I think the edits you made to the summary work very well in making it clear what the quantitative analysis does and doesn’t cover! Thank you for taking on board my comments so promptly.
Fully agree with your points on the difficulty of quantifying the indirect benefits, and also how/where those benefits should be attributed.
I think the challenge is that excluding indirect benefits from a quantitative analysis effectively assigns them a zero value. That is ok when indirect benefits are most likely only a small fraction of the direct benefits. But it becomes problematic when the indirect benefits could plausibly be several times (or orders of magnitude) larger than the direct ones and relevant to decision-making.
If judgements about the size of the indirect benefits might be important, think it is valuable to make the exclusions clear—as you’ve now done!
Thanks again for the time you put into the piece, and the clear write-up / reasoning transparency!
I think the edits you made to the summary work very well in making it clear what the quantitative analysis does and doesn’t cover! Thank you for taking on board my comments so promptly.
Fully agree with your points on the difficulty of quantifying the indirect benefits, and also how/where those benefits should be attributed.
I think the challenge is that excluding indirect benefits from a quantitative analysis effectively assigns them a zero value. That is ok when indirect benefits are most likely only a small fraction of the direct benefits. But it becomes problematic when the indirect benefits could plausibly be several times (or orders of magnitude) larger than the direct ones and relevant to decision-making.
If judgements about the size of the indirect benefits might be important, think it is valuable to make the exclusions clear—as you’ve now done!
Thanks again for the time you put into the piece, and the clear write-up / reasoning transparency!