably good, i.e. living healthier and living better quality lives, are bad for you, your friends, and society. Living longer and healthier is more expensive than living lives that are short, brutish and ugly.
But to give this post a point more interesting than just being cavalier, we need to seriously question assumptions, both about living longer and about living better. If you push your life expectancy back from 75 to 95 by eating better and exercising more and spend the last 10 years going in and out of hospitals fighting cancer, diabetes, and mental degeneration, does your quality of life improve and do you account for the tab you ask your friends, family and society to pick up on your behalf? Then again, maybe we just need to learn that paying the $200 billion to $1 trillion annually to help people live healthier lives might just be the cost of doing business in a modern world.
Whereas if the goal of development is really to put a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot, then all of us, rich and poor, might need to learn how to make do with a smaller car and a scrawnier chicken... hopefully a car that'll get us to work and a chicken sufficiently healthy to feed us; divided too many ways, no one "wins". And if national and global economic inequality is causing such social angst and conflict, and if the inequality is not reconcilable by giving everyone a seat at the adult's table, then maybe the price of international peace and stability between the haves and have-nots is sticking everyone at the kiddie's table. And before you start figuring out how fewer material possessions that might entail, remember the price could very well include things like health care and years of life expectancy. You might be able to give up the new H3, but how attached are you to your 80th birthday?
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