Economic consequences of anti-aging

抄録

Usefulness of anti-aging medicine cannot be judged solely by its contribution to our healthy life expectancy. It is of limited use if we cannot live our longer healthy life happily and comfortably, and for this, we need a social and economic environment that is suitable for longer-living individuals. This idea was implied by Yonei (2021), when he argued that we should build a "healthy society". Anti-aging medicine’s success will accelerate the increase of "old-age dependency ratio", which is already very high in Japan. An aging population poses a number of serious economic and economic-policy challenges, and unless we handle them well, we will not be able to build a “healthy society”. We therefore review the state of population aging in Japan, examine how the elderly live their lives now and in the future, and discuss economic policy issues that need to be addressed to help the Japanese economy adjust to aging. One of the most salient issues in this regard is how to re-design social welfare programs, since there will be an increasing number of the elderly poor in the future. Yonei (2021) makes an interesting proposal, which he calls "rice-sic income", that combines the provision of "basic income" for the poor with a policy for revitalizing agriculture in Japan. We evaluate this proposal from the point of view of standard economics.