This is a linkpost for https://linch.substack.com/p/the-rising-premium-for-life
The Rising Premium of Life, Or: How We Learned to Start Worrying and Fear Everything
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In some sense, this should be surprising: Surely people have always wanted to avoid dying? But it turns out the evidence that this preference has increased over time is quite robust.
Maybe for almost everything there's "some" sense in which it should be surprising. But an increase in 'not wanting to die', and in particular in the willingness to pay for not wanting to die in modern society, should, I think rather be the baseline expectation. If anything, an absence of it would require explanation: (i) basic needs are met, let's spend the rest on reducing risk to die; (ii) life has gotten comfy, let's remain alive -> these two factors that you also mention in the link would seem to be pretty natural explanations/expectations (and I could easily imagine a large quantitative effect, and recently also the internet contributing to it; now that LW or so is the coolest thing to spend my time with and it's free, why trade off my live for expensive holidays or sth.. maybe TV already used to have a similar type of effect generations ago though I personally cannot so readily empathize with that one).
(Fwiw, this is the same reason why I think we're wrong when complaining about the fact that an increasing percentage of GDP is being spent on (old age) health care (idk whether that phenomenon of complaint is prevalent in other countries, in mine it is a constant topic): Keeping our body alive unfortunately is the one thing we don't quite master yet in the universe, so until we do, spending more and more on it is just a really salient proof that we've gotten truly richer in which case this starts to make sense. Of course nothing in this says we're doing it right and having the right balance in all this.)
Yeah maybe I didn't frame the question well. I think there are a lot of good arguments for why it should be superlinear but a) the degree of superlinearity might be surprising and b) even if people at some level intellectually know this is true, it's largely not accounted for in our discourse (which is why for any specific thing that can be explained by an increasing premium-of-life people often go to thing-specific explanations, like greedy pharma companies or regulatory bloat or AMA for healthcare, or elite preference cascades for covid, or overzealous tiger parents for not letting their kids play in forests, etc).
I agree re: healthcare costs, Hall and Jones presents a formal model for why substantially increased healthcare spending might be rational; I briefly cover the model in the substack post.
1Somewhat related: Topic reminds me of a study I've once read about where Buddhist Monks, somewhat surprisingly, supposedly had high fear of death (although I didn't follow more deeply; when googling the study pops up immediately).
Small hypothesis that I'm not very confident of at all but is worth mentioning because I've seen it surfaced by others:
"We live in the safest era in human history, yet we're more terrified of death than ever before."
What if these things are related? Everyone talks about kids being kept in smaller and smaller ranges despite child safety never higher, but what if keeping kids in a smaller range is what causes their greater safety?
Like I said, I don't fully believe this. One counterargument is that survivorship bias shouldn't apply here - even if people in the past died much more often from preventable safety-related things like accidents or kidnappings, their friends and family would remain to report their demise to the world. In other words, if free-roaming was really as risky as we think it is, there should be tons of stories of it from the past, and I don't tend to see as many.
(although maybe comment threads I read on the matter select for happy stories on free-roaming as a kid in the 80s and select against sad ones, I dunno)
I do think there's something real to it. I agree that having less laissez faire childrearing practices probably directly resulted in a lower childhood accidental death rate. The main thesis of the most is that people care a lot more about living longer than they used to, and take much stronger efforts to avoid death than they used to. So things that look like irrational risk-aversion compared to historical practices are actually a rational side-effect of having greater premium of life and making (intuitively/on average/at scale) rational cost-benefits analyses that gave different answers than the past.
Another interesting subtlety the post discusses is that while the intro sets up "We live in the safest era in human history, yet we're more terrified of death than ever before," there's a plausible case for causality in the other direction. That is, it's possible that because we live in a safe era, we err more on the side of avoiding death.
(btw this post refreshed on me like 5 times while making this comment so it took a lot more effort to type out than i'm accustomed to, unclear if it's a client-side issue or a problem with LW).
I think the large part of this phenomenon is social status. I.e., if you die early, it means that you did something really embarassingly stupid. Conversely, if you caused someone to die by, say, faulty construction or insufficient medical intervention, you should be really embarassed. If you can't prove/reliably signal that you behaving reasonably, you are incentivized to behave unreasonaboy safe to signal your commitment to not do stupid things. It's also probably linked to trade-off between social status and desire for reproduction. It also explains why people who are worried about endless list of harms are not that worried about human extinction: if everybody is dead, there is nobody to be embarassed around.
Extreme sports plateauing is likely weak indicator. Even as risks decrease, you still need to enjoy it and most of people are not adrenaline junkies.