I&#x27;ll try by best not to sound like a raging sociopath here.<p>In pure economic terms, curing cancer has little benefit to society. Cancer is not any one specific disease. It&#x27;s a class of diseases, of which there are thousands (or more) of variants.<p>We may stumble on some amazingly technologically advanced cure to some forms of cancer but the more rare the form, the less likely there will ever be a treatment.<p>Most people get upset when you talk about humans as assets because we&#x27;re indoctrinated at a very young age to value human life above all else.<p>If you can, in fact, speak about humans in economic terms of supply&#x2F;demand. We have an overabundance of people, and nothing useful to give them jobs to do.<p>It&#x27;s like the current oil market. Oil was highly valued due to the inelasticity of supply. Now that there is a glut of over supply and inelasticity greatly reduced, the value has dropped dramatically.<p>The supply of humans capable of doing useful work used to be somewhat constrained. Now, we have more people than can be reasonably assigned to do useful work without essentially paying them to warm a chair. Yet, like the oil market nothing is stopping people from having more kids and increasing the supply. The government even directly subsidizes people for the number of children they have due the persistent belief that GDP is directly dependent on population.<p>People can increase their value proposition by earning many degrees and racking up huge amounts of debt but, unless you&#x27;re going to work in the industries that are thriving, it&#x27;s a buyers market for employers.<p>Business owners have their choice pick of the herd. They can keep wages as low as possible and skim more cream off the top because there&#x27;s a line out the door of people waiting the replace a worker who quits.<p>Who knows, maybe this is just the supply limit (ie in environmental science terms) as it applies to the human population. Poverty and misery is the expected result of making too many people before we can come up with enough useful reasons to sustain them.