Following up on some of the comments here, I thought the submitted article was implausible because I have lived in a country that has gone from a poor, subsiste

Following up on some of the comments here, I thought the submitted article was implausible because I have lived in a country that has gone from a poor, subsistence-peasant economy to a post-industrial wealthy economy in the lifetime of my in-laws who still live there. Nobody wants to go back to a peasant's life. It's just dumb to suggest that that would be a good trade-off. On the issue of health risk, people have really got to learn from statistics that were shared here on HN earlier. Life expectancy has been increasing at ALL ages all over the developed world, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w... and correspondingly the risk of being seriously sick at any age has been steadily declining here in the United States and all over Europe and other developed places. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel, http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2... originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. We have no good reason to go back to peasant days, and no reason to take an article that is basically just made up as a basis for evaluating our current trade-offs of modern living.