This is great! You should consider doing a whole series of posts like this, especially focusing on common misconceptions—the time cost thing was something I fuzzily knew about, but hadn’t ever explicitly considered as the single major cost of a policy, such that money cost can be basically ignored.
I’m surprised that a policy only fails the cost-benefit test if the FTE cost five times more expensive than the benefit, and anything less ineffective than that is simply not a priority. What’s the reasoning behind that?
The official framing is that a DALY is valued at 2 to 4 times GDP per capita, so given uncertainty, it’s probably good if you’re buying a DALY for less than GDP per capita and probably bad if you’re paying 5x.
My framing is that the disutility of working a job, holding income constant, is probably between 0.2 and 1 DALY.
This is great! You should consider doing a whole series of posts like this, especially focusing on common misconceptions—the time cost thing was something I fuzzily knew about, but hadn’t ever explicitly considered as the single major cost of a policy, such that money cost can be basically ignored.
I’m surprised that a policy only fails the cost-benefit test if the FTE cost five times more expensive than the benefit, and anything less ineffective than that is simply not a priority. What’s the reasoning behind that?
The official framing is that a DALY is valued at 2 to 4 times GDP per capita, so given uncertainty, it’s probably good if you’re buying a DALY for less than GDP per capita and probably bad if you’re paying 5x.
My framing is that the disutility of working a job, holding income constant, is probably between 0.2 and 1 DALY.