Quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and determine whether there’s misallocation of resources in biomedical research.
I suspect there’s a big gap between the distribution of resources allocated to the study of different diseases and what people actually suffer from the most. Among other factors that lead to non-optimal allocation, I’d guess that life-threatening diseases are overstudied whereas conditions that may really harm people’s well-being, but are not deadly, are understudied. For example, I’d guess that chronic pain is understudied compared to how much suffering it inflicts on society. It would be valuable to quantify the overall human suffering from different conditions, and spot misallocations in biomedical research (and other societal efforts to treat these conditions). For example, a random cohort of individuals could be asked to take a survey asking what conditions they would want the most to get rid of, and how many life years they would be willing to sacrifice for it (either asking what is the maximum number of years they would be willing to sacrifice for an operation that would be guaranteed to reduce that number of years from their life expectancy and solve the condition they suffer from, or asking what’s the maximum probability of dying in that operation that they would be willing to take). Given the survey’s results, it should be possible to quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and then detect mismatches between these estimates and estimates of the resources (money and talent) allocated into addressing these problems. It could also be interesting to try to address other potential reasons for mismatches between the social importance of conditions (in terms of overall well-being/suffering) and allocated resources, primarily the issue of tractability. For example, maybe condition A is causing more suffering than condition B, but it’s easier to make progress on B, so we should prioritize it more. This could be figured out by interviewing experts and asking them to estimate how many resources it would take to make a given amount of progress (such as cutting the prevalence of the disease in half). I imagine that a similar style of studies could be carried out in other settings where we’d want to find out whether society’s allocation of resources really reflects what people care about the most.
Quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and determine whether there’s misallocation of resources in biomedical research.
I suspect there’s a big gap between the distribution of resources allocated to the study of different diseases and what people actually suffer from the most. Among other factors that lead to non-optimal allocation, I’d guess that life-threatening diseases are overstudied whereas conditions that may really harm people’s well-being, but are not deadly, are understudied. For example, I’d guess that chronic pain is understudied compared to how much suffering it inflicts on society. It would be valuable to quantify the overall human suffering from different conditions, and spot misallocations in biomedical research (and other societal efforts to treat these conditions). For example, a random cohort of individuals could be asked to take a survey asking what conditions they would want the most to get rid of, and how many life years they would be willing to sacrifice for it (either asking what is the maximum number of years they would be willing to sacrifice for an operation that would be guaranteed to reduce that number of years from their life expectancy and solve the condition they suffer from, or asking what’s the maximum probability of dying in that operation that they would be willing to take). Given the survey’s results, it should be possible to quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and then detect mismatches between these estimates and estimates of the resources (money and talent) allocated into addressing these problems. It could also be interesting to try to address other potential reasons for mismatches between the social importance of conditions (in terms of overall well-being/suffering) and allocated resources, primarily the issue of tractability. For example, maybe condition A is causing more suffering than condition B, but it’s easier to make progress on B, so we should prioritize it more. This could be figured out by interviewing experts and asking them to estimate how many resources it would take to make a given amount of progress (such as cutting the prevalence of the disease in half). I imagine that a similar style of studies could be carried out in other settings where we’d want to find out whether society’s allocation of resources really reflects what people care about the most.
Related: Cochrane’s series of papers on waste in science and Global Priorities Project’s investigation into the cost-effectiveness of medical research