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by ByteJockey 1645 days ago
I think if the op was talking about non-monetary costs.

But if we're limiting this to monetary costs only, I believe you're right. I saw a similar study from the UK circa ~2008ish that compared long term smoker/obese/healthy medical costs, and healthy people are indeed the most expensive (mostly because of tremendous end of life care costs).

Edit: I dug around a bit and found the study I was thinking of. It was actually a study on obesity (also not done by the UK), but used (non-obese) smokers as a group for comparison.

Link to article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/

See Table 1 for lifetime medical costs.
1 comments
DangitBobby 1645 days ago
Surely most living people are worth more than the economic cost of keeping them alive. They don't seem to even mention the economic value of a living person, other than to say that they didn't take into account the difference in productivity between obese and non-obese people.
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ByteJockey 1645 days ago
Given that most smokers/obese people tend to die right around retirement age, we probably aren't leaving much on the table (from a purely economic perspective). Smokers probably aren't missing enough days of work to cancel out the $60k they save the system by smoking (not to mention all the extra taxes they pay).

But there's more value to human beings than their economic value, hence my talk about non-monetary costs. There's very real suffering that happens, and I'm not sure that's something you can put down in a spreadsheet somewhere.

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throwawaygh 1645 days ago
Lots of tremendously valuable labor is done by people who don't pull down a wage. I.e., retired people who volunteer and watch the grand kids. Many people -- perhaps most -- contribute more value to society in retirement than in their wage labor years.
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ByteJockey 1645 days ago
> Lots of tremendously valuable labor is done by people who don't pull down a wage.

Sure. I can believe that.

Is the unspoken claim here that it averages out to more than ~$60k/person?

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throwawaygh 1644 days ago
I mostly just disagree with the framing of the question. But, yes, I reckon the average retired person contributes as much/more to the GDP of the country than the typical wage-earning person.
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ByteJockey 1643 days ago
> I mostly just disagree with the framing of the question.

Are you talking about non-monetary value here? I covered that in my first post in this thread.

The rest of the read was about monetary value only. Otherwise, which framing would you prefer?

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