The key problem with valuing life in dollars, “the universal currency of utility,” is that utility is not affinely related to money, especially in extreme cases. However, utility is affine in probability, even in extreme cases.
That’s why micromorts work, but they only work as a one-dimensional sufficient statistic when the only outcomes under consideration are “death” and “status quo”.
In cases like infectious disease, where we have outcomes like “hospitalization for some time” and “transmission to others” (and I would add to your list “long-term sequelae” and “flu-like illness”) whose proportional impact on utility for different people can vary widely, a one-dimensional sufficient statistic can’t fully faithfully be used to compare kinds of risk with different profiles of such outcomes (e.g. COVID risk to vehicle accident risk). This approach can be used to compare different sources of COVID-profile risk, and of course that’s what a microCOVID is, but pretty much anything distinct from COVID has a different profile of ways it could impact utility; even the Delta variant arguably has a different profile from wild-type.
All that said, as long as we’re clear that we’re only considering fatal and status-quo outcomes, I do like the idea of an alternately scaled unit, a mortmile := 0.012 micromorts.
Yeah, I think that that’s a good point about the one-dimensionality of any unit of measure used to assess risk. It might be possible to effectively start measuring in quality-adjusted life minutes or hours, but that quite quickly becomes a massive headache to calculate, even if it’s more accurate to the actual impact on people. I think that using a unit like the mortmile is a good way to effectively make back-of-the-envelope calculations to assess the degree of risk and quickly understand just how risky something is, especially when differences are measured in orders of magnitude (as they usually are).
The key problem with valuing life in dollars, “the universal currency of utility,” is that utility is not affinely related to money, especially in extreme cases. However, utility is affine in probability, even in extreme cases.
That’s why micromorts work, but they only work as a one-dimensional sufficient statistic when the only outcomes under consideration are “death” and “status quo”.
In cases like infectious disease, where we have outcomes like “hospitalization for some time” and “transmission to others” (and I would add to your list “long-term sequelae” and “flu-like illness”) whose proportional impact on utility for different people can vary widely, a one-dimensional sufficient statistic can’t fully faithfully be used to compare kinds of risk with different profiles of such outcomes (e.g. COVID risk to vehicle accident risk). This approach can be used to compare different sources of COVID-profile risk, and of course that’s what a microCOVID is, but pretty much anything distinct from COVID has a different profile of ways it could impact utility; even the Delta variant arguably has a different profile from wild-type.
All that said, as long as we’re clear that we’re only considering fatal and status-quo outcomes, I do like the idea of an alternately scaled unit, a mortmile := 0.012 micromorts.
Yeah, I think that that’s a good point about the one-dimensionality of any unit of measure used to assess risk. It might be possible to effectively start measuring in quality-adjusted life minutes or hours, but that quite quickly becomes a massive headache to calculate, even if it’s more accurate to the actual impact on people. I think that using a unit like the mortmile is a good way to effectively make back-of-the-envelope calculations to assess the degree of risk and quickly understand just how risky something is, especially when differences are measured in orders of magnitude (as they usually are).