Four For Friday | September 29, 2023
LF83 | The Economist on life extension, Prevention-as-a-service, CostCo's new primary care offer & rewriting society's code
Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
The Economist dives into life extension
A Technology Quarterly on the topic. Various interesting articles, including the longevity benefits of lower calories and a suggestion that it’s poor record keeping, rather than a diet or lifestyle, that may account for some of the centenarian hotspots.
Prevention-as-a-service
A major challenge for healthy aging is the lack of a business model that supports it; most healthcare dollars flow once someone has a diagnosis, massively limiting incentives to stay healthy. This is a proposal for paying people for living healthily and preventing disease, validated by ubiquitous digital diagnostic biomarkers. The author (logically) has a startup that proposes to do exactly this.
Costco launches a primary care service
Costco has partnered with healthtech company Sesame to offer virtual primary care visits for just $29. And getting labs done and having a followup consultation only costs $79. Hopefully this can start to address the challenge of un- and under-insured forgoing primary health visits.
Radicle Civics - DNA for a new economic order
Dark Matter Labs are trying to re-code society. Our economic infrastructure is based on assumptions and mindsets around a selfish, utility maximizing homo economicus, yet this resulting in the destruction of our planet and society. This ‘radicle civics’ model starts with three major shifts:
From objects to agents. Rejecting the idea that things such as natural assets can be owned and exploited, this proposes giving everything ‘self ownership’, and the working out how to provide access to its resources.
From externalities to entanglements. The environmental and social costs of doing business should be integrated and absorbed into our model, not ignored and left for future generations to fix.
From private/ public to commoning. Rejecting the simplistic public vs private model of ownership and control in favor of common ownership, creating shared value and incentives.
As we seem to be walking inexorably into societal and climate breakdown, it’s good to see people looking to rewrite the ‘deep code’ that has us on this path; let’s hope it gets a broad audience.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen
Great stuff!
Have to say when I first read this I thought you meant the Economist itself was on life extension! Have the print edition and am looking forward to reading that special.