I don’t understand how to take a sum across a speculative set of possible futures like this—in particular, in cases where everyone has every incentive to lie (W doesn’t have to tell anyone about his anosmia, and if he cares about the resale value of his house, he won’t mention it).
For purposes of policy, you can simplify by finding typical values for people in various reference classes, by analyzing what choices they make to avoid / approach cases of the external transaction.
Just because I defined it as an integral doesn’t mean you can’t closely approximate it as a small number of multiplication problems.
A: There is a strong resemblance here, yes. Which specific problems do you think would also apply here?
B: The choices, not the flat money spent. You’re allowed to take the available resources into account. Dumping toxic waste where there’s no one at all seems like it would come out ahead of putting it in poor communities.
Doesn’t this have all the usual problems of average utilitarianism?
There is a strong resemblance here, yes. Which specific problems do you think would also apply here?
Imagine that I say that everything costs me a million dollars in value. Maybe there’s a sense in which it’s true—I’m just really sensitive. Still, it doesn’t seem fair to give me that level of disproportionate influence.
Alternately, doesn’t this lead to just dumping toxic waste in poor communities, since people there can’t afford to spend very much to avoid it?
The choices, not the flat money spent. You’re allowed to take the available resources into account.
I’m afraid I don’t understand this.
Dumping toxic waste where there’s no one at all seems like it would come out ahead of putting it in poor communities.
For a number of waste products, there does not appear to be an unpopulated place that they can be dumped—and if there were, environmentally-minded people would put a high value on not doing so, since it would disrupt unspoiled wilderness.
Imagine that I say that everything costs me a million dollars in value. Maybe there’s a sense in which it’s true—I’m just really sensitive. Still, it doesn’t seem fair to give me that level of disproportionate influence.
This is a good argument for why it’s hard to measure external costs by asking people. It doesn’t undermine the definition.
And the situation isn’t quite as bleak as you imply, in terms of measurement. We have techniques, such as revealed preference, for measuring costs when people have incentives to lie. We also routinely, in the legal system, apply estimates of “reasonable” costs for things.
The question was, ‘how do we measure the intensity of externalities’? We can measure this by peoples’ economic choices. The nice thing about money is that it’s more objectively quantifiable. You can actually see where money moves. Therefore, the scale, at least is set.
The line of reasoning that this would lead to dumping on the poor relies on the idea that the only way we’d measure economic choices is by adding up the dollar amounts spent. The dollars let us see the choices, but we can be cannier than an adding machine about combining them. At least we can use a disposable income correction, and of course a knowledge correction (if you don’t know you have a problem and never end up spending money fixing it − 8Hz noise pollution, say—then we have a bit of a problem with this approach)
What waste products are you thinking of? At the very least, the inside of a carefully constructed toxic waste container won’t have any jukes or tree narfs in it.
I don’t understand how to take a sum across a speculative set of possible futures like this—in particular, in cases where everyone has every incentive to lie (W doesn’t have to tell anyone about his anosmia, and if he cares about the resale value of his house, he won’t mention it).
For purposes of policy, you can simplify by finding typical values for people in various reference classes, by analyzing what choices they make to avoid / approach cases of the external transaction.
Just because I defined it as an integral doesn’t mean you can’t closely approximate it as a small number of multiplication problems.
Doesn’t this have all the usual problems of average utilitarianism?
Alternately, doesn’t this lead to just dumping toxic waste in poor communities, since people there can’t afford to spend very much to avoid it?
A: There is a strong resemblance here, yes. Which specific problems do you think would also apply here?
B: The choices, not the flat money spent. You’re allowed to take the available resources into account. Dumping toxic waste where there’s no one at all seems like it would come out ahead of putting it in poor communities.
Imagine that I say that everything costs me a million dollars in value. Maybe there’s a sense in which it’s true—I’m just really sensitive. Still, it doesn’t seem fair to give me that level of disproportionate influence.
I’m afraid I don’t understand this.
For a number of waste products, there does not appear to be an unpopulated place that they can be dumped—and if there were, environmentally-minded people would put a high value on not doing so, since it would disrupt unspoiled wilderness.
This is a good argument for why it’s hard to measure external costs by asking people. It doesn’t undermine the definition.
And the situation isn’t quite as bleak as you imply, in terms of measurement. We have techniques, such as revealed preference, for measuring costs when people have incentives to lie. We also routinely, in the legal system, apply estimates of “reasonable” costs for things.
The question was, ‘how do we measure the intensity of externalities’? We can measure this by peoples’ economic choices. The nice thing about money is that it’s more objectively quantifiable. You can actually see where money moves. Therefore, the scale, at least is set.
The line of reasoning that this would lead to dumping on the poor relies on the idea that the only way we’d measure economic choices is by adding up the dollar amounts spent. The dollars let us see the choices, but we can be cannier than an adding machine about combining them. At least we can use a disposable income correction, and of course a knowledge correction (if you don’t know you have a problem and never end up spending money fixing it − 8Hz noise pollution, say—then we have a bit of a problem with this approach)
What waste products are you thinking of? At the very least, the inside of a carefully constructed toxic waste container won’t have any jukes or tree narfs in it.
I’m still not sure what a viable combining mechanism is. (Oh, and also: children)
As for waste products, I’m generally skeptical of containment—not so much in theory, but in practice, we don’t seem to do a very good job of it.
FIne—then not producing the toxic waste in the first place would be the baseline comparison.