I think, if you try to prove that it makes economical sense to make peoples' lives better and longer, you will always fail- it will always be more profitable to treat people like cattle and let them die quickly. Economic thinking is broken like that: the highest value is money, there isn't any value that doesn't translate into money and there is no way to justify losing money to gain anything else.
Reality doesn't really work like this, or in any case that's just a twisted interpretation of reality.
When we began to acquire the ability to improve life, the value of humanity went up, and even proposed a mechanism (that with age comes more value). You didn't say anything about it, nor did you support you "cattle is cheaper" assertion.
If it's cheaper to let people die, then it follows that med tech is a waste of money, which (almost) anyone can see is not true.
Consider a simple example, Vitamin C. Cheaper to not know it's necessary for life? Things we consider expensive treatments now, become cheap in the future; hence this thread.
I cant imagine where you get that idea. We easily assign minimum values (in any store of value you want) to life constantly. People are what make things valuable. Using "money" to talk about value seems to be the hang up, but you haven't said why.
>> Using "money" to talk about value seems to be the hang up, but you haven't said why.
I'm specifically discussing the use of money as a measure of the value of life- not of anything else.
Why is it wrong? Because we use money to set the exchange rate of commodities, but life is not a commodity. For example, all modern societies have laws against slavery, which is precisely treating human lives as goods to be exchanged for money.
Further, money can be hoarded and there are great inequalities in income. If people are worth as much money as they have, the worth of human life will be as unequal as peoples' bank accounts. However, again, all modern societies have laws that recognise any human life is as valuable as any other, at least for the puprose of protecting and taking those lives - e.g. I don't really know that any modern societies have any laws that prohibit the murder of high-income individuals but not of low-income ones.
Finally, you can always make more money, as, to a certain extent, you can always make more of a valuable commodity. Human beings are unique entities- a person is born once, lives once and dies once. In that sense, one person is a distinctly different quantity than one kilo of oranges, one litre of milk, or one karat of gold. It is really not obvious how we can extend the use of a measure of the trade value of goods to the "worth" of human beings.
And by the way, we haven't even begun to define what this "worth" is that money is a measure of (or rather, a proxy). The worth of one kilo of oranges is that they can be eaten. The worth of a person is...?
I def did not mean to suggest human value is tied to a persons fortune. Before this much more insightful comment you argued that the value of a human was zero (worthless), now you argue the opposite, that human life is priceless. If that's an accurate summary of your position, we agree.
Reality doesn't really work like this, or in any case that's just a twisted interpretation of reality.