no cost-effectiveness estimates comparing near-term causes
On reflection, I should state ‘there’s only one model’ rather than ‘there are none’ but mention one in the footnote. I guess I meant, which is still true, “there are no models I known how to use”...
ix Ways DPR Could Do Good, yet your quantitative model only seems to take into account the first of these, improved treatment for mental health.
I think the mental health effect is the biggest, it’s also the easiest to think about because I know what the numbers are—it would take me a long time to assess the happiness impact of DPR caused by reducing crime (how much happiness does a crime remove? how many are there around the world? how many of those are attributable to drugs? etc...). I don’t plan to do any further modelling as I need to get back to my thesis and the detail of DPR now looks like it will be outside it. FWIW, I think the mental health impact of DPR is about 80% of it’s value, but when I asked Lee the same question (before telling him my view) I think he said it was about 30% (we were potentially using different moral philosophies).
Does this assume that every single person suffering from depression or anxiety in the UK will adopt the new treatment?
Yeah, I’m not clear on this. It’s probably unreasonable to assume everyone would get/use the new treatment, although that’s what I initially thought. I take the 0.1 as the (mean) average change across all those could be treated.
You assume a 0.1 change
I just guessed the number based on (a) the happiness impact of removing depression via other methods and (b) my qualitative sense from reading the studies of how much more effective psychedelics seems to be than alternatives. If there’s a cardinal scale I can use that shows how much better psychedelics are that would be great, but I didn’t dig through because doing something like what Lovisa and Konstantin did didn’t occur to me.
with regard to the £166m figure. It would be useful to get an order of magnitude estimate of the cost of past campaigns
I agree it would be good to do this. I looked into this a bit but couldn’t find anything useful on the cost-effectiveness of lobbying (I skimmed your paper too; it doesn’t really bear on the question at hand). It’s also a long way from my area of expertise and thought I was better to share what I had rather that wait until I’d found time to dig into this (which may not happen for months). If anyone read this and wanted to have a go, I’d be very grateful.
FWIW, two more things, 1) I think £166m figure is conservative and the real figure is closer to £10.5bn.
2) This is compared to AMF. As I note above and have argued elsewhere, you would have you to hold a particular, implausible philosophical view to believe AMF is as cost-effective as I stated; I was being generous to my imagined critics. A more realistic comparison is probably Basic Needs, which I say above is about 3x less cost-effective than AMF on AMF’s unbelievable numbers, So really we should multiply the ammount we would spend on a DPR campaign by three to get something like £560m (conservative) or £35bn (optimistic).
Hello Thomas,
On reflection, I should state ‘there’s only one model’ rather than ‘there are none’ but mention one in the footnote. I guess I meant, which is still true, “there are no models I known how to use”...
I think the mental health effect is the biggest, it’s also the easiest to think about because I know what the numbers are—it would take me a long time to assess the happiness impact of DPR caused by reducing crime (how much happiness does a crime remove? how many are there around the world? how many of those are attributable to drugs? etc...). I don’t plan to do any further modelling as I need to get back to my thesis and the detail of DPR now looks like it will be outside it. FWIW, I think the mental health impact of DPR is about 80% of it’s value, but when I asked Lee the same question (before telling him my view) I think he said it was about 30% (we were potentially using different moral philosophies).
Yeah, I’m not clear on this. It’s probably unreasonable to assume everyone would get/use the new treatment, although that’s what I initially thought. I take the 0.1 as the (mean) average change across all those could be treated.
I just guessed the number based on (a) the happiness impact of removing depression via other methods and (b) my qualitative sense from reading the studies of how much more effective psychedelics seems to be than alternatives. If there’s a cardinal scale I can use that shows how much better psychedelics are that would be great, but I didn’t dig through because doing something like what Lovisa and Konstantin did didn’t occur to me.
I agree it would be good to do this. I looked into this a bit but couldn’t find anything useful on the cost-effectiveness of lobbying (I skimmed your paper too; it doesn’t really bear on the question at hand). It’s also a long way from my area of expertise and thought I was better to share what I had rather that wait until I’d found time to dig into this (which may not happen for months). If anyone read this and wanted to have a go, I’d be very grateful.
FWIW, two more things, 1) I think £166m figure is conservative and the real figure is closer to £10.5bn.
2) This is compared to AMF. As I note above and have argued elsewhere, you would have you to hold a particular, implausible philosophical view to believe AMF is as cost-effective as I stated; I was being generous to my imagined critics. A more realistic comparison is probably Basic Needs, which I say above is about 3x less cost-effective than AMF on AMF’s unbelievable numbers, So really we should multiply the ammount we would spend on a DPR campaign by three to get something like £560m (conservative) or £35bn (optimistic).