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Why do you think it’s stupid? Sometimes people get tortured horribly, or die of horrible slow causes. Surely you need some minimum on the positive side to outweigh that?
People can also have a negative quality of life and still keep going and reproducing for various other reasons.
I believe it’s in the spreadsheet for comparing charities from last giving season. And there have been DALY/$ tradeoff calculations by the organizations that do DALY analysis.
Yeah, I meant “in the way” rather than “like”. Thanks.
I think there’s an error in your math. You’re using log base 10 consistently in your article and the linked spreadsheet, but then you say the derivative of the function log(c)+k is 1/c. If you’re using log base 10 throughout, the derivate is 1/(ln(10)*c). If you use log base e throughout, then each value you got for log_10(x) should be multiplied by ln(10) to get the value of ln(x). In either case, we end up with dollar amounts a bit over 2.3 times higher than your calculated values for the value of a marginal life in a pure aggregate utilitarian framework.
Also, nit: the Carl Shulman link is broken. You left off the http:// in the original link on your blog, so it was interpreted as a relative link, which was then copied over here.
I certainly agree with the general point that one must consider the experiential value of the life saved. However, I’m skeptical of presuming a log-relationship for consumption and happiness, both for the reason you identified (definition problems at low-incomes), and issues around self-reporting as a measure of happiness, the Easterlin Paradox, and tentative data supporting that much of the happiness from consumption may about feeling richer than other people.
Doesn’t this all depend on assuming we are trying maximize average happiness? That seems like a very questionable assumption to me. Rawls argued against it explicitly, for example. He phrased his arguments in terms of “fairness” and there are nice links here to the relationship between happiness and comparison to others. The mathematical implication is we need some more sophisticated function which maps the distribution to a scalar. And then of course there are the non-consumption variables. If you’re a well fed woman who is married to the man who raped you (see e.g. the issues surrounding article 308 of the Jordan criminal code) I don’t think total consumption is what matters to you...