It seems like there is a general trend for public health interventions to look insanely cost-effective wrt. to daly’s per dollar. I’d be curious to see a more detailed meta-review of this type of intervention, as they all are likely to share the same pitfalls if there are any.
Government policies I think are harmful tend have some easily measurable upside, at the cost of a much larger but difficult to measure downside. (ie. by making it more costly for firms to fire, employers respond by being much more cautious and discriminatory in their hiring practices)
These public health interventions seem to follow the pattern of an easily quantifiable upside and a difficult to measure downside, which leads me to worry if we are getting mugged by what is measurable.
In the context of public health taxation policies, the main hard-to-quantify downside would be freedom of choice. As you know, I’m sympathetic to the concern, and we worked together before on quantifying freedom lost from tobacco taxation while in the CE incubation programme (and I think it’s linked to somewhere in CEARCH’s evaluative framework, as an example of how one might do it).
Having explicitly run the numbers in the context of tobacco/​alcohol taxation + tightening road traffic standards in Singapore , my sense is that (a) for the range of realistic moral weights, very high taxes are still justified (i.e. the health benefits > the freedom of choice considerations), but outweigh bans are not (i.e. once you move from very high taxes to outright bans, the marginal health benefits decline below the value of freedom of choice).
Will definitely look to do this (i.e. incorporate freedom of choice considerations) at intermediate stages, and if we reach the deep stage I can definitely see the value of funding actual moral weights research on the matter (i.e. surveys to see how much people value being able to drink sweet drinks etc).
It seems like there is a general trend for public health interventions to look insanely cost-effective wrt. to daly’s per dollar. I’d be curious to see a more detailed meta-review of this type of intervention, as they all are likely to share the same pitfalls if there are any.
Government policies I think are harmful tend have some easily measurable upside, at the cost of a much larger but difficult to measure downside. (ie. by making it more costly for firms to fire, employers respond by being much more cautious and discriminatory in their hiring practices)
These public health interventions seem to follow the pattern of an easily quantifiable upside and a difficult to measure downside, which leads me to worry if we are getting mugged by what is measurable.
Cheers, Mathias.
In the context of public health taxation policies, the main hard-to-quantify downside would be freedom of choice. As you know, I’m sympathetic to the concern, and we worked together before on quantifying freedom lost from tobacco taxation while in the CE incubation programme (and I think it’s linked to somewhere in CEARCH’s evaluative framework, as an example of how one might do it).
Having explicitly run the numbers in the context of tobacco/​alcohol taxation + tightening road traffic standards in Singapore , my sense is that (a) for the range of realistic moral weights, very high taxes are still justified (i.e. the health benefits > the freedom of choice considerations), but outweigh bans are not (i.e. once you move from very high taxes to outright bans, the marginal health benefits decline below the value of freedom of choice).
Will definitely look to do this (i.e. incorporate freedom of choice considerations) at intermediate stages, and if we reach the deep stage I can definitely see the value of funding actual moral weights research on the matter (i.e. surveys to see how much people value being able to drink sweet drinks etc).