“Given this, my guess for the value of a marginal hour for a tech worker is something between a quarter and a half of their average salary. Again, this is enough of a difference that we could be significantly misled by valuing their time at their average hourly wage, as the examples above do.”
read like a bit of a strawman to me, because I’d read a couple of the examples and hadn’t noticed it. When I tried to go to the linked examples to discover whether they did in fact use average, rather than marginal, wage, the first link is broken and the fourth seems to link to the third (the third, as far as I can tell, doesn’t discuss voting).
With respect to kidney donation, all I see is talk about ‘lost wages’ in a somewhat opaque way that could mean marginal or average, but the implication is marginal (e.g. it talks about paid leave greatly lessening this cost) and so I think the charitable interpretation would be to assume marginal.
Finally, with respect to vegetarianism, I don’t see any explicit discussion of time/wage cost at all? In fact Katja’s explicit calculation all seems to be in dollars, as you (correctly, in my view) recommend.
I do of course agree that we should be thinking on the margin, and apologise if I’ve missed something.
Thanks for pointing out the broken links! They should be fixed now.
The relevant sentence from the first example:
There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen.
I read both of these as discussing average salaries, although you’re right no one says so explicitly. If everyone is already thinking on the margin and occasionally writing in unclear ways, then great.
Not to nitpick, but this:
“Given this, my guess for the value of a marginal hour for a tech worker is something between a quarter and a half of their average salary. Again, this is enough of a difference that we could be significantly misled by valuing their time at their average hourly wage, as the examples above do.”
read like a bit of a strawman to me, because I’d read a couple of the examples and hadn’t noticed it. When I tried to go to the linked examples to discover whether they did in fact use average, rather than marginal, wage, the first link is broken and the fourth seems to link to the third (the third, as far as I can tell, doesn’t discuss voting).
With respect to kidney donation, all I see is talk about ‘lost wages’ in a somewhat opaque way that could mean marginal or average, but the implication is marginal (e.g. it talks about paid leave greatly lessening this cost) and so I think the charitable interpretation would be to assume marginal.
Finally, with respect to vegetarianism, I don’t see any explicit discussion of time/wage cost at all? In fact Katja’s explicit calculation all seems to be in dollars, as you (correctly, in my view) recommend.
I do of course agree that we should be thinking on the margin, and apologise if I’ve missed something.
Thanks for pointing out the broken links! They should be fixed now.
The relevant sentence from the first example:
There’s some discussion between me and some others on the kidney donation post that I think is also pretty clear. http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ay/kidney_donation_is_a_reasonable_choice_for/1ex
I read both of these as discussing average salaries, although you’re right no one says so explicitly. If everyone is already thinking on the margin and occasionally writing in unclear ways, then great.
I see, I didn’t look at the comments section. I agree that there people are talking about average wage.