Category Archives: Poverty and Development

What is YOUR LIFE worth to the Dept of Transportation? About 2.7 Million.

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This cost allocation study Notes that the EPA is willing to spend almost twice what the Dept of Transportation is willing to spend to keep YOU alive. The numbers seem old so there may be some adjustments, but interesting is this:

In policy and regulatory analyses, EPA uses a value of $4.8 million to represent the cost of a premature death. This value is the mean of estimates from 26 studies dating back to the mid 1970s that have attempted to place a value on the cost of premature deaths. Estimates from those studies range from $0.6 million to $13.5 million, reflecting the large uncertainties in trying to estimate the public's willingness to pay to avoid premature death.

The Department of Transportation has adopted a value of $2.7 million per premature death, based on a comprehensive 1991 study by the Urban Institute

People are reluctant to accept this type of "dollar valuation" analysis even though it's commonplace in legal settlements and is a VERY APPROPRIATE way to allocate public funds. Note that the 4.8 million dollars the EPA spends to save a life would save thousands of lives if spent in alternative ways. One can argue that the complexity of this type of analysis undermines the rationale behind using this "lives for dollars" game, but it's a weak argument. Yet even with this appropriate method of trying to allocate dollars to lives and then allocate them most effectively, we tend to apply funding in odd ways and squander billions due to political budgeting.

Copenhagen Consensus

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An alternative to many pseudoscientific approaches to addressing global needs is the Copenhagen Consensus which seeks to suggest spending priorities for major global development projects according to their return on investment. Note their focus on health issues like AIDS and Malaria rather than Global Warming. They see warming as problematic but too difficult and expensive to fix. I’d like to see advocates for Kyoto protocol compare the costs with alternative approaches, but they seem to avoid this approach. I’d argue this approach is a moral imperative. Spending limited resources in the wisest way should be of primary importance to us as we seek to address global problems.
“The problem with Kyoto-type emission reduction plans is that the marginal costs rise exponentially and the benefits, if there even are any, rise linearly. So no matter which angle you look at it carbon dioxide restrictions on even a modest scale use up more social resources than any benefits they generate.”

Ross McKitrick
University of Guelph in Ontario

Mr. and Mrs. Smith * *

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Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a very missable film, but see it anyway to support Angelina Jolie who is one of the world's most dedicated poverty fighters.   Sure she's unconventional and downright weird in some ways, but she's probably done more to focus world attention on global poverty issues than all the Fox News anchors combined. 

Oh, the review?   This clever idea secret agents from different sides get married – is muddled by an underlying plot that is inaccessibly silly.   Spy Kids, with a similar idea, is actually a more intelligent and entertaining film than Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Movie buffs will enjoy the Brad and Angelina chemistry which brought the world a top celebrity scandal, one of the world's wealthiest Namibian children, and pictures of that child worth 5 million to charity.

Almost 5000 dead and counting

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No, not from the Indonesian earthquake – indeed a terrible tragedy. Global warming? Ha – not even the most alarmist proponents make this claim. Nope, not from terrorism, which tragically took perhaps 5 or even 10 lives today despite *trillions* of dollars spent fighting wars and providing security across thousands of first world venues.

Malaria killed the 5000. Today. And yesterday. And tomorrow. 1-3 Million per year with some indications the count has been historically too low on this disease.

But let's not worry about Malaria because the cost to dramatically reduce transmission is …. $2.50 for nets that protect people while they sleep. $5.50 for the really good nets that can protect people for 5 years.

More death news you won't see on CNN or FOX. Yet today (nor yesterday or the days before) I didn't see anything on CNN or FOX about this ongoing life and death battle with parasitic diseases where the death toll eclipses that of *all wars ever fought for all time*.

CNN did, however, have a long report lamenting the fact that that about 100 people per week die waiting for organ transplants. We better get to work on that, because why spend $2.50 for a net to save a kid's life when you can spend $250,000.00 giving a rich guy a extra few years?

Save the world, ignore global warming

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As I noted before I actually admire and respect Al Gore for his passion regarding the environment and his sincerity about creating a better world. However I wonder if his global warming alarmism is misguided.

Here is a short and articulate summary by the controversial "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg of the view that Global warming is happening but that those suggesting dramatic measures are proposing we waste time and innovation better spent on problems we *can* solve.

Personally, I'm incredibly frustrated by how *every source I've read* suggesting global warming remedies fails to even attempt a cost benefit analysis when this should be a key concern due to the overwhelming costs associated with, for example, Kyoto Protocol implementation.

Lomborg suggests:
… in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming, and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do most good first and quickest.

Lomborg's book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" suggests that many of the sacred cows of the environmental movement, including Global Warming, are supported more by political and ideological rather than scientific and mathematical motivations.

Lomborg has been villified in some scientific circles and if I can get permission I'll post some very interesting correspondence I had with the editor of Scientific American, which challenges Lomborg in what I feel are more personal rather than scientific ways. Lomborg's critics are notoriously vicious with ad hominem attacks on Lomborg rather than attacking his math and scientific assumptions. I'd suggest this is a strong indication that we should be paying more attention to Lomborg's analyses of pressing global concerns and that we should be careful to review the motivations of ALL of those involved in the global environmental debate.

Wikipedia on Global Warming – an excellent summary

EPA's Global Warming Site
Cooler Heads Coalition – industry funded I think. Note the paper about Terraforming Mars using injected greenhouse gasses! These guys seem to LIKE global warming!

Clear vs Artistic thinking

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I wonder if a reasonable way to broadly categorize people's thinking is dividing folks into TWO groups?.  "Clear thinkers"  tend to apply reason, logic, and the experimental method, accept new information as it comes to them, change their mind when evidence demands it, and generally seek out information even when it contradicts their position.  

The second group is much larger and in fact more representative of the forces that shaped humans over time, and tends to think "tribally" (Groupthink, conformity, dogma, prejudices,alliances) and "emotionally".   I'm starting to call this "artistic" thinking, which is often more interested in the outcome of the analysis than the analysis itself.      For artistic thinkers facts are collected with the outcome in mind rather than to support or disprove their working hypothesis.   Focus is narrowed to those things that support the story line.

What if we all agreed for a few years to apply a combination of rational analysis, experimental method, and highly optimized government spending using things like risk and reward analysis rather than political and emotional analysis?

We could solve a lot of problems by accepting more risk/danger in areas where we now demand far too much safety or quality standards.

naaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! 

Global Warming, or Global Alarming?

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Tim O'Reilly's looking forward to the upcoming film by Al Gore about Global Warming.
It's called "An Inconvenient Truth" and premiers very soon.

I respect Al Gore for many reasons, but I'm concerned by what appears to be a "propagandistic" rather than "scientific" lean to this film (this is based on clips and comments by those who have seen the film). I do not think Gore is a clear thinker on this topic and sees himself more as a "prophet".

If we focus on addressing the many global problems like health and economies of the developing world we can get a spectacular return on the investment of mental and monetary capital. Collateral advantages will be reductions in terrorism and a huge boost in good will and personal satisfaction.

Investing in alleviating human causes of global warming has no clear path to success, yet the costs are simply staggering.

Tim replied to my concerns, which I posted over at his blog. I love the internet for letting little old me, and thousands of others, actively engage with some of the world's best and brightest. Whatever one's views on the *most* pressing problems, certainly the collective application of innovation has the power to bring us the solutions.

Joe —
I see you've read The Skeptical Environmentalist. And I certainly agree with Bjorn Lomborg that there are other pressing problems where there is a great return on investment. But it also seems to me that many of the things that would be required to help with global warming could have enormous payoff. Critics talk about enormous costs, but it seems to me that the costs of the current way of doing things are always hidden.

A great example of this is railroads vs. automobiles. There's always been a huge debate about rail from the north bay down to San Francisco, with critics talking about the $150 million projected cost as a subsidy. But no one talks about the tens of billions of dollars of subsidy represented by the creation and maintenance of the highway system. Railroads are expected to carry their costs and described as uneconomic because they need subsidies, but the automobile industry managed to get much larger subsidies baked into the economy and hidden so that they no longer even appear as subsidies.

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I agree with Tim that some hidden economic subsidies are not always identified in discussions, but Economists do talk about and study these relationships. Unfortunately these observations are almost always buried in the politically/emotionally motivated budgeting processes. Political budgeting is not rational budgeting.

He's also right that greenhouse alleviation *might* have a big payoff, especially from things like alternative energy innovations that we might not explore unless we tackle global warming more aggressively. Still, the benefits seem so very unclear that I'd rather have the government spend my money on alleviating the abundant clear, present, and (most importantly) CHEAP-to-fix dangers like global health and poor education. (I'm against much of the excessive military and security spending as well as potential global warming big spending.)

I'd even suggest that the positive technology spinoffs from $250,000,000,000 towards global health and development would simply dwarf those from that investment in Greenhouse gas alleviation (or military or first world health care, etc, etc).

Death on Everest. Would YOU have stopped climbing to save the guy?

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News Item:
David Sharp, 34, died apparently of oxygen deficiency while descending from the summit during a solo climb last week.
More than 40 climbers are thought to have seen him as he lay dying, and almost all continued to the summit without offering assistance.

Our first reaction is to be appalled at the lack of concern and I'm anxious to hear from those who passed him by to hear their rationalizations. A Semper Fi sensibility hardly seems to apply to the new Everest hiking crowd. Sir Edmund Hillary observed this in his harsh criticism of the decision to put the summit above saving a life.

YET don't we ALL do this every day when we choose to distance ourselves from far more pressing global concerns where saving lives requires nothing like the efforts needed in this case? The key difference is proximity rather than ability to help. A modest Unicef contribution is more likely to save a life than attending to an oxygen deprived climber at 27000 feet in 80 below zero weather. Yet we don't have to look the malnourished kid in the face and thus we condemn and abhor the feelings of those who passed by the climber but absolve ourselves of what are probably more justified feelings of guilt for doing little in the face of great need.

It's a cruel world, right?

Update 

Book ’em!

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I just read that we Americans have 1 in 136 people locked up. Right now. Incredibly, about 1 in 37 Americans have served time.  Among industrialized nations (and most others) we are the world's leading incarcerator. This is not a statistic to be proud of by any means and is an alarming indicator of an unhealthy society.

The Sentencing Project tried to answer the question "why?". This from a 2003 study comparing incarceration rates around the world:

The high rate of imprisonment in the United States can be explained by several
factors:
· A higher rate of violent crime than other industrialized nations.
· Harsher sentencing practices than in other nations, particularly for property and drug
offenses.
· Sentencing policy changes over a period of three decades, particularly the shift
toward mandatory and determinate sentencing, restrictions on judicial discretion, and
a greater emphasis on imprisonment as a preferred sanction.
· Policy changes adopted as part of the “war on drugs,” leading to a vastly increased
use of the criminal justice system as a means of responding to drug problems.

Playstation 5 = Human Brain says leading UK futurist

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Playstation 5 , said leading UK futurist Pearson, will be as powerful as a human brain.  He notes the dramatic increase in power as video games evolve, and predicts that by 2050 we'll be able to download our brains into computers.    Combine this notion with the recent brain blueprint experiments for a neat look into the probably future of …. self.  

The implications are nothing short of staggering for a world filled with machine housed consciousnesses, communicating at near light speed via global networks.  

How would these entities, perhaps AKA "you and me", view those who have chosen NOT to download into the machines?     I'm guessing favorably unless the physical entities became threatening which would seem unlikely.  Machines – conscious and otherwise – by that time will be so capable that it seems unlikely serious conflict would be to anybody's advantage.

I just hope I can make it to 2050 and have enough cash for the download.  Pearson think's it'll take 25 MORE years before the procedure becomes cheap enough to be routine.