Both of your examples are ultimately arguments in favor of reasoning about ratios of budgets: going from $350B to $700B is a 100% increase, while going from $0 to $350B isn’t even defined. Perhaps $175B and $350B would be at a similar distance from each other.
Similarly, taking away a few billion from the FDA and a few billion are incomparable; however, reducing the FDA budget by 50% and reducing the military budget by 50% might be approximately equally radical suggestions.
So maybe we should be talking about log-budgets instead. Is there any example where such a calculation would produce counter-intuitive results?
Both of your examples are ultimately arguments in favor of reasoning about ratios of budgets: going from $350B to $700B is a 100% increase, while going from $0 to $350B isn’t even defined. Perhaps $175B and $350B would be at a similar distance from each other.
Similarly, taking away a few billion from the FDA and a few billion are incomparable; however, reducing the FDA budget by 50% and reducing the military budget by 50% might be approximately equally radical suggestions.
So maybe we should be talking about log-budgets instead. Is there any example where such a calculation would produce counter-intuitive results?