If I thought it was only worth $10k to avoid Covid, then I would stop trying to not catch it entirely, I’m giving up way, way more value than that and none of my actions make sense, and also the lockdown is a beyond obvious mistake (e.g. $10,000 times 300 million extra cases is both the beyond-worst-case and also 3 trillion so just let it happen modulo the most vulnerable).
Also, dollar framing this way excludes impact on others, so it’ll be a vast underestimate. Including it would likely give people a very bad idea.
I accept that my 10k figure is lower than typical; again, I’m relatively young (25) and risk tolerant. I’m curious where you’d bound your “cost of avoiding covid” at - $100k? $1M?
I did not model impact on others, and agree that this is a major oversight—as OP stated, there aren’t great models of this yet and we should try to do better.
But crucially, I don’t think “my current parameters leads to a massive underestimate” logically equates to “dollars are a bad framing device for understanding risk”. I almost feel like the fact that you can have such strong immediate opinions on seeing these dollar figures, means that converting to dollars provided a lot of clarity around our respective thought processes.
Of course it’s a simplification; it paints over, for example, the fact that two people with different incomes but the same risk tolerance would assign different dollar values. But on the flip side, literally every member of our society has grown up assessing the prices of things in dollars. QALY, micromorts, now microcovids, etc are incredibly esoteric by comparison.
Yeah, I’ve seen some posts trying to make similar “lockdown goes too far” arguments (including this one on the SSC Tumblr) that seem to be comparing life with COVID-19 mitigation to normal 2019 life or to that plus some chance of getting sick. Aside from understating the potential for long-term consequences, I think there’s a trend in those dollar-cost estimates towards significantly underestimating the negative effects of unmitigated pandemic spread beyond the effect on one’s personal health.
(Not that I expect that you disagree with this, but it stands out to me that “let it happen modulo the most vulnerable” is already begging the question. I’d expect if that were driving public policy that the “modulo the most vulnerable” part largely wouldn’t happen. It’s hard to protect any particular group from infectious disease when it’s widespread in the general population.)
If I thought it was only worth $10k to avoid Covid, then I would stop trying to not catch it entirely, I’m giving up way, way more value than that and none of my actions make sense, and also the lockdown is a beyond obvious mistake (e.g. $10,000 times 300 million extra cases is both the beyond-worst-case and also 3 trillion so just let it happen modulo the most vulnerable).
Also, dollar framing this way excludes impact on others, so it’ll be a vast underestimate. Including it would likely give people a very bad idea.
I accept that my 10k figure is lower than typical; again, I’m relatively young (25) and risk tolerant. I’m curious where you’d bound your “cost of avoiding covid” at - $100k? $1M?
I did not model impact on others, and agree that this is a major oversight—as OP stated, there aren’t great models of this yet and we should try to do better.
But crucially, I don’t think “my current parameters leads to a massive underestimate” logically equates to “dollars are a bad framing device for understanding risk”. I almost feel like the fact that you can have such strong immediate opinions on seeing these dollar figures, means that converting to dollars provided a lot of clarity around our respective thought processes.
Of course it’s a simplification; it paints over, for example, the fact that two people with different incomes but the same risk tolerance would assign different dollar values. But on the flip side, literally every member of our society has grown up assessing the prices of things in dollars. QALY, micromorts, now microcovids, etc are incredibly esoteric by comparison.
He was saying that it is worth $10k to him to avoid the experience of being sick with but not dying from Covid.
Impact on others can be incorporated into the dollar estimate using R0 and the value you place on those other lives as parameters.
Edit: microCOVIDs also excludes impact on others.
Yeah, I’ve seen some posts trying to make similar “lockdown goes too far” arguments (including this one on the SSC Tumblr) that seem to be comparing life with COVID-19 mitigation to normal 2019 life or to that plus some chance of getting sick. Aside from understating the potential for long-term consequences, I think there’s a trend in those dollar-cost estimates towards significantly underestimating the negative effects of unmitigated pandemic spread beyond the effect on one’s personal health.
(Not that I expect that you disagree with this, but it stands out to me that “let it happen modulo the most vulnerable” is already begging the question. I’d expect if that were driving public policy that the “modulo the most vulnerable” part largely wouldn’t happen. It’s hard to protect any particular group from infectious disease when it’s widespread in the general population.)