Thank you for writing this up—always good to see criticism of key ideas.
I want to contest point 4.
The fact that we can decompose “Good done / extra person or $” into three factors that can be roughly interpreted as Scale, Tractability and Neglectedness is not a problem, but a desirable property.
In ultimate instance, we want to evaluate marginal cost effectiveness ie “Good done / extra person or $”. However this is difficult, so we want to split it up in simpler terms.
The mathematical equation that decomposes the cost serves as a guarantee that by estimating all three factors we will not be leaving anything important behind.
Agreed. However, one of the subcritiques in that point is the divide-by-zero issue that makes issues that have received zero investment “theoretically unsolvable.” This is because a % increase in resources from a starting point of 0 will always yield zero. The critic seems to feel it’s a result of dividing up the issue in this way.
Thank you for writing this up—always good to see criticism of key ideas.
I want to contest point 4.
The fact that we can decompose “Good done / extra person or $” into three factors that can be roughly interpreted as Scale, Tractability and Neglectedness is not a problem, but a desirable property.
In ultimate instance, we want to evaluate marginal cost effectiveness ie “Good done / extra person or $”. However this is difficult, so we want to split it up in simpler terms.
The mathematical equation that decomposes the cost serves as a guarantee that by estimating all three factors we will not be leaving anything important behind.
Agreed. However, one of the subcritiques in that point is the divide-by-zero issue that makes issues that have received zero investment “theoretically unsolvable.” This is because a % increase in resources from a starting point of 0 will always yield zero. The critic seems to feel it’s a result of dividing up the issue in this way.
I leave it to the forum to judge!