When every life is precious: we value individual human lives more every day. That's (mostly) good news.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top - Editorial

The modern world is a mess of seeming contradictions. Children have never been safer, yet parents have never been more anxiously overprotective. We have more leeway than ever before to lead free, quirky, customized private lives, yet governments have unprecedented power to inspect and disrupt our most intimate activities. Fewer jets crashed in 2014 than since the advent of commercial air travel, yet CNN switches to wall-to-wall coverage every time a Boeing goes missing.

This collection of seemingly opposed notions actually shares a single throughline, one you can see running all over this special issue on aging. Human beings, as a species, are treating each individual as incredibly precious--much more so than we have in the past. This is a remarkable and transformative development, though it presents challenges and not a small amount of cognitive dissonance, particularly for the more libertarian among us.

Before the advent of modern medicine, birth control, and (in much of the developing world) economic prosperity, men and women produced batches of kids, knowing that some may die but enough would survive to take care of their parents and propagate the family line. Now more than half the world's people, including the 320 million of us in the United States, live in countries where the fertility rate--the average number of births per woman--is below the replacement level of 2.1. Mexican women averaged 7.3 births in i960; today that number is 2.2. India in the 1970s was widely projected to suffer from mass starvation due to overpopulation; now it is on the verge of sinking below the replacement rate.

We know what happens in economic terms when goods become scarce. Prices and valuations go up, and owners invest more in upkeep and maintenance. The same is now happening with people, with mostly good but sometimes challenging side effects.

Take war. Every day I walk past a memorial in my local park commemorating 187 men from my neighborhood alone who died in World War I. That's only 71 fewer U.S. military deaths than in the entire 1991 Gulf War.

While the staunchest anti-interventionists among us may feel a sense of constant fatigue and dismay, the fact is that there is less war and less war-death than ever. In the year of reason's birth, 1968, more U.S. military personnel died in Vietnam--16,592--than have died in every subsequent American military adventure combined. It is inconceivable that we would tolerate the idea of 36,000 Americans dying in...

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