Oops. You’re right. But since I was trying to make the number as low as possible so no one could claim it would be lower, it’s still almost certainly well over $10 million/life. If we look at the recent few years, there’s been about 10 per year, so if we’re still being pessimistic, we have to assume that’s a trend and that there’d be about 100 fatalities per year otherwise, putting it at $10 million/life, still just over the value of statistical life. And still almost certainly an underestimate since 1 hour/year of teacher training is a massive underestimate of the cost, there’s no way it would send school shooting fatalities to 0, etc. But it’s closer than I expected it to be, though.
Your numbers don’t add. $100 million/year divided by 40 deaths/year is $2.5 million per life, which is well below the accepted value of a life.
Oops. You’re right. But since I was trying to make the number as low as possible so no one could claim it would be lower, it’s still almost certainly well over $10 million/life. If we look at the recent few years, there’s been about 10 per year, so if we’re still being pessimistic, we have to assume that’s a trend and that there’d be about 100 fatalities per year otherwise, putting it at $10 million/life, still just over the value of statistical life. And still almost certainly an underestimate since 1 hour/year of teacher training is a massive underestimate of the cost, there’s no way it would send school shooting fatalities to 0, etc. But it’s closer than I expected it to be, though.
$2.5 million is a thousand times greater than the marginal cost of saving a life via effective altruism.
But the lives you’d save via effective altruism are not American lives! ;-)
Yes, but nobody expects government action to be effective.