To bring up population ethics again, how does taking a long-term view affect the desirability/cost-effectiveness of population-changing interventions? Because there’s little negative feedback between population size and population growth in today’s world (it’s not Malthusian), small changes in population will last a long time and result in a lot of extra lives. For example, if there’s slight negative feedback and population changes decay by about 10% a generation, an extra person today leads eventually to ~10 extra people.
I find this a bit counterintuitive (but probably not wrong), since it means that considering a long time horizon dramatically increases the benefit of saving lives, compared to poverty reduction or treatment of non-fatal diseases. In the extreme case of a total utilitarian who values saving and creating lives symmetrically, they would value saving a life in the tens of millions of dollars instead of a few million dollars (again assuming a ~10% “decay rate”).
To bring up population ethics again, how does taking a long-term view affect the desirability/cost-effectiveness of population-changing interventions? Because there’s little negative feedback between population size and population growth in today’s world (it’s not Malthusian), small changes in population will last a long time and result in a lot of extra lives. For example, if there’s slight negative feedback and population changes decay by about 10% a generation, an extra person today leads eventually to ~10 extra people.
I find this a bit counterintuitive (but probably not wrong), since it means that considering a long time horizon dramatically increases the benefit of saving lives, compared to poverty reduction or treatment of non-fatal diseases. In the extreme case of a total utilitarian who values saving and creating lives symmetrically, they would value saving a life in the tens of millions of dollars instead of a few million dollars (again assuming a ~10% “decay rate”).