I wrote about this in Impact above Replacement, and suggested that a better way of thinking about counterfactual impact is via what I called the replacement view, “where your impact is the value you produced using some amount of resources, minus the value the ‘replacement-level person’ of that reference group would’ve produced using those resources”.
This is an effective altruist variant of what sabermetricians call Wins Above Replacement, a stat that aims to measure how many more wins a baseball player contributes to a team than the replacement-level player. The replacement-level player is the substitute who would’ve been called up to join the team had the player being measured not participated.
Still, there are issues with that way of looking at things too, e.g., it’s somewhat unclear which reference group to use, also I’m not sure it’s conceptually sound (though it seems better than naive alternatives).
I wrote about this in Impact above Replacement, and suggested that a better way of thinking about counterfactual impact is via what I called the replacement view, “where your impact is the value you produced using some amount of resources, minus the value the ‘replacement-level person’ of that reference group would’ve produced using those resources”.
Still, there are issues with that way of looking at things too, e.g., it’s somewhat unclear which reference group to use, also I’m not sure it’s conceptually sound (though it seems better than naive alternatives).