Evil? It depends on your moral code. However, I would certainly note that allowing the economy to kill people should be considered strongly contradictory with normal LessWrongian social goals like abolish effective scarcity and make everyone immortal.
People are dying for economical reasons all the time.
In most cases, when a person dies, there was an option to save them. Killed by a disease? With enough money, best doctors and medicine could be bought to save them. If that is not realistic, with some money they could be at least cryopreserved and given some chance of living again. Killed by a murderer? With enough money, there could have been a policeman standing on that street to prevent the crime. Killed by a random falling object? With enough money, something could be there to prevent the object from falling on someone’s head. Killed by an obesity caused by unhealthy life style? I am sure that with enough money, something could be done to prevent this, too.
Thus speaking about not allowing the economy to kill people is merely an applause light. People die for economical reasons today, and they will also die tomorrow. The only choice we have is to move more money to some area, by taking the money from another area, so we can save some people from dying by cause X at the expense of more people dying by cause Y; and we can hope that by doing some we have increased the total value (total quality-adjusted life years, or whatever is your favorite metric).
In a perfect world, an answer to “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life?” would always be yes, because in the imaginary perfect world you can always get the $ 1 000 000 without taking it from somewhere else. In real life we have choices more like “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life? or should we instead let the person die and use the money to save lives of other ten people?”. (And if you wish, you can make it more complicated by assuming that the first person is a Nobel price winner in medicine and invented a cure that saved millions of lives, but these days he is too old to invent anything more; and the other group contains one great poet, but also one murderer, et cetera.)
If this comment was made with the implicit intent and understanding of money as an abstraction of the resources we have available, I don’t see why it hasn’t been upvoted through the stratosphere yet.
In a perfect world, an answer to “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life?” would always be yes, because in the imaginary perfect world you can always get the $ 1 000 000 without taking it from somewhere else.
It really, really hurts me when I see that the best options being offered by even the brightest minds and best visionaries in a given group all revolve around better redistribution of these million dollars, and not one of them asks “What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
“What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.
Then we weren’t looking for a solution to this problem statement, or we failed.
The problem statement I wish were posed is: Currently, there is an attribution of (e.g.) medical resources, where wealthier people have priority and every application of medical resources prevents the application of important resources in some other place, medical or otherwise. Can we change this situation around so that the opportunity cost of any given life-changing attribution of (e.g.) medical resources will always be lower than the returns of this attribution (e.g. productivity of the healed person)?
Naturally, this is intended to be a comprehensive “opportunity cost” calculation where “killing off all elders so that the overall medical opportunity cost of healing young persons becomes lower” is an appropriately taxed option. Still an option, perhaps a repugnant one, but at least one that is properly appraised. If there’s currently no known good way to appraise this, then perhaps that might be a good first step?
Are you serious? Why shouldn’t elders get treatment if they’ve paid taxes or insurance all their life? Who’d want to take part in a society knowing they’d be euthenased when the time comes?
DaFranker wasn’t offering mercy killing, DaFranker was offering termination when no longer economically viable (Ans possible recycyling into Soylent Green..why let protein go to waste
I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.
You take something you’d really dislike and assume that everyone else would also dislike it to close to the same extent, and that they wouldn’t be subject to different memes growing up in a culture where such activity was the norm.
Says who? Eg, apartheid was found obnoxious by the international community and shut down.
That’s evidence that one country when it does something can get a reaction. That’s very different than a situation like this where it would a) be done by many if not all countries and b) be a much more reasonable course of action.
This requires evidence. In the vast majority of non-universal attitudes, any given person’s attitude is _a_typical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
Because DaFranker has waved away the existence of objections?
I did not wave them away, I created a hypothetical scenario in which some specific set / cluster of objections were “unapplicable” or “already solved” (within the hypothetical).
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
That could well be indicative of atypicallity on your part.
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor
You need to say something, to defend your claim that there are things that coudl be done that are ratitonally desirable, but not intutively good. If there are no examples, your claim fails.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
You say there are a great many: name a few.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge.
They are not just debated, they are accepted in some quarters. However, you were saying that there were other, more radical policies. You offered killing everyone who reaches the age of 80 as an example, and then backpedaled, leaving you with no examples.
atypical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
We are not discucssing an unknown attitude, or an attitude known to be non-majoritarian The majority of peope do not agree with killing old people for being old. I agree too. Iam in the majoity, so my attude is, tautologously, typical.
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
In most cases, when a person dies, there was an option to save them. Killed by a disease? With enough money, best doctors and medicine could be bought to save them.
What do you mean with “best doctor” in this case. Do you mean more than just a doctor who know which clinical trial says which drug is best for a particular condition?
Killed by an obesity caused by unhealthy life style? I am sure that with enough money, something could be done to prevent this, too.
There no straightforward way to throw money at the problem of obesity to solve it. Gastric bypass surgery might work to reduce the weight but it has it’s own disadvantages and I wouldn’t call it buying health.
I don’t think that there are many cases where you can simply buy a life in a country with a health system like Germany for $1 000 000.
What do you mean with “best doctor” in this case. Do you mean more than just a doctor who know which clinical trial says which drug is best for a particular condition?
You’re leaving out the possibility of needing to shuffle through a number of doctors to get a competent diagnosis. It’s a fairly frequent problem in the US. I don’t know how common it is in Germany.
Gastric bypass surgery might work to reduce the weight but it has it’s own advantages
You’re leaving out the possibility of needing to shuffle through a number of doctors to get a competent diagnosis. It’s a fairly frequent problem in the US. I don’t know how common it is in Germany.
Do you have a source that describes how US millionaires go through 10 doctors to get a correct diagnosis?
I think most of the time in Germany what stopping people from going to more doctors isn’t financial but the fact that they trust a doctor.
I don’t have a source for how many non-millionaires in the US have to go through a number of doctors to get a correct diagnosis—I just know a fair number of people (some online-only) who’ve done it. They probably have average or better incomes, though it would be worth checking. It isn’t a cheap process, at least in terms of time, and I’m guessing that poor people are less likely to have the self-assurance to do it.
Your assumption is that the difference in Germany is in the degree of trust in doctors rather than better diagnosis?
I don’t have a source for how many non-millionaires in the US have to go through a number of doctors to get a correct diagnosis—I just know a fair number of people (some online-only) who’ve done it.
I would guess that thing that separtes those people that you know online from the average person isn’t only that the have more money but that the make decisions differently than the average person.
In real life we have choices more like “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life? or should we instead let the person die and use the money to save lives of other ten people?”.
No, that’s not the problem. In real life, the choice is, “Do we spend one million dollars on a welfare state (or labor laws, whatever) that can keep people alive longer and with more dignity, in the hope of eventually abolishing human-scale scarcity, or do we allocate one million dollars to an institutional investor’s mutual-fund portfolio?” You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
No serious economist actually believes that. In fact, they wouldn’t even make the claim that the economy is designed to save human lives; it would be downright silly. They would point out two things:
1) If we use wealth-accumulation as an approximation of human value, the mutual-fund portfolio could, in some sense, be said to be more valuable than the human lives, in the sense that those human lives generate little value for other humans. Of course, socialists and anarchists can argue with capitalists over whether wealth-accumulation under a neoliberal capitalist economy is a good approximation of human value or not. (I side with the socialists in saying most definitely no.)
2) Real economies rarely or never actually hit Pareto-optimal equilibria, they merely oscillate around them, and in fact sometimes even rarely oscillate near them because the assumptions behind efficient-market theories are so far from real-world conditions. (There was once a paper published, IIRC, under the title *Markets are Efficient If and Only If P=NP”.)
Given these two facts, we should most probably not consider “The Economy shouldn’t be allowed to kill people” as an applause light, but instead as an ethical charge to find the deadweight losses of human lives and remove them. We can argue about zero-sum tradeoffs when we’re actually faced with one, but when instead faced with a case where a clear positive-sum move exists, we should take it.
You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
Actually, I don’t. And it’s not even necessary for the argument. Even if we nationalized all the investment funds and hanged all the evil capitalists, someone would still die because there would not be enough money to cure them.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis. Unless we have already solved the problem of Friendly Singularity. We can, and should, look for the ways to minimize this number. It’s not going to be zero, anyway. Even if we had a world-wide government of incorruptible angels with mandatory cryonics right now.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
That means that your country wasn’t ruled well. On the other hand if you live in a country like Germany you do have access to all medicine that”s proven to work in clinical trials.
When it comes to drugs the expensive part is research, marketing and other things that aren”t about the production costs of the actual drug.
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis.
Yes, but that doesn’t refute the case-by-case ummm… case, that we’re looking at a deadweight loss of human life in this particular instance. If you don’t hold that the economy is Pareto-optimal, then there are improvements we can feasibly make without suddenly causing shortages of medicine.
Evil? It depends on your moral code. However, I would certainly note that allowing the economy to kill people should be considered strongly contradictory with normal LessWrongian social goals like abolish effective scarcity and make everyone immortal.
People are dying for economical reasons all the time.
In most cases, when a person dies, there was an option to save them. Killed by a disease? With enough money, best doctors and medicine could be bought to save them. If that is not realistic, with some money they could be at least cryopreserved and given some chance of living again. Killed by a murderer? With enough money, there could have been a policeman standing on that street to prevent the crime. Killed by a random falling object? With enough money, something could be there to prevent the object from falling on someone’s head. Killed by an obesity caused by unhealthy life style? I am sure that with enough money, something could be done to prevent this, too.
Thus speaking about not allowing the economy to kill people is merely an applause light. People die for economical reasons today, and they will also die tomorrow. The only choice we have is to move more money to some area, by taking the money from another area, so we can save some people from dying by cause X at the expense of more people dying by cause Y; and we can hope that by doing some we have increased the total value (total quality-adjusted life years, or whatever is your favorite metric).
In a perfect world, an answer to “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life?” would always be yes, because in the imaginary perfect world you can always get the $ 1 000 000 without taking it from somewhere else. In real life we have choices more like “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life? or should we instead let the person die and use the money to save lives of other ten people?”. (And if you wish, you can make it more complicated by assuming that the first person is a Nobel price winner in medicine and invented a cure that saved millions of lives, but these days he is too old to invent anything more; and the other group contains one great poet, but also one murderer, et cetera.)
That is not true because of one simple observation: eventually everyone dies.
Millionaires and billionaires die, too, even with the best of doctors and security guards.
If this comment was made with the implicit intent and understanding of money as an abstraction of the resources we have available, I don’t see why it hasn’t been upvoted through the stratosphere yet.
It really, really hurts me when I see that the best options being offered by even the brightest minds and best visionaries in a given group all revolve around better redistribution of these million dollars, and not one of them asks “What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.
What if we already have created a world of much greater wealth in absolute terms, and it still isn’t benefitting the poorest?
Then we weren’t looking for a solution to this problem statement, or we failed.
The problem statement I wish were posed is: Currently, there is an attribution of (e.g.) medical resources, where wealthier people have priority and every application of medical resources prevents the application of important resources in some other place, medical or otherwise. Can we change this situation around so that the opportunity cost of any given life-changing attribution of (e.g.) medical resources will always be lower than the returns of this attribution (e.g. productivity of the healed person)?
Naturally, this is intended to be a comprehensive “opportunity cost” calculation where “killing off all elders so that the overall medical opportunity cost of healing young persons becomes lower” is an appropriately taxed option. Still an option, perhaps a repugnant one, but at least one that is properly appraised. If there’s currently no known good way to appraise this, then perhaps that might be a good first step?
Are you serious? Why shouldn’t elders get treatment if they’ve paid taxes or insurance all their life? Who’d want to take part in a society knowing they’d be euthenased when the time comes?
Er… Most doctors? (Read this if you don’t know why.)
DaFranker wasn’t offering mercy killing, DaFranker was offering termination when no longer economically viable (Ans possible recycyling into Soylent Green..why let protein go to waste
I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.
You may be engaging in the typical mind fallacy. It may also help to keep in mind that humans will adopt to consider almost anything normal.
How.
Says who? Eg, apartheid was found obnoxious by the international community and shut down.
You take something you’d really dislike and assume that everyone else would also dislike it to close to the same extent, and that they wouldn’t be subject to different memes growing up in a culture where such activity was the norm.
That’s evidence that one country when it does something can get a reaction. That’s very different than a situation like this where it would a) be done by many if not all countries and b) be a much more reasonable course of action.
My attitudes are typical. where’s the fallacy?
As opposed to evidence from no countries.
Why would it be done by all countries? Because DaFranker has waved away the existence of objections?
That could well be indicative of atypicallity on your part.
This requires evidence. In the vast majority of non-universal attitudes, any given person’s attitude is _a_typical simply by virtue of there being no net majority of any attitude. Blues think A, Greens think B, Violets think C, Infrareds think Z42, and Castamogorioshites think 0101110. Feel free to replace colors and letters above with random real-world religions and traditions.
I did not wave them away, I created a hypothetical scenario in which some specific set / cluster of objections were “unapplicable” or “already solved” (within the hypothetical).
I then put forward this hypothetical as a goal to strive towards, and compare it to current goals that I often see being held, noting the differences and claiming that my hypothetical would serve better as an objective and as a problem to which we could find solutions.
Your mom.
There, at least I was overt about mine.
You need to say something, to defend your claim that there are things that coudl be done that are ratitonally desirable, but not intutively good. If there are no examples, your claim fails.
You say there are a great many: name a few.
They are not just debated, they are accepted in some quarters. However, you were saying that there were other, more radical policies. You offered killing everyone who reaches the age of 80 as an example, and then backpedaled, leaving you with no examples.
We are not discucssing an unknown attitude, or an attitude known to be non-majoritarian The majority of peope do not agree with killing old people for being old. I agree too. Iam in the majoity, so my attude is, tautologously, typical.
Better by whose standards?
What do you mean with “best doctor” in this case. Do you mean more than just a doctor who know which clinical trial says which drug is best for a particular condition?
There no straightforward way to throw money at the problem of obesity to solve it. Gastric bypass surgery might work to reduce the weight but it has it’s own disadvantages and I wouldn’t call it buying health.
I don’t think that there are many cases where you can simply buy a life in a country with a health system like Germany for $1 000 000.
You’re leaving out the possibility of needing to shuffle through a number of doctors to get a competent diagnosis. It’s a fairly frequent problem in the US. I don’t know how common it is in Germany.
Typo: I think you mean disadvantages.
Do you have a source that describes how US millionaires go through 10 doctors to get a correct diagnosis? I think most of the time in Germany what stopping people from going to more doctors isn’t financial but the fact that they trust a doctor.
Fixed.
I don’t have a source for how many non-millionaires in the US have to go through a number of doctors to get a correct diagnosis—I just know a fair number of people (some online-only) who’ve done it. They probably have average or better incomes, though it would be worth checking. It isn’t a cheap process, at least in terms of time, and I’m guessing that poor people are less likely to have the self-assurance to do it.
Your assumption is that the difference in Germany is in the degree of trust in doctors rather than better diagnosis?
I would guess that thing that separtes those people that you know online from the average person isn’t only that the have more money but that the make decisions differently than the average person.
Is that because Germany has more competent doctors, or because Germans trust their doctors even when they shouldn’t?
How does a non expert judge the competence of an expert?
Well, seeing if the doctor’s recommendations help the problem is one way.
Like this? (I’d guess Germany would be somewhere between France and Sweden.)
Your link just goes to the OP, I assume you meant to link something else.
D’oh! Fixed. Thanks.
No, that’s not the problem. In real life, the choice is, “Do we spend one million dollars on a welfare state (or labor laws, whatever) that can keep people alive longer and with more dignity, in the hope of eventually abolishing human-scale scarcity, or do we allocate one million dollars to an institutional investor’s mutual-fund portfolio?” You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
No serious economist actually believes that. In fact, they wouldn’t even make the claim that the economy is designed to save human lives; it would be downright silly. They would point out two things:
1) If we use wealth-accumulation as an approximation of human value, the mutual-fund portfolio could, in some sense, be said to be more valuable than the human lives, in the sense that those human lives generate little value for other humans. Of course, socialists and anarchists can argue with capitalists over whether wealth-accumulation under a neoliberal capitalist economy is a good approximation of human value or not. (I side with the socialists in saying most definitely no.)
2) Real economies rarely or never actually hit Pareto-optimal equilibria, they merely oscillate around them, and in fact sometimes even rarely oscillate near them because the assumptions behind efficient-market theories are so far from real-world conditions. (There was once a paper published, IIRC, under the title *Markets are Efficient If and Only If P=NP”.)
Given these two facts, we should most probably not consider “The Economy shouldn’t be allowed to kill people” as an applause light, but instead as an ethical charge to find the deadweight losses of human lives and remove them. We can argue about zero-sum tradeoffs when we’re actually faced with one, but when instead faced with a case where a clear positive-sum move exists, we should take it.
Actually, I don’t. And it’s not even necessary for the argument. Even if we nationalized all the investment funds and hanged all the evil capitalists, someone would still die because there would not be enough money to cure them.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis. Unless we have already solved the problem of Friendly Singularity. We can, and should, look for the ways to minimize this number. It’s not going to be zero, anyway. Even if we had a world-wide government of incorruptible angels with mandatory cryonics right now.
That means that your country wasn’t ruled well. On the other hand if you live in a country like Germany you do have access to all medicine that”s proven to work in clinical trials.
When it comes to drugs the expensive part is research, marketing and other things that aren”t about the production costs of the actual drug.
Yes, but that doesn’t refute the case-by-case ummm… case, that we’re looking at a deadweight loss of human life in this particular instance. If you don’t hold that the economy is Pareto-optimal, then there are improvements we can feasibly make without suddenly causing shortages of medicine.