My first question was âWhy the assumption that all deaths are as cheap to prevent as the marginal one?â which I see AGB has already raised there. Iâll be interested to see an answer.
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffmanâs central claim is not that people arenât suffering preventable diseases. It is only that âdrowning childrenâ (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So theyâre questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasnât all that low hanging fruit of saving âdrowning childrenâ been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly canât be âthereâs simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning childrenâ because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, thereâs a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the âthereâs just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and thatâs why the price remains lowâ is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And thatâs why it makes sense to assume that theyâre all at the marginal price. The claim is that if you were truly purchasing all the low hanging lives saved, and your budget was that high, the marginal price should have gone up by now because you should have already bought up all the cheap life saving methods.
(Iâm just exploring the thought process behind this particular subsection of the analysis, which is not to be taken as being agreement with the overall argument, in whole or in part.)
My first question was âWhy the assumption that all deaths are as cheap to prevent as the marginal one?â which I see AGB has already raised there. Iâll be interested to see an answer.
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffmanâs central claim is not that people arenât suffering preventable diseases. It is only that âdrowning childrenâ (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So theyâre questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasnât all that low hanging fruit of saving âdrowning childrenâ been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly canât be âthereâs simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning childrenâ because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, thereâs a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the âthereâs just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and thatâs why the price remains lowâ is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And thatâs why it makes sense to assume that theyâre all at the marginal price. The claim is that if you were truly purchasing all the low hanging lives saved, and your budget was that high, the marginal price should have gone up by now because you should have already bought up all the cheap life saving methods.
(Iâm just exploring the thought process behind this particular subsection of the analysis, which is not to be taken as being agreement with the overall argument, in whole or in part.)