The premise of your hypothesis is that resources are zero-sum, when globalization, modern capitalism, and scientific progress have made this moment the greatest for poor people in all of human history.  At the same time, the rich have gotten richer.<p>To answer your specific question, whether rich people living longer is good for poor people -- it would be, because those longer-living rich people aren&#x27;t just consuming more, they are creating more.  In other words, if we aren&#x27;t losing as many people from cancer, our productivity goes up, and wealth abounds in all areas of human endeavor.  If an engineer in Kansas didn&#x27;t die of cancer, maybe he&#x27;ll go on to invent a new method of soy cultivation that brings prices down and saves lives in Africa.<p>I think that to deny that health, life, thriving are good things, one must believe that humans are liabilities instead of assets.  But they aren&#x27;t.  Humans aren&#x27;t sandbags on human achievement, they are a necessary input.