Lifespan Extending Investment Paradigm

People have two very essential assets -- their health and their life.  We will call the value one personally places on ones life its intrinsic value, LV_intrinsic.  This is the sum of multiple components, its Health Value (HV), its Fun Value (FV), its Satisfaction Value (SV), etc. HV is perhaps the most heavily weighted component in LV_intrinsic.  An existence of a non-zero suicide rate indicates that at times physical or emotional pain can cause people to feel the value of LV_intrinsic is negative, i.e. "a life not worth living", and drive them to end their life.  Poor health also tends to drive down FV and SV.  Death involves the immediate loss of your intrinsic value.  In cases where LV_intrinsic is negative, the loss is viewed by oneself to be positive.

Your life also has some extrinsic value (the value placed on it by family, friends, coworkers, employer, etc.).  We will call this LV_extrinsic. LV_extrinsic is typically high for family members, then much lower for less closely related people.   Of course for a person in poor health that places an extreme burden on friends or family, i.e. LV_intrinsic and LV_extrinsic are both negative,  ending ones life is likely to be viewed as positive.  Thus we see movements in some countries to allow euthanasia.  In rare circumstances, for despots, dictators, etc., LV_extrinsic may be viewed as negative by large numbers of people and so their death would be viewed as a highly positive event.  Thus one sees activities to remove or eliminate people like Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.

Your life has some yield -- based on work-for-hire (Y_WFH) and/or the yield on investments (Y_INV) based on your net wealth (NW).  While living, one expects a future income, FI = (NPV(Y_WFH) + NPV(Y_INV))^a.  Death involves the loss of all FI your life might yield.
 

Death involves a transfer of ones net wealth (NW) to others, including: the government (NW_taxed), family members (effectively, NW - NW_taxed) or in some cases other organizations viewed to be of intrinsic value (e.g. charities). The sum of the value transferred to others (government, family members and other organizations) will be called the net benefit of ones death (NB).  NB has two subcomponents, NB_self and NB_others, where NB_self = -LV_intrinsic + EB, where EB is the emotional benefit one derives from providing ones NW to family, charities, etc.  For most individuals we would argue that NB_self is generally negative (excepting cases where life is burdensome as previously pointed out where NB ~= -LV_intrinsic where LV_intrinsic is < 0) and EB is only a partial compensation for the loss of ones life.  NB_others may be low if one (personally) has the ability to generate a higher Y_WFH or Y_INV than would be generated by ones family members (or other organizations) and one shifts some fraction of that yield to the family members or organizations while one is still alive (this is the case when one is supporting family members with a relatively high Y_WFH or one has sufficient knowledge and experience to generate a relatively high Y_INV from which your family can benefit while you are alive).^b

Because FI can affect personal quality of life, as well as NW at time of death, it effects both LV_intrinsic and LV_extrinsic.

So the Cost of Dying (COD) can be viewed as:

COD = -LV_intrinsic - LV_extrinsic - FI + NB

How does create an investment strategy that would minimize COD?  I.e. how does one create an investment strategy that would maximize the chances that you die at a point where the sum intrinsic and extrinsic life values and future income is minimal and/or NB is maximal?.

Presumably at a young age, you lack the foresight and resources to invest much in accelerating technologies.  You can assume that research funded by governments and foundations will determine the ultimate course of your life.  So one should invest early in life and seek high yields to maximize NW later in life.

Very late in life, informed individuals who can see the technology vectors clearly enough to know that there is relatively little that you can do to alter the course of fate.  The only alternative we are currently aware of is cryonics and most people think that is a long shot.  So you might seek to maximize NB, particularly to family and "worthy" organizations for the purpose of maximizing EB. But, someplace between these points you may have the knowledge and resources to affect the course of technological development.  Sometime you will face the "final bets" call of the croupier spinning the game called life.

My preliminary analysis seems to suggest that there is a large advantage to investing in safe, high-yield investments early in life, but as the odds of losing all FI increase, the strategy should be to invest in riskier investments that would seek to accelerate healthspan and lifespan extending technologies.  Then at some point, after one became clear that the technologies would not provide a yield that would assist you in avoiding the LV losses and maximizing FI, one would switch to a strategy that maximized NB.  Alternatively, if one opts for the cyronics option, one would seek to channel funds into technologies that increase P_reanimation, the probability that a croyonic suspension and recovery process is successful^c.

The problem at this time is that most investors do not believe they can have any influence on the rate of technology development that would have an impact on these variables in their lives (i.e. the path will be determined by the government(s) or worse is determined by "fate") and so they do not make investment allocations based on these insights.  One problem may be an insufficient risks-to-benefits tradeoff.  How many million Americans would not give a $1 to extend their life by 1 year?  How many would give $10, $1000, $100,000?  We do not seem to have a way of measuring the yield of our investments in lifespan extending technologies.  We should develop these and educate investors to accelerate the availability of these technologies.

Footnotes

1. NPV = net present value function.
2. Older individuals, for example, might have avoided the dot-com bubble of 2000-2001 because they remembered the 1929 bubble.
3. Informed individuals might also investigate alternatives such as cryonics.  These are long shots, but certainly less risky than burial or cremation.  In fact if
P_reanimation * (LV_{postreanimation} + FI_{postreanimation}) > NB - C_suspension where C_suspension, is the cost of suspension, then cryonic suspension is a very logical alternative.  In this case the higher ones NW, and smaller fraction that C_suspension represents, the more sense it makes to seriously consider cryonics, particularly if one places a fraction of NW in investments that yield Y_INV while one is suspended.