I had a much shorter facebook status on this a while back:
“Donating a live kidney extends an average of three developed-country lives by, I will guess, an average of 30 healthy years. It will require you to take two weeks off work and accept a 1/1000 chance of death in the operation. The long-term health impacts are negligible.
For my own case, if I were earning to give, I would earn something like $2,000 from an additional week of work. I could expect to earn something like $8m from the rest of my career, 1/1000th of which is $8,000. So I’m giving up something like $12,000 in expected earnings for 90 years of healthy adult life. Assuming that the Against Malaria Foundation can save infants in the developing world for $2,500, I would have to regard a year of healthy life in the developed world as roughly 2.5x more valuable for the kidney donation to be better than just continuing to work and giving the money to AMF.
If I would dislike the two-week kidney donation process more than doing my job and not spending any of the income on myself, then that number will rise somewhat.
I think it’s plausible to regard a year in Britain as 3x more enjoyable than a life of poverty in e.g. rural India, though I am far from sure.”
I had a much shorter facebook status on this a while back:
“Donating a live kidney extends an average of three developed-country lives by, I will guess, an average of 30 healthy years. It will require you to take two weeks off work and accept a 1/1000 chance of death in the operation. The long-term health impacts are negligible.
For my own case, if I were earning to give, I would earn something like $2,000 from an additional week of work. I could expect to earn something like $8m from the rest of my career, 1/1000th of which is $8,000. So I’m giving up something like $12,000 in expected earnings for 90 years of healthy adult life. Assuming that the Against Malaria Foundation can save infants in the developing world for $2,500, I would have to regard a year of healthy life in the developed world as roughly 2.5x more valuable for the kidney donation to be better than just continuing to work and giving the money to AMF.
If I would dislike the two-week kidney donation process more than doing my job and not spending any of the income on myself, then that number will rise somewhat.
I think it’s plausible to regard a year in Britain as 3x more enjoyable than a life of poverty in e.g. rural India, though I am far from sure.”
https://www.facebook.com/robert.wiblin/posts/600595706275
The resulting comments were interesting too.