The people who think finance is harmful won’t be persuaded by adding up tobacco deaths and doing this kind of math. They believe that donating to charity is not nearly as good as the numbers suggest, or they believe that finance is worse than being a tobacco CEO, or they believe that charity doesn’t morally offset direct harm, or they believe that the entire paradigm of calculating how many people die or live and adding those numbers up is totally misguided from a methodological standpoint. Moreover, this wouldn’t even counter the steelmanned argument which is that even if earning to give is not harmful, it’s still not nearly as good as direct work, and that is what the most authoritative critics (e.g. Deaton, Acemoglu) have been saying. Seriously, how many people are there who would seriously think “Wall Street financiers are exploiting the poor more than their charity will help—but, wait, if you add up tobacco deaths and subtract it from AMF lives saved, you get a positive number, so working in finance must be okay after all” and then make a decision accordingly?
If it gets people interested in relevant content, then I suppose that’s fine, as long as everyone keeps in mind how fine the line is between pretending to be clickbait and being clickbait.
The people who think finance is harmful won’t be persuaded by adding up tobacco deaths and doing this kind of math. They believe that donating to charity is not nearly as good as the numbers suggest, or they believe that finance is worse than being a tobacco CEO, or they believe that charity doesn’t morally offset direct harm, or they believe that the entire paradigm of calculating how many people die or live and adding those numbers up is totally misguided from a methodological standpoint. Moreover, this wouldn’t even counter the steelmanned argument which is that even if earning to give is not harmful, it’s still not nearly as good as direct work, and that is what the most authoritative critics (e.g. Deaton, Acemoglu) have been saying. Seriously, how many people are there who would seriously think “Wall Street financiers are exploiting the poor more than their charity will help—but, wait, if you add up tobacco deaths and subtract it from AMF lives saved, you get a positive number, so working in finance must be okay after all” and then make a decision accordingly?
If it gets people interested in relevant content, then I suppose that’s fine, as long as everyone keeps in mind how fine the line is between pretending to be clickbait and being clickbait.