Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

Author:Aaron Bastani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Philosophy, Communism, Automation, Non-Fiction, Utopias, Socialism, Inequality
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2018-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ageing in Britain: Austerity beyond Austerity

In 2017, Britain’s Conservative Party lost their parliamentary majority. Seven weeks earlier when Theresa May called a snap general election, anything short of a landslide victory had seemed impossible. While there was much to commend in how Labour fought back from the brink, it is hard to ignore just how poorly the Tories fared – their nadir being one of the great unforced errors in modern politics: the ‘Dementia Tax’.

While the proposal proved to be the election’s turning point, it was as much a response to long-term necessity as political naivety. Its logic was simple: people who need social care should pay for it themselves until the value of their assets, including their home, reaches a floor of £100,000. While a family would never be forced to sell a property during a patient’s lifetime – with the cost being recouped only after death – for many this was tantamount to introducing a new inheritance tax. That led to widespread anger, particularly among their voter base, because while seemingly progressive, the policy created a lottery in how medical services were paid for. If you had cancer the cost of treatment was socialised through the NHS, whereas if you had dementia you were on your own. The Tories included the policy in their manifesto, framing it as painful but necessary, because they incorrectly believed their lead to be unassailable.

And yet there was more to the Dementia Tax than political myopia. The emphatic changes it proposed, which so outraged long-time Tory voters and activists, at least represented a response to the crisis of ageing. Whoever governs, and whatever their ideological views, increased life expectancy and declining fertility rates – two trends which will ultimately impact every society – call into question the viability of socialised health and social care. June 2017 won’t be the last time a major political upset is caused by the politics of ageing.

Any presumption that the leading causes of death will remain static over the next century ignores just how much has changed over the last hundred years. Where infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza were once the biggest killers of all, they have retreated, with age-related illness accounting for around two-thirds of global mortality every year.

Indeed by 2016 the leading cause of death in England and Wales was no longer heart disease, but Alzheimer’s and dementia – a significant shift. Already the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, it is reasonable to expect that elderly dementia will become increasingly prevalent as life expectancy improves (already in 2013 it was forecast that the global rate of dementia would triple by 2050). Given the economic cost of the condition already – $818 billion in 2015 – it is clear that between squeezed public finances and a shrinking workforce relative to the elderly population, major change is inevitable.

Part of the reason why is that the challenges of ageing and healthcare are exponential.

Similar to how Moore’s Law has meant extraordinary progress in digital technology,

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