Depends on your time scale. Solving malaria “early” might make a few decades’ difference in when we start seeing an explosion of developed, first-world African nations (as is theorized that introducing outhouses precipitated the productivity boom in the southern US, due to a generation born without parasite exposure.) And those African nations would be more sources of scientific talent to solve problems like aging.

On the other hand, aging is unique in that solving it (or even just pushing it back a bit) gives multiplicative effects to productivity against any problem that requires decades of expertise, because it lets researchers have more productive decades and/or spend more years learning to be productive and yet still spend just as many years being productive. Malaria, at this point, isn’t quite the type of problem this would help—but there certainly are many problems where more grabbing out more productive researcher man-years from the aether would be extremely helpful.

It’s rather interesting to think in these terms: trying to figure out which advance will have “unblocked the tech tree” the most 50 years down the line. I rarely see this kind of analysis being done, though, which I find disappointing; surely there are people far better equipped than I to do it.

I alway like to consider unlocking the tech tree the most. That’s why we want a lot of people working on a lot of problems. We can’t predict which discoveries will make the most difference.

Consider all the problems you need to solve to “cure death”.

The US GDP is $17 trillion. If people starting spending billions on a more youthful old age, we’d get more research. More venture capital would go to aging research.