In practice all of these figures seriously underestimate the full impact because they don’t consider flow-through effects such as:
the people whose lives are saved will have more children themselves, perhaps resulting in hundreds of extra lives over the very long term (I know of people who have 100+ great grandchildren)
people for centuries or millennia into the future will be richer because the country developed economically sooner as a result of having healthier, better educated, and more productive people now (this is a version of ‘astronomical waste’).
If the direct impact is lower, the flow-through effects will also be lower, but ‘$3,000 per life saved’ is still very misleading as an indication of the absolute cost-effectiveness.
In practice all of these figures seriously underestimate the full impact because they don’t consider flow-through effects such as:
the people whose lives are saved will have more children themselves, perhaps resulting in hundreds of extra lives over the very long term (I know of people who have 100+ great grandchildren)
people for centuries or millennia into the future will be richer because the country developed economically sooner as a result of having healthier, better educated, and more productive people now (this is a version of ‘astronomical waste’).
If the direct impact is lower, the flow-through effects will also be lower, but ‘$3,000 per life saved’ is still very misleading as an indication of the absolute cost-effectiveness.