That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffman’s central claim is not that people aren’t suffering preventable diseases. It is only that “drowning children” (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So they’re questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasn’t all that low hanging fruit of saving “drowning children” been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly can’t be “there’s simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning children” because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, there’s a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the “there’s just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and that’s why the price remains low” is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And that’s why it makes sense to assume that they’re 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.
(I’m 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.)
That was my first question too, but I think figured out the answer? Maybe? (Let me know if I got this right BenHoffman?)
BenHoffman’s central claim is not that people aren’t suffering preventable diseases. It is only that “drowning children” (a metaphor for people who can be saved with a few thousand dollars) are rare.
So they’re questioning why, if the current price of saving a life is so low, and the amount of available funding so high, why hasn’t all that low hanging fruit of saving “drowning children” been funded already? And if it has been, the marginal price should be higher by now?
And the answer supposedly can’t be “there’s simply too many low hanging fruits, too many drowning children” because, if you assume that all low hanging fruits are Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases disease related, there’s a maximum of ten million fruits (low hanging or not) and the most generous thing for the “there’s just too many low hanging fruits for us to pick them all and that’s why the price remains low” is to assume all possible fruits are low hanging. And that’s why it makes sense to assume that they’re 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.
(I’m 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.)