Are All Lives Equal? Why Cost-Benefit Analysis Values Rich Lives More and How Philosophy Can Fix It
Abstract
According to economists, saving the life of a single American is just as beneficial to society as saving the lives of 2 Saudis, 5 Romanians, 10 Macedonians, 35 Indians, 69 Haitians, 90 Sierra Leoneans, or 148 Liberians. Why do economists think that, to judge if your life is worth saving, they must first check your pocketbook? Why do so many organizations, from the United States Government and the World Bank to the Gates Foundation and the United Nations (many of whom claim to hold the equality of life as sacrosanct) agree that when you check the numbers, rich lives are just worth more?
Are All Lives Equal? investigates how economics has come unbound from its philosophical and ethical foundations. It explores why economists support policy frameworks that would let hundreds of poor people die to save a single rich person. Unlike many philosophical treatises on economics, this book does not advocate blindly discarding the useful tools of Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Value of a Statistical Life. Instead, it strives to thread the needle between economics and philosophy, advocating for reforming the way governments measure benefit by making the system both more accurate and more just.
With over 40 new, original, thought experiments, this book is engaging and accessible to everyone, from economists that know nothing of philosophy, to philosophers that know nothing of economics, to all of us skeptics in between that know nothing of either.
... Some tools are particularly geared for these users, such as OONI or NetBlocks which are updated on a daily or even hourly basis (Open Observatory of Network Interference, 2020; NetBlocks, 2022b). Some donors are interested in a dataset with broad country coverage, publicly available and accessible data, and measurements explicitly linked to governance (Millennium Challenge Corporation, 2019; USAID, 2019; Tilley and Jenkins, 2020;Fletcher, 2021;Carneades, 2022). Donors and advocates can use these data to target development aid to countries that are pursuing good governance reforms, identify countries that may need to reform their internet regulations, or pressure autocratic regimes to reduce oppression (Wagner, 2013). ...
Donor organizations and multilaterals require ways to measure progress toward the goals of creating an open internet, and condition assistance on recipient governments maintaining access to information online. Because the internet is increasingly becoming a leading tool for exchanging information, authoritarian governments around the world often seek methods to restrict citizens’ access. Two of the most common methods for restricting the internet are shutting down internet access entirely and filtering specific content. We conduct a systematic literature review of articles on the measurement of internet censorship and find that little work has been done comparing the tradeoffs of using different methods to measure censorship on a global scale. We compare the tradeoffs between measuring these phenomena using expert analysis (as measured by Freedom House and V-Dem) and remote measurement with manual oversight (as measured by Access Now and the OpenNet Initiative [ONI]) for donor organizations that want to incentivize and measure good internet governance. We find that remote measurement with manual oversight is less likely to include false positives, and therefore may be more preferable for donor organizations that value verifiability. We also find that expert analysis is less likely to include false negatives, particularly for very repressive regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia and therefore these data may be preferable for advocacy organizations that want to ensure very repressive regimes are not able to avoid accountability, or organizations working primarily in these areas.
Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations around the World looks at an issue that has gotten much attention in the developed world, but with, for the first time, new data and analysis covering most of the world, including developing economies. The analysis examines whether those born in poverty or in prosperity are destined to remain in the same economic circumstances into which they were born and looks back over a half a century at whether children’s lives are better or worse than their parents’ in different parts of the world. It suggests local, national, and global actions and policies that can help break the cycle of poverty, paving the way for the next generation to realize their potential and improve their lives.
The debate over police use of military equipment often revolves around the supposed tradeoff between increasing police safety and reducing killings by the police. In this paper, I rely on institutional features that exogenously determine the distribution of military equipment to US police departments to show that, contrary to previous evidence, there is no such tradeoff: police militarization increases killings by the police and reduces police safety. Each year police militarization results in 64 additional killings by the police, 12,440 police officer assaults, and 2,653 police officer injuries.
Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges.
This brief models the effectiveness of closing face-to-face schooling to help contain COVID-19 in the Philippines. It finds much higher health and economic costs than benefits from untargeted closures, and recommends alternatives.
Mark Sagoff has written an engaging and provocative book about the contribution economics can make to environmental policy. Sagoff argues that economics can be helpful in designing institutions and processes through which people can settle environmental disputes. However, he contends that economic analysis fails completely when it attempts to attach value to environmental goods. It fails because preference-satisfaction has no relation to any good. Economic valuation lacks data because preferences cannot be observed. Willingness to pay is benchmarked on market price and thus may reflect producer cost not consumer benefit. Moreover, economists cannot second-guess market outcomes because they have no better information than market participants. Mark Sagoff's conclusion is that environmental policy turns on principles that are best identified and applied through political processes. Written with verve and fluency, this book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in environmental policy as well as informed general readers.
Numerous analyses of the benefits and costs of COVID‐19 policies have been completed quickly as the crisis has unfolded. The results often largely depend on the approach used to value mortality risk reductions, typically expressed as the value per statistical life (VSL). Many analyses rely on a population‐average VSL estimate; some adjust VSL for life expectancy at the age of death. We explore the implications of theory and empirical studies, which suggest that the relationship between age and VSL is uncertain. We compare the effects of three approaches: (1) an invariant population‐average VSL; (2) a constant value per statistical life‐year (VSLY); and (3) a VSL that follows an inverse‐U pattern, peaking in middle age. We find that when applied to the U.S. age distribution of COVID‐19 deaths, these approaches result in average VSL estimates of $10.63 million, $4.47 million, and $8.31 million. We explore the extent to which applying these estimates alters the conclusions of frequently cited analyses of social distancing, finding that they significantly affect the findings. However, these analyses do not address other characteristics of COVID‐19 deaths that may increase or decrease the VSL estimates. Examples include the health status and income level of those affected, the size of the risk change, and the extent to which the risk is dreaded, uncertain, involuntarily incurred, and outside of one's control. The effects of these characteristics and their correlation with age are uncertain; it is unclear whether they amplify or diminish the effects of age on VSL.
This paper examines the discourses used by proponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as claims of universality to which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allied activists mounted a movement of opposition in 2014–2017. We position our analysis within the historical context of Lakota and Dakota resistance to settler colonialism, which has endured since the nineteenth century. From publicly available texts circulated by key actors in the conflict over the construction of this pipeline project, we identify themes that proponents of this project drew upon to articulate their representations of the land as universal. We suggest that claims like these, when naturalized in practice, have historically materialized in settler colonial landscapes. With the concept of settler colonial landscapes, we focus on ways of seeing and representing places that have facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous people from their territory as well as the construction of a settler-dominated community. In this way, we develop a cultural geographical understanding of the ongoing construction of settler colonial landscapes as a process dependent on claims to neutrality and objectivity.
Purpose
Economic hardship and crime is always a debatable issue in the political economy literature. Some authors define poverty leads to crime some are completely opposite. The purpose of this paper is to find out the impact of poverty on crime in the USA.
Design/methodology/approach
Using time series data of USA over the period from 1965 to 2016, this study applies autoregressive distributed lag approach to identify the effect of poverty on crime.
Findings
The outcomes confirm a positive co-integrating relationship between poverty and property crime. It can be argued that poverty ultimately leads property crime in long run in the USA. However, unemployment and GDP exhibit neither long-run nor short-run relationship with property crime and they are not cointegrated for the calculated period.
Research limitations/implications
The subject of this paper helps to explain and analyze the nexus between poverty and crime in the USA.
Practical implications
Government and policymakers should focus more on poverty rather than unemployment alone to control property crime.
Originality/value
This study attempts to identify the consequences of economic hardship and poverty on the crime in the advanced economy like USA.