You have a point that safety isn’t a negative externality in the way pollution is. I will concede that. Never really thought of it like that.
To clarify, I am not arguing that safety standards should be more or less strict. I just think they should be overwhelmingly determined by companies and workers instead of imposed by governments.
Don’t you think unions have an important role to play in this? Because as a worker, especially in a poor country, there’s a lot of asymmetry. It’s difficult and often impossible to assess the risk of a workplace before you’ve started. You lack the expertise to understand the breadth of all the safety issues, and don’t have the information readily available to accurately compare safety across different firms.
And if governments can step in, productively with union & employer stakeholders, set sensible rules on safety (minimum safety standards, workplace assessment ratings), that makes it much easier for workers to assess safety of different firms, make better judgements, bargain for higher pay at more dangerous firms, allocate their labour more economical efficiently. Helps employers compete too.
Maybe you are arguing against the rules being too inflexible? Maybe you are just against first world unions don’t always have the interests of third world workers in mind but maybe third world unions are ok?
“The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards.”
I think the causality goes the other way around. A higher income per capita means people are willing to pay more to protect their health, and therefore push for stricter safety standards.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the Kerala case study. Kerala actually has a lower per capita income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
I think it’s a good case study to challenge this line of argument. I’d say that example is a clear case where the causality is opposite to how you described. A lot of the social democratic countries show that trend. The Nordic countries famously were amongst the poorest parts of Europe when they adopted the Nordic model pushed by militant labour movements in those countries.
You’re absolutely right in my opinion Abraham. EV is a mathematical convenience and simplification that might work most of the time, but certainly not all.
I feel words like “expected value” are confusing & miselading (nothing expected about it—it’s a misnomer and accident of history/ translation from french that it’s called that), and this community would do well to avoid unnecessary jargon. I need to write up a post about this.
If we substituted the word “expected value” with mean or average, which is literally what it is (and I meet so many people in this community who get this wrong), it would be just as accurate but much more easier to understand, even to technical people. And many people understand that mean is not always the most appropriate statistic to use espescially with skewed distributions, e.g. reporting on incomes is often done with median, and that’s perfectly fine.
Expected value should also not be confused with expected utility (or as I prefer the mean utility). You use the terms interchangeably in your post as do many people in this community, it’s fine in causal conversation but it is worth being specific when necessary in discussions like this. I suspect because the word “value” in expected value implies some humanistic desireable ideal, but that’s what the word utility is for.
You also say use the term “in expectation” to mean the most likeliest outcome (i.e. the mode outcome) or more than 50%. I’m not familiar with that langauge—maybe it is accurate, but to me it is confusing when you can simply say the mode or the likeliest outcome.
So ultimately I suspect your dilemmas boil down to the recognition that there are circumstances where mean, mode, median, (and in fact even more statistics) can be maximised and we get different optimal decisions depending on the statistic we use.
At the end of the day we want to: maximise utility. But if utility has a probability distribution, it’s hard to maxmise without using some statistic (mean, mode, median etc) that maps a probability distribution to a real number. Using mean (EV) is not completely arbitrary I believe (it has some nice preperties), but it’s not fully settled. I personally think it has problems.