I notice I am confused. My mental model of the average person would definitely choose a 99% chance of life over a 100% chance of life with infertility.
First, the claim is that infertility is 98.9% as healthy as full health; this part isn’t much based on tradeoffs. Which is frustrating, since tradeoffs are more useful for the kind of questions we care about.
But even then, I’m not sure most infertile people would take a 1% chance of death to restore their fertility. Another way of putting it: if the maternal death rate in the US jumped from 28⁄100,000 to 1,000⁄100,000 (a level only Sierra Leone hits) how many people would decide not to have kids?
This is for the reason I outlined in another comment. This revised ranking uses people’s judgments of which state is more ‘healthy’, rather than how good they are. People don’t think that being infertile makes people much less ‘healthy’ even though they think it is bad. The same goes for reductions in intelligence such as via lead poisoning.
True, that is confusing. One potential explanation is that they’re probably talking about infertility for one year, rather than permanent infertility.
Whether or not this is the true reason why infertility has such a low disability ranking, this uncovers an interesting point—the basic DALY model assumes that the burden of having a disability in year 1 is independent of whether you also have that disability in year 2, which is clearly not true for infertility. One person having lifelong infertility is much more than 50 people having infertility for one year—the latter may actually benefit them!
I notice I am confused. My mental model of the average person would definitely choose a 99% chance of life over a 100% chance of life with infertility.
First, the claim is that infertility is 98.9% as healthy as full health; this part isn’t much based on tradeoffs. Which is frustrating, since tradeoffs are more useful for the kind of questions we care about.
But even then, I’m not sure most infertile people would take a 1% chance of death to restore their fertility. Another way of putting it: if the maternal death rate in the US jumped from 28⁄100,000 to 1,000⁄100,000 (a level only Sierra Leone hits) how many people would decide not to have kids?
This is for the reason I outlined in another comment. This revised ranking uses people’s judgments of which state is more ‘healthy’, rather than how good they are. People don’t think that being infertile makes people much less ‘healthy’ even though they think it is bad. The same goes for reductions in intelligence such as via lead poisoning.
True, that is confusing. One potential explanation is that they’re probably talking about infertility for one year, rather than permanent infertility.
Whether or not this is the true reason why infertility has such a low disability ranking, this uncovers an interesting point—the basic DALY model assumes that the burden of having a disability in year 1 is independent of whether you also have that disability in year 2, which is clearly not true for infertility. One person having lifelong infertility is much more than 50 people having infertility for one year—the latter may actually benefit them!