Generally speaking, bigger problems tend to be cheaper to solve (i.e. solving them will yield more utilons per dollar); so if there is a painting in a museum that risks being sold, and there are people that risk dying from malaria, the existence of latter is a good indication that worrying about the former isn’t the most effective use of a given amount of resources. (“Concentrate on the high-order bits”—Umesh Vazirani.) But in this particular case, that heuristic doesn’t seem to work (unless I’m overestimating the cost of prosthetics).
Generally speaking, bigger problems tend to be cheaper to solve (i.e. solving them will yield more utilons per dollar); so if there is a painting in a museum that risks being sold, and there are people that risk dying from malaria, the existence of latter is a good indication that worrying about the former isn’t the most effective use of a given amount of resources. (“Concentrate on the high-order bits”—Umesh Vazirani.) But in this particular case, that heuristic doesn’t seem to work (unless I’m overestimating the cost of prosthetics).