101–110 of 115 posts
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I am an economist, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
I think parent is saying there's no economic incentive to save starving kids in Africa.
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That isn't how the various things called "value of a life" are calculated. The Wikipedia article linked above describes some ways to do it, and if you look at them you will see that with one exception they are not estimating, nor trying to estimate, expected future earning power or anything like it. (Though that might affect the answer.) The first approach they describe: take N people and ask each of them how much th…
If you ask a billionaire how much they’re willing to spend to save their life (or significantly improve their health) and you ask someone with a $1000 dollars in their bank account, is the answer to that question measuring the worth of a life or how much that capital is worth? Very wealthy people would be more willing to trade wealth for health/happiness whereas poorer people are less willing to make that trade off s…
(For the avoidance of doubt: my previous comment wasn't trying to claim that the "statistical value of a life", measured in such a way, is a good measure of how much a person values their life in non-monetary terms, or anything like that. I was just objecting to the specific claim I was responding to, namely that the "statistical value of a life" is measuring only its value as a future income stream.)
Very very crudely, the value of a small gain in money is something like inversely proportional to the amount you have already, which means that the value of a given amount of wealth increases something like logarithmically with the amount of money, and either of these means that financial institutions like markets care about people's interests roughly proportionally to their wealth. Everything in this paragraph is pure handwaving, but I find it a useful intuition.
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Only a few law journals do traditional peer review. Most law review articles are reviewed by law review editors, who are law students in their second and third years, not law professors. In any case, you rightly point out that the author marked this private and preliminary. It's not a crazy idea. Nobody outside academe looks at SSRN ... until they do.
It's a little odd to put a paper on SSRN that is "do not circulate". I'm guessing it was left on there by accident.
https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/ssrn-faq/
"SSRN is instrumental [...] as a place to communicate their findings at an early stage, prior to publication in academic journals."
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> People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem. This sounds a lot like saying its not worth it to help one person.
More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term. If everyone just takes…
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More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term. If everyone just takes…
I too have seen the Facebook chain letter about how we could end world poverty for only $XX billion. But yes, let's definitely not fund malaria relief in the meantime.
I said "less value" not "no value". In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations. Even if the total is the same, the fact that it just trickled in and it lacked coordination can only hurt. I even gave an example, perhaps a better one would have been that you can't cross a canyon in 2 steps. And you won't effectively put out a big fire no matter how many cups of water you individually dump on it.
Fittingly even the example you chose is bad simply because "malaria relief" still involves quite the coordinated effort, not the least financial, not individual people independently sending small help to a single other person.
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> People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem. This sounds a lot like saying its not worth it to help one person.
More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term. If everyone just takes…
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The money doesn't actually belong to the shareholders, since a shareholder only owns the company stock not the company (stocks typically do not grant any ownership rights of any kind besides votes on management/corporate actions--many don't even do that). Companies can decide to re-allocate profits through dividends or buy-backs, but can also decide to re-allocate to other things that may not ultimately benefit the s…
As far as I know, everything you said is factually incorrect in the majority of cases. Common stock is a security that represents ownership in a corporation. In a liquidation, common stockholders receive whatever assets remain after creditors, bondholders, and preferred stockholders are paid. Do you have a source for these bold claims?
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I can’t speak to judgements, but executives often hold a lot of shares. The largest individual shareholder of Disney is the CEO, for example.
If the executives continually hold shares from the time of the 'wrongdoing' to the time of the judgement, and are included in the settlement or decision, the impact on them would be to transfer money from one pocket to another, minus some loss to the lawyers on both sides.
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I too have seen the Facebook chain letter about how we could end world poverty for only $XX billion. But yes, let's definitely not fund malaria relief in the meantime.
Besides the unwarranted and unhelpful snark, you also took the weaker interpretation of my comment so you can defend your point of view. Neither are good signs for your argument. I said "less value" not "no value". In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations. Even if the total is th…
The original topic was that various charities are saving lives in measurable ways, yet most people make excuses not to contribute, preferring to spend their money on additional luxuries for themselves.
Thank you for providing excellent examples of those excuses.
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> People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem. This sounds a lot like saying its not worth it to help one person.
More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term. If everyone just takes…
exactly! my suffering as an individual is simply not significant enough to motivate you.
> If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term.
I'd be especially pissed if he refused to pull my tooth on the grounds that other people would still suffer from toothaches.
> If everyone just takes turns pushing a boulder up a mountain eventually you'll put in more effort than if everyone pushes at once, and have almost none of the results. Sometimes being even 99% there is not enough.
If few people are willing to pay the cost of an incremental solution then how are we proposing to convince them that the much greater cost of a large scale solution is worth it?