The Future Now

Changing health

As ever, an interesting piece from Michael Tomasky on the importance of the debate over health care in the battle for the Democratic nomination.  It sounds as if Clinton is gaining support by having a policy that can never be implemented, and Obama is losing support because it's just too difficult to explain to the electorate why the Clinton plan (mandatory insurance) is a non-starter. 

The comment below Tomasky's piece by Don Reynolds, who appears to know a thing or two about this, is at once the most enlightening and depressing thing I've read during during the campaign.  Reynolds says,

There are no politicians, including Hillary and Obama, that are able to stand up to the physicians, hospitals, nursing homes, and pharm corporations (and their lobbyists). The only one that honestly wanted to try was John Edwards and he is no longer in the race. (I doubt he would have met with any success either.)

The USA is clearly unable to deliver on the promise of universal health care, which puts it way down the league table in terms of social progress among the rich nations.  But this should send out warning signals to other countries about the problems to be faced over the coming decades, as science races ahead, the population gets older, and we find ourselves unable to fund the quality and quantity of health inputs we would like in an ideal world.

The science of suffering

Further to my post yesterday about the need to come to terms with our mortality, Colin Blakemore signs off an illuminating article in today's Independent with the following observation:

Paradoxically, the spectacular success of medical science in prolonging the function of the rest of the body is amplifying the burden of brain disease.

There may be no limit to what, ultimately, we can understand and control through science, but there are still centuries of work to be done.  While science catches up, growing numbers of elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and similar diseases are having their lives pointlessly lengthened as a result of our obsession with the sanctity of life regardless of its quality, and our failure to make value judgments about when and when not to apply scientific discoveries.

A happy death

Dominic Lawson has a very sensible piece in today's Independent in which he points out just how pointless and unproductive our growing obsession with longevity has become.

Everybody is entitled to a happy and healthy retirement, but there is no merit in extending life ever further past the point at which it ceases to have any positive value to its possessor.  The economic costs of a severely age-imbalanced population are obvious, but Lawson outlines several other practical and philosophical reasons for coming to terms with our own mortality.

History and literature are full of examples of how the desire for immortality is generally the product of a damaged mind - Lawson chooses Gulliver's Travels to illustrate his piece:

The Luggnuggians soon correct Gulliver's wide-eyed excitement. He is told how, by the time they are 80, the Struldbruggs had "not only the Follies and Infirmities of other old Men, but many more which arose from the dreadful Prospect of never dying". In their nineties, they "can never amuse themselves with reading, because their Memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a Sentence to the end; and by this Defect they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable."

Much of the blame for the current obsession must lie at the door of those scientists whose personal ambition outstrips their sense of social and moral responsibility.  And of course, those parts of the media that, on a daily basis, encourage the belief that it's possible to remain young forever.

An eminently sensible Tory

Zac Goldsmith was on Newsnight tonight discussing the government's plans to use nuclear energy to address climate change.  He was debating with Tom Burke who was rational and practical, Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary who was, almost literally, barking, and some guy representing the electricity producers, who did his job perfectly well, but added little to the debate.

Goldsmith was superb, as he usually is.  Surely if the Conservative party has a future he, and others like him (if there are any), rather than David Cameron and George Osborne, are it.

Goldsmith is standing against Susan Kramer at Richmond in the next general election.  It's weird to think that if I lived in Richmond, I'd be struggling to decide whether to vote for a Lib-Dem or a Tory.  The world is definitely changing.