I think you’re being disingenuous and taking semantic laziness on Sarah’s part as a fundamental flaw in the reasoning itself.
It is a fundamental flaw. A cost is not a benefit, nor is it a profit. This is a hard and fast point, similar to: p-values are not posterior probabilities; probabilities are not utilities; correlations are not causations; maps are not territories; and so on.
When Sarah asks
like, how much could improving criminal justice buy, if it were done optimally?
This is a great and valid question! I have many strong opinions on the topic, such as the high human cost of the War on Drugs and whether the prison rape epidemic is a good idea. However, it has next to nothing to do with the raw total of how many people are in prison. Because the deterrence tremendously affects everyone else and costs are not benefits.
With something like cancer, it is totally reasonable to ask how many people have cancer to estimate an upper bound on the value of researching cancer. If 1m people have skin cancer, this is a good starting point for upper bounding the value of skin cancer research—maybe skin cancer research is totally intractable and it’s worth $0, but you can be sure the value is <1m people. And if $1b gets spent on treating skin cancer every year, it’s reasonable to suggest that the value must be at least $1b. This is because cancer is a very nicely behaved problem and we do not live in a world where if you cut skin cancer treatment budgets by 50%, the skin cancers might start exploding and infecting everyone in a chain reaction of ever growing Akira-sized cancer blobs causing the collapse of skyscrapers and the end of Western civilization and life as we know it and everyone agrees as they roam the wastelands looking for gasoline that this is very unfortunate and we probably should’ve not cut the skin cancer budget.
Alright, I think if you and I sat down and talked about the cost vs. benefit of incarceration and the war on drugs, we would be in almost complete agreement. The costs are in equilibrium with benefits, so it’s sort of like trying to see where you can save the most utility a year by looking at your financial records: Sure, the more expensive items are more likely to have a high magnitude of savings, but they also could generate more utility. You haven’t ever read anything I’ve written, but I’ve read your site, so you’ll have to take my word on that :)
That means our disagreement here has more to do with our almost-legal interpretation of the article, which is sort of a boring thing to disagree on honestly. I’m willing to give her reading a more charitable interpretation, I am probably filling in the gaps in her article with my own reasoning, which perhaps is too charitable or incorrect. I still think you are not being charitable enough, but again, that’s a boring thing to disagree on. So let’s call it good.
It is a fundamental flaw. A cost is not a benefit, nor is it a profit. This is a hard and fast point, similar to: p-values are not posterior probabilities; probabilities are not utilities; correlations are not causations; maps are not territories; and so on.
When Sarah asks
This is a great and valid question! I have many strong opinions on the topic, such as the high human cost of the War on Drugs and whether the prison rape epidemic is a good idea. However, it has next to nothing to do with the raw total of how many people are in prison. Because the deterrence tremendously affects everyone else and costs are not benefits.
With something like cancer, it is totally reasonable to ask how many people have cancer to estimate an upper bound on the value of researching cancer. If 1m people have skin cancer, this is a good starting point for upper bounding the value of skin cancer research—maybe skin cancer research is totally intractable and it’s worth $0, but you can be sure the value is <1m people. And if $1b gets spent on treating skin cancer every year, it’s reasonable to suggest that the value must be at least $1b. This is because cancer is a very nicely behaved problem and we do not live in a world where if you cut skin cancer treatment budgets by 50%, the skin cancers might start exploding and infecting everyone in a chain reaction of ever growing Akira-sized cancer blobs causing the collapse of skyscrapers and the end of Western civilization and life as we know it and everyone agrees as they roam the wastelands looking for gasoline that this is very unfortunate and we probably should’ve not cut the skin cancer budget.
Alright, I think if you and I sat down and talked about the cost vs. benefit of incarceration and the war on drugs, we would be in almost complete agreement. The costs are in equilibrium with benefits, so it’s sort of like trying to see where you can save the most utility a year by looking at your financial records: Sure, the more expensive items are more likely to have a high magnitude of savings, but they also could generate more utility. You haven’t ever read anything I’ve written, but I’ve read your site, so you’ll have to take my word on that :)
That means our disagreement here has more to do with our almost-legal interpretation of the article, which is sort of a boring thing to disagree on honestly. I’m willing to give her reading a more charitable interpretation, I am probably filling in the gaps in her article with my own reasoning, which perhaps is too charitable or incorrect. I still think you are not being charitable enough, but again, that’s a boring thing to disagree on. So let’s call it good.