It’s a shame and a sign of significant bias in EA that this got so many disagree votes. What are people disagreeing with? Presumably that taxes kill people but the author makes a very simple argument that nearly everyone in EA approximately agrees with. He then goes on to point out cases where the sign could be reversed or approximately 0.
I didn’t vote, but it is an article about the “mortality cost of taxation” which imputes significant mortality whilst completely disregarding the expected mortality reduction of the tax money being spent back into the economy, and the likelihood that the redistribution is net positive. It appears the author acknowledged that bit after getting the negative response. (I also think the estimation methodology is flawed, which is very well explained by Soemano Zeijlmans’ comment)[1]
Sure, it’s not in dispute that taxation, like giving to overseas charity, can result in economic deadweight loss, and ceteris paribus economic deadweight loss can lead to lower life expectancy. A really interesting paper might even have explored this (most likely coming to the conclusion that the benefits of redistribution to people on very low incomes and funding health and education vastly exceeded deadweight loss in modern welfare states, but it would be wise to ensure that very little of the tax burden fell on the poor and to minimise government waste). But if you write an article which is the equivalent of “the mortality cost of overseas aid” which skips the bit where actually overseas aid is pretty good at reducing mortality it’s probably going to get some pushback, especially here.
I don’t think it’s “significant bias” talking, because I suspect an article about the “mortality cost of markets” which focused on the role of markets in depriving people of stuff and disregarded their role in getting stuff produced altogether would accumulate disagree votes here too.
I had hoped that it would be obvious that I was referring to the gross cost, not the net, especially after my post on Life-year Variability. Taxation does not automatically generate good things. Often it is wasted. It is an odd bias, or a failure of decoupling, to assume that ‘taxation’ always and automatically means ‘tax and spend it effectively on good things’.
If a developed government spends a billion dollars on something, we should train ourselves to think ‘You just killed about 100 people to do that. Was it worth it?’ Public health and foreign aid usually is. Other things, not so much.
It is not about the deadweight loss, that is an entirely separate issue. Even taxation that caused zero deadweight loss would kill people.
Tax isn’t “wasted” by making money vanish from the economy though (except for the deadweight loss) it’s just redistributed to other people via payouts, jobs, loans or indirectly via goods purchases. Statistically, some of these beneficiaries will enjoy longer lives through the same indirect income-mortality relationship you invoke to associate taxes with death. This is true even of public spending which is—relative to others—extremely wasteful and not evaluated as lifesaving even by its proponents.[1]
Which is why I’d argue it makes far more sense to focus cost-benefit analysis on deadweight losses and [counterfactual alternative] uses of public funds. Because regardless of whether the tax is focused on creating “good things” or not, the net result of the transfer probably isn’t killing people..
In a developed country with a progressive tax system, the demographics paying most of the tax are unlikely to typically need the income to survive more than state employees or other [indirect] recipients the resulting public expenditure benefits, even for ridiculous ideas like paying millions of dancers to create synchronised tributes to the president. So ignoring extremely indirect and difficult to quantify transfer effects (or explicitly treating them as netting out to zero) in favour of focusing on direct effects and deadweight loss in cost-benefit analysis probably if anything is biased against tax and spend. Empirically, tax burden is positively correlated with longevity, even amongst US states.
paying superfluous bureaucrats may be an inefficient way of saving lives, but in exactly the same way as taxing people is a very inefficient way of killing, especially where the tax is progressive above affordability thresholds and targeted benefits/rebates exist
It’s a shame and a sign of significant bias in EA that this got so many disagree votes. What are people disagreeing with? Presumably that taxes kill people but the author makes a very simple argument that nearly everyone in EA approximately agrees with. He then goes on to point out cases where the sign could be reversed or approximately 0.
This is lazy voting.
I didn’t vote, but it is an article about the “mortality cost of taxation” which imputes significant mortality whilst completely disregarding the expected mortality reduction of the tax money being spent back into the economy, and the likelihood that the redistribution is net positive. It appears the author acknowledged that bit after getting the negative response. (I also think the estimation methodology is flawed, which is very well explained by Soemano Zeijlmans’ comment)[1]
Sure, it’s not in dispute that taxation, like giving to overseas charity, can result in economic deadweight loss, and ceteris paribus economic deadweight loss can lead to lower life expectancy. A really interesting paper might even have explored this (most likely coming to the conclusion that the benefits of redistribution to people on very low incomes and funding health and education vastly exceeded deadweight loss in modern welfare states, but it would be wise to ensure that very little of the tax burden fell on the poor and to minimise government waste). But if you write an article which is the equivalent of “the mortality cost of overseas aid” which skips the bit where actually overseas aid is pretty good at reducing mortality it’s probably going to get some pushback, especially here.
I don’t think it’s “significant bias” talking, because I suspect an article about the “mortality cost of markets” which focused on the role of markets in depriving people of stuff and disregarded their role in getting stuff produced altogether would accumulate disagree votes here too.
though tbf I’ve seen other flawed methodologies estimate significantly higher mortality cost
I had hoped that it would be obvious that I was referring to the gross cost, not the net, especially after my post on Life-year Variability. Taxation does not automatically generate good things. Often it is wasted. It is an odd bias, or a failure of decoupling, to assume that ‘taxation’ always and automatically means ‘tax and spend it effectively on good things’.
If a developed government spends a billion dollars on something, we should train ourselves to think ‘You just killed about 100 people to do that. Was it worth it?’ Public health and foreign aid usually is. Other things, not so much.
It is not about the deadweight loss, that is an entirely separate issue. Even taxation that caused zero deadweight loss would kill people.
Tax isn’t “wasted” by making money vanish from the economy though (except for the deadweight loss) it’s just redistributed to other people via payouts, jobs, loans or indirectly via goods purchases. Statistically, some of these beneficiaries will enjoy longer lives through the same indirect income-mortality relationship you invoke to associate taxes with death. This is true even of public spending which is—relative to others—extremely wasteful and not evaluated as lifesaving even by its proponents.[1]
Which is why I’d argue it makes far more sense to focus cost-benefit analysis on deadweight losses and [counterfactual alternative] uses of public funds. Because regardless of whether the tax is focused on creating “good things” or not, the net result of the transfer probably isn’t killing people..
In a developed country with a progressive tax system, the demographics paying most of the tax are unlikely to typically need the income to survive more than state employees or other [indirect] recipients the resulting public expenditure benefits, even for ridiculous ideas like paying millions of dancers to create synchronised tributes to the president. So ignoring extremely indirect and difficult to quantify transfer effects (or explicitly treating them as netting out to zero) in favour of focusing on direct effects and deadweight loss in cost-benefit analysis probably if anything is biased against tax and spend. Empirically, tax burden is positively correlated with longevity, even amongst US states.
paying superfluous bureaucrats may be an inefficient way of saving lives, but in exactly the same way as taxing people is a very inefficient way of killing, especially where the tax is progressive above affordability thresholds and targeted benefits/rebates exist