The Capital Market View of Changing Longevity
I think this piece from Global Pensions is representative of the way the behemoths of the insurance and other capital markets are viewing the prospects for increasing longevity: "Could longevity experience a spike if there was a dramatic breakthrough in medical science, if someone found a cure for cancer for example? ... That would not change mortality statistics suddenly. It would take a long time to filter through. If some of the drugs being tested at the moment come on stream between now and 2020 then you would not see a significant impact until the middle of the century. Our model factors in the impact of significant medical advances and the key point for investors is that longevity is nevertheless a trend exposure rather than a spike, or event risk as is the case with mortality - and yet mortality bonds have nevertheless found a fairly broad marketplace." This sort of thinking - in any market - is why disruptive innovations are disruptive. The behemoths are right in that onerous regulatory burdens greatly slow advances in medicine, but success in Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) or SENS-like work will be the disruption here. I'd say that betting vast sums against greatly increasing longevity in in the midst of a biotechnology revolution isn't such a good idea.
Link: http://globalpensions.com/showPage.html?page=gp_display_feature&tempPageId=686565