Two reports in two days: one counts the people, one counts the market

Yesterday the Milken Institute published The Future of Aging and Longevity: A Decade of Progress, A Decade to Act, a collection of essays and interviews from more than fifty contributors — foundations, universities, AARP, Meals on Wheels, the MIT AgeLab, the Stanford Center on Longevity, and several large financial-services firms — organized around four verbs: invest, build, shift, connect, and covering brain health, caregiving, work and retirement, housing, technology, social connection and lifelong learning. This morning a market-research vendor issued a press release sizing the "longevity biotech market" at $23.2 billion this year and $34.8 billion by 2030, with segments that include biological-age testing, longevity consultation and preventive health programs sold directly to consumers. Two documents about aging, two days apart. They are about different things, and the difference is this site's business principle.

The people and the market. The Milken collection is institutional: how a society with more old people in it builds housing, care, work and connection for them. Its contributors include people who sell things, and it names no funders, which we would prefer it did. But its subject is the infrastructure of a long life, and infrastructure is what makes a long healthy life available to people regardless of income — the equity half of our argument. The vendor report is a sales tool: a 250-page forecast, methodology undisclosed, whose job is to tell investors that a market exists and will grow 10.7% a year. Its segments are a catalog of what we write about here — tests, consultations, programs. One report asks what the decade should build. The other estimates what it will sell.

Ben’s take

Our rule is to monetize institutions and democratize the message for individuals, and these two reports are the rule's two halves held up to the light. The institutional work — care, housing, connection, medical education — is where money should go, and the Milken contributors are mostly arguing for that. The $23 billion is the other thing: the consumer longevity market, a forecast whose growth depends on more people buying tests and programs. I would rather see capital in the first document. I expect to see it chasing the second.

Loree’s take

Every topic in the Milken collection — caregiving, housing, work, connection — is something my patients bring me that no test addresses, and every segment in the market report is something they bring me that a test created. The institutional problems are the ones that determine how an old age actually goes. The consumer market is the one with the marketing budget. Read the first. Be skeptical of the second.

Why it matters to a recovering optimizer. The answer to the longevity trap is not to reject the idea of a longevity economy; it is to notice which economy. One builds the conditions for everyone to live well — the equity argument, the institutional job. The other sells individuals the feeling of control over their own aging, a segment at a time. This week both published their plans. Only one of them needs you to buy anything.