I object to calling funding two public defenders “strictly dominating” being one yourself; while public defender isn’t an especially high-variance role with respect to performance compared to e.g. federal public policy, it doesn’t seem that crazy that a really talented and dedicated public defender could be more impactful than the 2 or 3 marginal PDs they’d fund while earning to give.
Yes, in general it’s good to remember that people are far from 1:1 substitutes for each other for a given job title. I think the “1 into 2” reasoning is a decent intuition pump for how wide the option space becomes when you think laterally though and that lateral thinking of course shouldn’t stop at earning to give.
A minor, not fully-endorsed object level point: I think people who do ~one-on-one service work like (most) doctors and lawyers are much less likely to 10x the median than e.g. software engineers. With rare exceptions, their work just isn’t that scalable and in many cases output is a linear return to effort. I think this might be especially true in public defense where you sort of wear prosecutors down over a volume of cases.
I object to calling funding two public defenders “strictly dominating” being one yourself; while public defender isn’t an especially high-variance role with respect to performance compared to e.g. federal public policy, it doesn’t seem that crazy that a really talented and dedicated public defender could be more impactful than the 2 or 3 marginal PDs they’d fund while earning to give.
Yes, in general it’s good to remember that people are far from 1:1 substitutes for each other for a given job title. I think the “1 into 2” reasoning is a decent intuition pump for how wide the option space becomes when you think laterally though and that lateral thinking of course shouldn’t stop at earning to give.
A minor, not fully-endorsed object level point: I think people who do ~one-on-one service work like (most) doctors and lawyers are much less likely to 10x the median than e.g. software engineers. With rare exceptions, their work just isn’t that scalable and in many cases output is a linear return to effort. I think this might be especially true in public defense where you sort of wear prosecutors down over a volume of cases.