Is Everything Securities Fraud?

If you treat starving kids as important then you will have more starving kids. If you treat starving kids as unimportant or undesirable you will try your best to prevent them from being created in the first place.

The vast majority of necessary policies that you need to change in the relevant countries have absolutely nothing to do with individual charity. A lot of what is needed is simple infrastructure projects. People waste their time acquiring water on foot instead of getting a water truck delivery. You can drive a water truck for 600 miles and it's still more economical than walking. The problem is often that there are no roads suitable for 20 ton trucks. You'll get stuck on the dirt roads so no delivery happens at all.

People think of complicated solutions like drone delivery of medicine because the government fails to maintain or set up basic infrastructure. It all boils down to government corruption and people's desire to work around it. It's not going to work out.

If you care about cancer patients you will have more cancer patients? This is nonsense because you framed it wrong. Caring about [something] isn't necessarily about perpetuating or creating more [something], it's about solving (on of) the problem(s) behind it. And this can have solid economic value. On top of it you can have a layer of humanity where you do something purely for the the well being of another.

To the point, "caring about starving kids" means "caring about solving starvation". This has plenty of implications, not the least of which are that you developed tech that can be applied elsewhere, or that you just created a new market where the participants have a chance of actually paying because they have a chance at a disposable income. You "created" new valuable members of society capable of producing and consuming your products or services.

The reason starving kids don't pull that much attention is that "solving" starvation has a shaky business case, far from guaranteed success, and very unclear timeline. Things most businesses shy away from.

Why do you think Facebook is investing in internet in India or Africa? It's not because they care about people with no internet so by your reasoning they'll create more people with no internet. It's because they are untapped markets that need to be brought up just to the point where they become profitable. You have to spend money to make money. So far the case for solving world hunger has that threshold too high for today's "make money now" stock price driven business models.

That makes sense if the shareholders who sued were somehow specifically affected, but if the effect is a drop in stock price, all shareholders were affected equally, so it doesn't make sense for some shareholders to compensate others.

Presumably the two are related; if you are miserable and expect to remain so, you will probably be less willing to pay for more life. Clearly the two are not the same; if you have no money, your ability to pay will be greatly constrained.

You can deal with that latter problem to some extent by asking hypothetical questions: suppose your net wealth were exactly $1M, then how much would you pay for a 0.1% reduction in your chance of dying this year? But of course people don't necessarily have that much insight into what they would do in hypothetical situations. Or by asking people what they would pay for other people's lives, which is kinda what e.g. national healthcare institutions like the NHS in the UK or Medicare in the US have to do to decide what treatments they are willing to pay for. But of course that also isn't measuring happiness, nor even other people's estimates of it.

Or, of course, you could use the same techniques as you use for calculating a "statistical value of a life" to put a value on things other than merely being alive or not. Ask people about things that trade off money against some probability of disfigurement, depression, being abandoned by their spouse, etc., etc. Or look at the tradeoffs they actually make.

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If you have capital but no income then you can buy life insurance, at least until the capital runs out. Of course, if you have capital then you can also buy income.

I agree that retirement income is still income, which is why I bothered to add "even if you have no income". (Of course being retired and having no income of any sort is a highly unusual situation, because there are state pensions and the like.)

But, I repeat, it is simply not true that the only possible reason for buying life insurance is to make up for the loss of your income after you die. Here is a concrete situation to imagine:

You have some investment that provides income. It will continue to do so after you die. It's enough for you to live on, reasonably comfortably but not at all extravagantly. Your needs are few, so you don't take a job, you just live off your investment income.

The investment will not change as a result of your death. No one will be financially worse off when you die. But you have an aged parent who needs a lot of help: something like one person, full time. You do it for free -- you have plenty of time and you love them and care about them. But there is no one else who would be willing and able to do it for free.

So when you die, your parent will need a lot of help, and it will need to be paid for. They can inherit that investment and the income it brings, but that may not be enough to pay for the help they need. You are still fairly young and healthy, so you can get life insurance cheaply. That way, if you get hit by a bus or have an unexpected heart attack or something, your parent will be able to afford the care they need.

(This is a situation in which life insurance is bought for a reason other than replacing income. It is not a situation in which life insurance is bought by someone who has no income to be replaced. Those are separate possibilities, and I suspect there is no plausible scenario in which they both happen at once.)