No country has found a sustainable way to finance dementia care

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to quantify the most important of the costs of dementia: the losses to people living with the condition. In a forthcoming book, “The Great Demographic Reversal”, Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, two economists, suggest that surveys could be used to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of plans to spend more on dementia. A sample of adults could be asked how much annual income they would be prepared to pay to reduce the risk of developing dementia, as it mounts with age.

The results would be at best subjective and indicative, but better than nothing, which is all that is available now. Other costs—to those caring for people living with dementia and to the economy—are, in theory, more measurable. But the estimate cited earlier for the global cost of dementia, an annual $2trn by 2030 (up from $604bn in 2010 and $1trn in 2018), is little more than a guess. It relies on extrapolation from countries with good data to others with hardly any at all. And, as Marco Blom of the Alzheimer’s Society in the Netherlands points out, straight-line projections are likely to be exaggerated: 60-65% of the costs, he says, go to labour. There will be too few workers for their number to increase in tandem with rising dementia.

In ADI’s World Alzheimer Report in 2015, Martin Prince of King’s College London and others divided...