This too shall pass ... eventually

As we go about our daily lives, and as I witness India's descent into Covid hell that the government made possible, it is difficult to view the events over a longer time horizon.  Even though I teach students to understand the human condition by looking at trend lines, the Covid catastrophe, which Arundhati Roy correctly describes as the modi government's crime against humanity, preempts looking at tomorrow leave alone history.

But, history does offer a little bit of comfort if we look back at the world in 1918, when the Spanish flu killed many.

Imagine you were there at Camp Devens in late 1918, surveying the bodies stacked in a makeshift morgue. Or you were roaming the streets of Bombay, where more than 5 percent of the population died of influenza in a matter of months. Imagine touring the military hospitals of Europe, seeing the bodies of so many young men simultaneously mutilated by the new technologies of warfare — machine guns and tanks and aerial bombers — and the respiratory violence of H1N1. Imagine knowing the toll this carnage would take on global life expectancy, with the entire planet lurching backward to numbers more suited to the 17th century, not the 20th. What forecast would you have made for the next hundred years?

I would have forecast that it was the end times.  That we were all going to die.  And that it would be a miracle if humanity recovered from such a catastrophe. 

I would have been proven wrong! 

A hundred years ago, an impoverished resident of Bombay or Delhi would beat the odds simply by surviving into his or her late 20s. Today average life expectancy in India is roughly 70 years.

Sriram in 1918 would never have predicted such a positive transformation.

How did this happen?

Of course scientific breakthroughs helped.  But it was not science alone that did it.

Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root.

(I hope the ardent advocates for STEM will read the long read in the NY Times Magazine, which is what I am referring to here.)

Perhaps you don't have the time to read that long essay, and want an example of how science alone didn't deliver progress.  In that case, here is an example: Pasteurization.  The scientific method led Pasteur to understand the role that bacteria played in spoiling the milk, which then caused sickness in people who drank it.  He then figured out that heating milk and then quickly cooling it down did the trick. But, this didn't take effect right away.

In the United States, it would not become standard practice in the milk industry until a half century after Pasteur conceived it. That’s because progress is never a result of scientific discovery alone. It also requires other forces: crusading journalism, activism, politics.

My favorite examples, as I have blogged in plenty, will always be the elimination of small pox, and piped drinking water supply. In both, science alone wasn't enough; it required an army of non-scientists, and sometimes the literal army too.

So, yes, over the long run, the trend lines tell a story that is vastly different from what most would have predicted in 1918.

But, then there is the reality of daily life.

I cannot wait for this pandemic to end.

Dying slower: The curse of longevity

"You will be working for at least 45 years after you graduate" is something that I have been telling students for a long time.

I am not sure if any student gives a damn about it.

I suppose at 18, I would not have imagined 45 long years, when the prospect of 4 years of undergrad itself was huge.  Think about the proportions: 4 out of 18, and then 45 compared to 18.

As difficult as it might be to imagine these time horizons, we will be better off if we tried to.

If we did think about 45 years of working, and living into the 8th and 9th decade of one's life, then we might begin to appreciate the complex aspects of life.  We are already living nearly immortal lives compared to the average human a mere 200 years ago, when globally the life expectancy at birth was a mere 35 years.

When conditions have changed this rapidly, it also means that the magnitude of change has yet to sink into our collective consciousness.  Is it any wonder, for instance, that divorce rates are increasing?  Mating for life for about 2 decades before death strikes at 35 is different from mating for life for 70 years, right?  Not for everybody:  “Thirty more years of this joker? No way.”

What are we going to do with longevity anyway, when we are already bored enough that we watch endless cat videos?

After all, as writer Susan Ertz wryly observed in her 1943 novel “Anger in the Sky,” “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

I don't think it is any accident that our entertainment options have exploded an infinite number of ways along with the increasing life expectancy.  We have no idea how to spend our time, and are often bored out of our wits.  I won't be surprised if there is a show that is nothing but watching the paint dry. Oh wait, we already have that!

I am not sure if we are ready for longer and longer lifespans.  Yet, apparently we wish for longevity and immortality.  Be careful for what you wish for!

Stuff it!

A couple of days ago, I blogged that we are addicted to stuff. I added that getting rid of this addiction is impossible.

I continue to think about this and, frankly, it scares the life out of me.  Yes, as I wrote there, there are the awful impacts on the natural environment that sustains our existence.  But, there is more to worry about.  Something more existential.  If we are working long hours primarily because it is not about mere survival but to get more stuff, then "today’s discussions need to move beyond the old point about the marvels of technology, and truly ask: what is it all for?"

The metaphorical tasting of an apple from the forbidden tree is about this aspect of our existence.  Through our curiosity, over the hundreds of thousands of years, we have essentially become people running faster and faster on a treadmill.  What is it all for?

It doesn't have to be this way though.

If we wanted to produce as much as Keynes’s countrymen did in the 1930s, we wouldn’t need everyone to work even 15 hours per week. If you adjust for increases in labour productivity, it could be done in seven or eight hours, 10 in Japan (see graph below). These increases in productivity come from a century of automation and technological advances: allowing us to produce more stuff with less labour. In this sense, modern developed countries have way overshot Keynes prediction – we need to work only half the hours he predicted to match his lifestyle.

But, such short work weeks did not happen, nor will it ever happen.

Globally, people enjoy a standard of living much higher than in 1930 (and nowhere is this more true than in the Western countries that Keynes wrote about). We would not be content with a good life by our grandparents’ standards.

We humans are a strange species!

To complicate things, there is this:

If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays.

Have we paused to consider what this will mean?  How long will those kids who grow up to be adults be on treadmills so that they can get more stuff?

It is also not the first time that I have blogged about the implications of a 100-year life.  But, it simply sucks to be in the minority worrying about all these things.

I know I don't want to be on a treadmill for ever.

The luck of the draw

We never ask to be born.  We appear on this planet, and for a good chunk of years do not even have the legal claim to make our own decisions.  It is one heck of a random occurrence, which I have addressed in many posts over the years, like here.  This randomness of existence and the advantages or disadvantages that we are born into, raised in, and grow up to, determine most aspects of our lives.  Addressing this randomness becomes a moral issue.  As the comments in the previous post show, well, there can never be any single moral compass to guide us.

One aspect of the randomness in life is longevity itself.  A mere check with Wikipedia reveals the tremendous variation among countries when it comes to average life expectancy at birth.  Take Chad, for instance:

In Chad the average life expectancy at birth is about 50. Children who survive childbirth — and then malnutrition and diarrhea — are likely to die of pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, AIDS or even traffic accidents

Note the different hurdles a typical kid in Chad has to overcome before he is lucky enough to reach my current age.  Notice there is one major disease missing in that list: Cancer.  Why?  Because it takes time for cells to mutate and become malignant.

In fact, cancers of any kind don’t make the top 15 causes of death in Chad — or in Somalia, the Central African Republic and other places where the average life span peaks in the low to mid-50s. Many people do die from cancer, and their numbers are multiplied by rapidly growing populations and a lack of medical care. But first come all those other threats.

Cancer, in other words, is almost a rich person's disease because only the rich live long enough to begin with.  Most men in the decades past, for instance, did not suffer from prostate cancer because they rarely ever lived long enough to suffer that curse.

In the affluent countries, if one is lucky enough to be accidentally born there, it is a story that is different from what happens in Chad.  The report looks at Jimmy Carter's cancer treatment:

How different this is from the United States, where oncologists are working to rid a 91-year-old former president of metastatic melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers. One of Jimmy Carter’s drugs, a new immunotherapy agent called Keytruda, has been priced at $12,500 a month, in addition to the cost of his surgery and treatment with computer-guided radiation beams.

Carter's treatment is not all that exceptional.  Octogenarians undergoing heart surgeries is not news anymore, even though the treatment is at a considerable cost.  All because of the randomness of existence in an affluent country, as opposed to being born in Chad where cancer or heart trouble is the least of the health worries in life, as the following map shows.

Source

It is a moral question of whether or not one ought to be concerned that, for instance, a typical citizen of Chad has to fight the ultimate fight for life all because of the randomness of where we are all born.  Addressing even one aspect of the randomness--longevity--requires redistribution of income, which apparently won't be an easy sell.

So, given that I have won the ovarian lottery, why should I really care about all these?  A verse from the old country says it best for this atheist:

Vaishnav people are those who:
Feel the pain of others,
Help those who are in misery

The poor problems of longer life expectancy

The December days in India are about family and friends, yes.  But, it is also about guavas.  Every day, I eat a guava with breakfast, a guava or two after lunch, and a guava in the evening.  I suppose it is a pedestrian fruit to the locals who don't seem to care for it at all.  The locals do not know what they are missing out on ;)

A couple of days after landing in Chennai, I walked--bag in hand--to the guava vendor at the street corner. He said it was forty rupees for a half-kilo.

"Forty?" I was genuinely surprised because I think it was only thirty a year ago.

"Usually it is fifty, sir.  Because you are a regular customer it is forty."

The guy was trying to humor this customer!

Two days ago, I walked over there to restock.  He was not there.  No guavas.  I came home empty-handed.  As if the cosmos were watching out for me, my sister came home with a bag of "farm-fresh" guavas.

I wonder about that vendor.  His livelihood is from selling guavas.  If he is sick and is unable to work, then he loses the day's income.

That's is no different from the story of the tailor whose business is nothing but a foot-pedaled sewing machine and needles and threads on the sidewalk.  He has been gone for a few days now because of an appendectomy.  The guy is now financially set back that much more.

Or, take the case of the maid, er, domestic help, at my parents' home.  An older woman, she has been off and on this past week because she is not feeling well.  Even though I have no idea about the local protocols, I told her that she need not come to work if she is not well.  My father joined me.  "At some age, you need to retire and let your sons and daughter take care of you" he said.

She snorted.  "Like they will take care of me.  If I don't earn my livelihood, I won't get any food."

I think about these real people as I consider the celebratory news on the global increase in life expectancy:

Global life expectancy for men and women has increased by about six years over the past two decades, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of global health done so far. The rise in global life expectancy is mainly the result of dramatic advances in health care.
In richer countries longer lifespans are spurred by a big drop in deaths related to heart disease, while poorer countries have seen big declines in the death of children from ailments such as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria.

In the old country:

In India, which is on track to become the world’s most populous country in less than two decades, life expectancy at birth rose from 57.3 years to 64.2 years for males, and from 58.2 years to 68.5 years for females, according to the Lancet study.

Which is wonderful, indeed.  But, who takes care of the living? In the bad old days, when average life expectancy at birth was a low number, one really did not need to worry about the burdens of old age; there was no need when even living until forty was a big deal.  But, increasingly the worries of the old maid will be the stories all over the world.  As a species, and like other animals, we would have died much younger.  We have artificially lengthened our life spans and created hassles along the way.  I love the fact that we have been able to conquer many ailments that killed us by the millions.  But, am I in the minority to be concerned about the individual and collective responsibility over the tail end of our unnaturally long lives?

"I won't come tomorrow because I am going to the doctor" the maid said as she was leaving.  "But, I will be back the day after that."

All I could do was helplessly nod my head.

Later today, I hope to see the guava vendor.

Source

Make this a better place ... for you and for me

Perhaps I am also a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Aren't we all to some extent that way, in terms of how we display one personality in some contexts and a different personality when among a different set of people?

I am Mr. Hide, when I am on campus and in the context of faculty, and behave like Justice Clarence Thomas at a typical Supreme Court hearing--a silent presence, thanks to the union bosses telling their people (which is, for all I know, everybody except me) not to listen to me.  When with students, I--the Dr. Khé--am an animated, energetic, pun-loving pain-in-the-ass instructor, which is the real me.

Thus, there is a fair chance that the students know more about me and my penchant for discussions than do my peers.  Especially given that some of the students read, and even follow, my blog ;)

Discussions I love, and the internet has made possible discussions and debates that I would otherwise never be able to have.  With people halfway around the world, especially with this guy who, thankfully, does not leave me alone.

Towards the end of an email exchange with a fellow contemplator, where we disagreed a lot--after all, argumentative Indians we are--I wrote:

If the world looks awful now, I would contend that it has never been any better than this.  No way were the conditions in the past any close to how awesome the conditions now are. Can we do better?  I am convinced that we can, and we should try to do better.

My favorite example in talking about such a trend is a simple, yet a profound, measure--life expectancy at birth.  In that same email thread, I noted:

Even the poor live much longer lives than the 35-year lifespan that humans were typically restricted to, on an average, up until a couple of centuries ago.

In such a framework, of course, I find plenty of company.

The doubling of human life expectancy is one of the most remarkable achievements of the past century. Consider, Lomborg writes, that “the twentieth century saw life expectancy rise by about 3 months for every calendar year.” The average child in 1900 could expect to live to just 32 years old; now that same child should make it to 70.

The family stories in the old country are full of tragedies of lives cut short.  A grandfather whose death made my grandmother an 18-year old widow and the mother of two kids--one (my father) was a 40-day old newborn.  Uncles and aunts dying from tuberculosis. Children dead from mysterious illnesses.  One can easily imagine, therefore, the torture that the matriarch went through as she continued to live while people dear to her died one after another.

There simply has never been a better time than now.  And a lot more peaceful a world now:

children live in a world with fewer armed conflicts, netting what the authors call a “peace dividend.” Globalization and trade liberalization have surely contributed to this more peaceful world (on aggregate). An interdependent global economy makes war costly.

There simply has never been a better time than now.

Lomborg’s main message? Ignore those pining for the “good old days.” Thanks to the immense gains of the past century, there has never been a better time to be alive.

The "good old days" were mostly nothing but bad old days--paleofantasies those are.

Enough said. Stop reading this and go do your part to make this world an even better place, especially for the generations to come.