If you have $100K, and you can save lives for $5K each with bednets or $10K each with vaccines, you should spend all $100K on bednets.
That doesn’t mean the people who die because they lack vaccines “are unimportant or unworthy of funding.” It’s just the consequence of being in triage.
It does tend to be more effective to work on larger-scale problems; the fact that it’s cheaper to prevent a case of malaria than [rare disease] is related to the fact that malaria is a larger-scale problem.
What if you could either add an average 5 years to 1000 people, or spend the same resources to make 1 person have a life expectancy of 10,000 years?
What bothers me is that obviously 10k>5k, but the vibes of the decision. Especially as the “1” chosen individual is likely already powerful and well connected etc.
If you have $100K, and you can save lives for $5K each with bednets or $10K each with vaccines, you should spend all $100K on bednets.
That doesn’t mean the people who die because they lack vaccines “are unimportant or unworthy of funding.” It’s just the consequence of being in triage.
It does tend to be more effective to work on larger-scale problems; the fact that it’s cheaper to prevent a case of malaria than [rare disease] is related to the fact that malaria is a larger-scale problem.
What if you could either add an average 5 years to 1000 people, or spend the same resources to make 1 person have a life expectancy of 10,000 years?
What bothers me is that obviously 10k>5k, but the vibes of the decision. Especially as the “1” chosen individual is likely already powerful and well connected etc.