In looking at the cost-effectiveness of health interventions in fantasy communities we have shown that the infinite lifespan of elves creates analytical problems, and other commenters have suggested that the cost-effectiveness of clerical interventions to reduce infant mortality should be balanced against the need for clerics to go to war. Well, Professor John Quiggin at the Crooked Timber blog recently broached the issue of doing a benefit-cost analysis of US military spending, and has found that the US defense department has killed a million Americans since 2001. His benefit-cost analysis is really just an exercise in peskiness, though it does have a valid underlying point, and I think actually you could show with a simple cost-effectiveness analysis that the wars of the last 10 years have, under quite reasonable assumptions, not been a cost-effective use of American money. Of course, we don’t make judgments about military spending on cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit grounds.
In comments at Crooked Timber[1], I listed a few examples of how US Defense Department money could be better spent, and one of those examples was vaccination. Obviously, disease eradication would be a very good use of this money, because of its long-term implications, but in thinking about the cost-effectiveness (or cost-benefit) of this particular intervention, I think we can see another clear example of how these purely economic approaches to important policy debates just don’t work. So, here I’m going to look at this in a little more detail, and give some examples of how we can come to outrageous policy conclusions through looking at things through a purely econometric lens. I think I came to this way of thinking by considering the cost-effectiveness of interventions in elven communities, and ultimately it’s relevant to the debate on global warming, because a common denialist tactic is to demand that AGW abatement strategies be assessed entirely in terms of cost-benefit analyses, which are very hard to do and, as one can see from the comments thread at Crooked Timber, are anathema to supporters of the military establishment. As we can see here, they also break down in quite viable real-life circumstances.
The Problem of Disease Eradication
So, you’re the US president in 2001, and you’re reading a book on goats to some schoolkids, and as happens in this situation, you have to make a snap decision about how to spend 200 billion US $ over the next 10 years. You could spend it going to war with a small nation that harbours terrorists; let’s suppose that if you don’t your country will be subject to one 9/11 -style attack every year for the next 20 years (until OBL dies). If you do, you’ll commit your own and the next administration to spending 200 billion US $. Is this a good use of your money? 200 billion US $ to save about 50,000 US lives over 20 years, minus the casualties (wikipedia tells me it’s about 5000). So you get a net benefit of 45,000 lives, or 4,444,444 US $ per life – this actually comes under the US government’s 5 million US$-per-life-saved threshold, so it’s a viable use of your money. But one of your alternatives is to spend the money on eradicating HIV using a vaccine that was recently developed, and it has been shown that by spending 200 billion US$ over 10 years you could eliminate HIV from the face of the earth. You don’t care about the face of the earth, but you need to eradicate it everywhere to make Americans safe from it. Should you ignore the terrorist attacks and spend the money?
For a standard cost-effectiveness analysis you would calculate the incremental benefit (in lives saved) from this vaccine compared to the war on terror. Lives saved in the future are discounted at a fixed rate (usually about 3% a year) and decline in value over the term of the intervention. But the problem with this calculation for disease eradication (specifically) is that the term of the intervention is infinite. All future lives saved forever go into the calculation. The actual formula for this calculation is the integral over (the negative exponent of (discount rate*time t)) multiplied by (lives saved at time t)[2]. Usually we model a policy over 20 or 30 years, giving a finite result; but in this case we need to model the benefit over all future time, and the integral of any bounded function multiplied by the negative exponent, over an infinite range, is infinite. So even with furious discounting we get an infinite benefit from eradicating any disease. Not only does this make comparing disease eradication decisions – e.g. smallpox vs. HIV – impossible, but it makes comparing disease eradication to any other policy objective impossible, and it tells us – quite reasonably, I should say – that we should bend all our health care resources to this task.
In this case, the president of the USA should decide not to go to war because 20 September 11ths are a small price to pay for the eradication of HIV. Eventually Osama bin Laden will give up[3]; HIV won’t. But the stupidity of this decision doesn’t end here. If it costs a trillion dollars to eradicate HIV, the president would be better off defunding his army and paying the price than not; and if Mexico were to invade, killing a million Americans, the infinite benefit of having eradicated HIV would still outweigh the loss.
Now, one argument against this logic is that you shouldn’t include the yet-unborn in a policy evaluation; yet this is standard practice. For example, in considering the cost-effectiveness of different interventions to reduce HIV transmission, we might run a model on the 15-64 year old population, and when we do this we allow for maturity into and out of the population; if we run the model for more than 15 years we are implicitly allowing the yet-unborn into the model. Furthermore, you could surely argue that modeling disease eradication without including the unborn devalues the whole concept – what is disease eradication except a project to protect the unborn generations of the future?
So we can’t use econometric analyses by themselves to assess the value of interventions, because a perfectly reasonable economic analysis of a valid healthcare goal throws up an impossible contradiction. The world expects – with significant help from Bill Gates, I might add – to eliminate polio by 2015 and with the recent announcement of a vaccine for malaria you can bet that the international health movement will turn its gaze on that bastard protozoan next. And there is no economic argument you can mount against spending money on it – even if the cost is everything you own.
Implications for the Global Warming Debate
A common argument mounted by “hard-headed realists” and AGW deniers is that money spent on AGW mitigation needs to be justified by a solid cost-benefit analysis, because the alternative is to spend this money on targeting real problems now, especially in third world countries (often also the countries most vulnerable to AGW’s worst effects). Money spent on infant mortality now, they argue, is far better than money spent on AGW mitigation in the future – even if you accept that the negative effects of AGW are a certainty. This is a particularly powerful argument since we don’t have solid evidence for exactly how bad the effects of AGW will be, and we know that the future benefits of reducing infant mortality now are huge. This economic defense will usually also depend on discount rates – we’re much more interested in lives saved now than in the future, and AGW mitigation’s effects will be felt in the future, not now. Exactly what the relative benefits of mitigation will be are very sensitive to discount rates.
In this case, though, one can argue: well, let’s spend the entire defense department’s money on eradicating HIV. If we test everyone in Africa every 6 months – surely possible with the full funding of the US military on the case – and treat them immediately (or, hey, just treat everyone in Africa with anti-HIV drugs for the next 30 years – let’s put them in the water!) then we can eliminate HIV, and save an infinite number of lives. It’s guaranteed on both cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness grounds, with the added benefit that you don’t need to quibble over the discount rate – it’s guaranteed to be cost-effective under any finite discount rate. The natural argument against this will be that someone might invade America. But we can say in response to this, “uh uh! Precautionary principle! You don’t know how bad that invasion will be or even if it will happen.” If the precautionary principle doesn’t apply to the putative risks of AGW, why should it apply to defense? Or rather, if we need to attach a monetary value to the future risks of AGW, why not attach one to the future invasion of the USA? And when we do, it will be of lower value than the benefits from elimination of HIV, even if the entire population is wiped out during the invasion.
Which brings us back to the simple problem that we can’t assess any policy in isolation using only the econometric tools at our disposal. Everyone understands this, of course, which is why people on the Crooked Timber thread are bridling at Professor Quiggin’s analysis. They attach additional, non-economic considerations to these problems. But one of the rear-guard actions of the anti-AGW movement is to demand that we use exclusively economic methods for assessing the value of AGW mitigation – and it was in response to this fiction that the Stern review was commissioned. I think it needs to be recognized that these econometric tools offer false clarity, and only apply within a very limited framework, that of limited improvements in a limited temporal framework (pacemakers vs. aspirins, essentially). Defense, disease elimination, and AGW mitigation lie outside that framework. This should be abundantly clear to anyone who has tried to do a cost-effectiveness calculation of the relative merits of slavery and genocide for elven communities. It’s just a shame that most economists haven’t bent their mind to these truly important questions; fortunately, we at the C&C University are here to help with the more profound philosophical questions. No, don’t thank me, we do it for free. Or, alternatively, pick apart the argument in the comments … I’m eager to hear how a valid mathematical framework can be constructed for the analysis of disease eradication goals, because it’s relevant to my work…
Update
Actually while I was watching a band in Kichijoji at 3am last night I realized that my interpretation of the formula for total effectiveness in the disease eradication was wrong[5]. Ultimately, the benefits that accrue from disease eradication are approximately (1/(discount rate))*average number of lives saved in any year. So for a discount rate of 3% and 1,000,000 lives saved per year from (e.g. ) eradicating malaria you would get a total benefit of about 33 million. It’s not infinite but it’s very very large. So the general argument holds, but it is possible to compare disease eradication programs. Note that there’s an argument that can be made for a lower discount rate in the case of disease eradication (it is all about saving future generations, not the current generation) and even a small change in the discount rate makes a big difference to the outcome. Also, under certain conditions (exponential population growth bigger than the discount rate) the benefits of disease eradication are infinite; I think most people expect the population to stabilize at 7 billion though so this doesn’t apply on earth.
—
fn1: for historical reasons I comment there as sg
fn2: or something similar
fn3: Actually it’s an interesting question, isn’t it? If you ignore a terrorist who is incapable of waging a conventional war on you, refuse to give into his demands, mount a purely law-enforcement operation to prevent his worst excesses, and wait him out, how long will it be before he just gives up and goes away? How long can OBL recruit people for if killing Americans leads to … nothing? And if after a few years the US said quietly to the Taliban, “we’ll give you a billion a year in aid if you get rid of him,” how long would it be before he had no safe bases?
fn4: I find this very interesting. A few years ago it was getting hard to find doctors in the west who would perform circumcisions on babies; ten years ago doctors were equivocal on the issue and there has been a long-standing community opposition to circumcision for non-medical reasons; yet now we’re recommending it (and funding it!) en masse in African countries. I wonder how Americans would have felt if, in 1987, Nelson Mandela or Robert Mugabe had come to the USA and suggested that the solution to their growing HIV problem was to circumcise all adult gay men?
fn5: I did this calculation only recently, so I really should have got this right from the start…
Compromise and Conceit 
October 24, 2011 at 11:32 am
”has found that the US defense department has killed a million Americans since 2001. His benefit-cost analysis is really just an exercise in peskiness”
If you felt like being pesky in return I suggest asking what CO2 abetment those deaths deliver and asking whether he incorporated the CO2 saving times his preferred carbon price back into his economic analysis.
Please note, this is just peskiness, but it does highlight the fact that genocide is a valid global warning abetment program. And in doing so hopefully highlights that some options aren’t on the table.
”Of course, we don’t make judgments about military spending on cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit grounds.”
I don’t think this statement is true. It’s that modelling the cost/benefit of a war is generally attempting to anticipate a black swan event. The odds of your enemy wiping out our civilisation is low, but the cost of that happening is total. As such AGW warming and wars should be assessed using highly similar metrics.
And before you say “But AGW has a consensus supporting what it’s impact will be” remember that history provides an excellent record of what military underspending or inactivity delivers to nations. I’m sure military historians would reach a consensus on it.
”Actually it’s an interesting question, isn’t it? If you ignore a terrorist who is incapable of waging a conventional war on you, refuse to give into his demands, mount a purely law-enforcement operation to prevent his worst excesses, and wait him out, how long will it be before he just gives up and goes away? How long can OBL recruit people for if killing Americans leads to … nothing? And if after a few years the US said quietly to the Taliban, “we’ll give you a billion a year in aid if you get rid of him,” how long would it be before he had no safe bases?”
This is just naive. Go do a search on the word danegeld. If you offer the Taliban a billion a year for peace, then the initial answer would be “Sure. I’ll take the 1bn for this year. And I promise that OBL won’t have a safe base here. If fact even he’d agree how unsafe it is. Let me put him on to tell you himself.” And eventually it’d become “This year, it’s 1.5bn, or else I give the 1bn from last year to our mate Osama and we see how much yellowcake that’ll buy.” And because the price is just .5bn higher you’d be nuts not to pay it (by your logic). If you need another example of how paying for peace results in a bill but no advantage take a look at North Korea or google for “peace for our time” [1] If you want other examples of how buying a problem off does not make it go away take a look at Saudi Arabia’s social problems and how those led to OBL or look at Greek government spending and debt.
In short, the only thing I demand to be saved from is people who think that throwing money at a problem will save me from it. And I’m so serious that I’m willing to pay absolutely nothing for it.
”But we can say in response to this, “uh uh! Precautionary principle! You don’t know how bad that invasion will be or even if it will happen.” If the precautionary principle doesn’t apply to the putative risks of AGW, why should it apply to defense?”
Sorry, but now you’re misunderstanding the precautionary principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle It’s used as a reason to block scientific progress/discovery or to support spending any amount you want to prevent AGW. The (flimsy) rational is that if you don’t know what the risk is then you shouldn’t do anything that could trigger that risk. Therefore nanotechnology and genetically engineered foods should be banned as we can’t be certain what the risk is. Likewise we don’t know if climate change would be bad, therefore we must act to stop it.
Worse, in regards to defence spending, the precautionary principle would argue the oppose of what you say. It’d say that there is a risk associated with decreasing it and that that risk cannot be know. Therefore no action to decrease spending should be taken.
Finally on the precautionary principle, I’m unaware of serious climate change skeptics who uses the precautionary principle to say that AGW shouldn’t be acted upon (except as a contrarian argument that they don’t believe in). I’ve never even see Andrew Bolt use it, and we both know he’d seize it in a second if he make a halfway coherent argument for his position. On the other hand I have seen AGW believers invoke it.
And my final point is that while you’re willing to assign lives saved to disease prevention, I note that you assign no lives saved to supporting different economic or political models. To give you an example, a forceful intervention before WWII would have a high cost to impose a non-Nazi regime on Germany, but would have avoided the holocaust. Alternatively if the Western world had shrugged after WWII and accepted communism then we can assume that the gulags would have claimed millions more lives across the world. In either of these cases you can see that there are definite advantages and disadvantages to enforcing a social structure on a nation or the world. But the advantages of these are significant in terms of lives saved. Your approach suggests that military spending has no role to play in that, which is clearly nonsense.
[1] Apparently it’s peace for our time according to Wikipedia…
October 25, 2011 at 12:30 am
Thank you for this comment, Paul. I fear this post was a little hard to follow, so thanks for struggling through …
First to the peskiness… I think counting the CO2 cost would be a bit like applying an IDU weight. You can only look at the direct cost and effect of the treatment, right? And the treatment in this case is killing people, so you need to ignore secondary effects (freeing up real estate, removing consumers of bad television stations, etc.) Also probably the military activities of the US produce rather a lot of CO2, so we could just assume it balances out …
It’s that modelling the cost/benefit of a war is generally attempting to anticipate a black swan event
This is what I was getting at with my discussion of the precautionary principle; I interpreted this as being about black swan events[1] (also see below about the terminology issues)[2]. What I think I’m trying to say here is that cost-benefit analysis (and cost-effectiveness analysis) only really works in equilibrium situations: that is, where your system is in equilibrium and you are assessing the value of a small change that doesn’t disturb the equilibrium. But the nature of defense and AGW mitigation – both of them – is that they are about shifts to new equilibria, or to uncontrolled circumstances. Opponents of AGW mitigation demand cost-benefit analyses of the strategies, but refuse to allow non-linearity, black swans[3] in this analysis, thus inherently restricting it to only the most conservative possible scenarios; but then get all antsy about applying cost-benefit analyses to military expenditure precisely because of those same concerns. If AGW shares these issues with defense planning, then should it not also be exempt from these kinds of analyses? Or should they perhaps be conducted on non-normative assumptions, such as allowing for modeling catastrophes?
This is just naive. Go do a search on the word danegeld.
I agree with you here, and I didn’t intend the development aid idea to be the main point of this aside… the main point was wondering what would happen if the US just ignored OBL. Or treated the issue of terrorism on a purely law enforcement/border control level. I think one of OBL’s goals was to inflame a war with the muslim world. If the US didn’t give it to him, and his “allies” in the muslim world didn’t, then he’s not much cop is he? This really is just all pointless speculation, though, so let’s put it aside…
Sorry, but now you’re misunderstanding the precautionary principle.
I don’t want to get hung up on definitions, since I’m not even sure in this post what starting point I’m coming from … but I think you’re overegging the precautionary principle. According to the wiki you link to, it is itself quite contradictory, and not exactly clearly of one form or another, and it definitely doesn’t support “spending any amount”:
As I read that, the second sentence contradicts the first, since (surely?) the precautionary principle (PP) could be taken just as much to oppose action to prevent mitigation? In the absence of scientific evidence that a product will damage the environment, we should not use it; but surely then, in the absence of scientific evidence that the mitigation will be necessary, we should not waste the money? Maybe I’m overegging that interpretation … anyway, note the caveats: “the lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing …” i.e. don’t wait until you’re absolutely certain that it won’t damage the environment before acting. Would have been good if that principle had been more well known back, oo, in 1990 when the Liberal Party ran against Bob Hawke with a platform of 20% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (and lost!) Also note that the principle as phrased by the UN only allows for “cost-effective measures,” so it definitely says nothing about “spending any amount.” It might, in the minds of some hippies somewhere; it may have in the mind of Andrew Peacock in 1990, when he was running with the aforementioned better-than-the-kyoto-protocol environmental policy; but really you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between the conclusions of the Rio “earth summit” as written in that precautionary principle and the demands of latter day AGW denialists when they demand cost-benefit analyses for every single intervention proposed. Maybe it’s not such an earth-friendly principle at all…?
Incidentally, the precautionary principle is at the heart of modern pharmaceutical research: Phase 1 trials are all about safety, and you can’t proceed to Phase 2 or 3 until you’ve confirmed safety; you then need to have a strict element of your Phase 3 research protocol which allows for cutting short the trial if serious harm is observed, or if there is premature evidence of success (in this case you usually have to switch all the controls to receive the drug for ethical reasons). I think this is driven by the lessons of earlier drug trials, especially things like thalidomide[4]. Obviously the precautionary principle is very important when trialling things like this – would have been good if it had been applied to DDT before the era of widespread crop-spraying, too, wouldn’t it?
David Brin thinks that denialists use the precautionary principle (and Cheney too!) The National Centre for Policy Analysis certainly use it to argue against mitigation[5]. Australia’s hotbed of libertarian stupidity, Catallaxy (who never saw a speed limit they couldn’t abolish) use it. But you’re right, as far as I can tell Bolt doesn’t.
And my final point is that while you’re willing to assign lives saved to disease prevention…
I was hoping in this post to have segued away from a direct comparison of disease prevention and military spending (except as an aside about my response to Professor Quiggin’s peskiness in paragraph 2), but I think you would even then – in the modern world, anyway – be hard pressed to make the case in favor of defense spending. Consider, for example, the 200 billion US$ spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 10 years. I don’t think anyone seriously accepts that Hussein was murdering millions, or even tens of thousands of people, nor that he was ever going to again, even putting aside the possibilities inherent in the Arab spring. The invasion of Iraq killed a million Iraqis and drove another 2 (4?) million out of their homes, destroyed the infrastructure and set the economy back significantly; Afghanistan’s border regions are in a state of continuous unrest now, and Pakistan is suffering significant stability issues. So in addition to the direct cost in lives in the affected countries, the money could have been spent on, e.g. 10 years of vaccination efforts against polio, which exists now only in conflict-riven countries – one of them being Pakistan. Alternatively the money could have been spent on HIV prevention and treatment in Africa, saving probably millions of lives. Had this been done, Saddam Hussein would still be alive and might have killed a few hundreds or thousands of political opponents – a number of opponents that probably would have been balanced by the number of US soldiers who didn’t die in that conflict (about 2500). It’s really hard to argue for US military action in the middle east on a cost-benefit basis.
Historical dictators are a different issue, and yes you could probably construct an argument for shifting development aid money into warfare against the USSR, but this would have to have been done before 1945, i.e. before 1939, because after 1945 the Soviet Union had nukes and thus no military intervention would turn up a plus on the benefit-cost analysis spreadsheet (North Korea is in this position too). But before 1936, Hitler was an ally of the west, helping them to destroy communism in Spain – couldn’t allow that pernicious ideology to spread its gulags anywhere! By the time “peace for our time” was announced, the west had been busily ignoring Hitler’s actions for about a decade, in the interests of fighting communism. He came to power in Germany over the bodies of a lot of dead social democrats, and for a lot of western ideologues a few more wouldn’t have gone astray. The Daily Mail, for example, were supporters of Hitler, and Nazi Germany was part of the Non-Intervention Committee that sided with Nationalist Spain. If ever there was a case of a cost-benefit analysis that went wrong, it’s the decision of the European powers to side with fascism against the expansion of communism in Europe.
Anyway, that’s this thread Godwinned…
fn1: fuck I hate that term – black swans were probably predictable if the theory of evolution were known, and were an important part of the development of that theory
fn2: cool, a footnote followed by parentheses – we’re really going for clarity tonight aren’t we?
fn3: or whatever other cool phrase you want to insert here for “things could be a lot crazier than we can model them”
fn4: although maybe thalidomide was also blighted by a researcher falsifying data – I can’t remember the story clearly.
fn5: You can see from this that I have google on my computer …
October 26, 2011 at 3:06 pm
”I think counting the CO2 cost would be a bit like applying an IDU weight. You can only look at the direct cost and effect of the treatment, right?”
Counting CO2 costs is more like assessing all the relevant costs when doing the analysis. If someone suggested assessing the cost of going to war and then ignored the cost of having the troops available but unused then they’d massively overestimate the cost because they’re starting from the wrong base.
I find the interesting point from this is that it demonstrates how economic assessments of CO2 are anti-human in that killing people is shown as a possessing a lower cost than it would have if CO2 was ignored. Despite this it’s not the equivalent of an IDU weight as it doesn’t distort the assessment. It actually reflects the assessment that the CO2 analysis provides.
Please note I’m not saying that I know of anyone who actually supports killing people to reduce CO2 emissions, nor that this argument is accepted anywhere. It’s just that it’s one of the dislikable outcomes from an economic assessment. Additionally I must say that it’s no more perverse than suggesting person X should be denied their critical medicine so that people Y and Z can both receive slightly less critical medicine.
So consider it speaking from cross-benches. It’s not a nice outcome, but it is a logical one. And considering it in assessments of the cost benefit analysis of other decisions is not inappropriate, just distasteful.
”cost-benefit analysis (and cost-effectiveness analysis) only really works in equilibrium situations: that is, where your system is in equilibrium and you are assessing the value of a small change that doesn’t disturb the equilibrium.”
That’s not true. It’s just that some black swan events (i.e. wars and AGW) have such massive costs and low probability that you can model them as 0.0000001% chance of costing everything forever. As you pointed out in your original posts update, costing everything forever does not provide an infinite cost due to discount factors, but it does tend to give a massive one. Therefore small changes in the risk assessment can massively swing your decision making process.
Given that the risk assessment for such events is by its very nature highly inaccurate/subjective it just means that it’s a bad tool to use due to insufficient data to create a real risk profile.
And to be clear, I wasn’t saying that war should be given the benefit of the doubt but AGW shouldn’t. I was saying both should be assessed under the same logic. That logic tends to contain an element of “We can’t assess the risk level accurately, so we don’t just use maths, but we can make some level of estimate on it to guide our reasoning.”
Amusingly, I find that AGW supports like to use this logic to AGW prevention scenarios, but then reject defence spending based on similar logic.
”the main point was wondering what would happen if the US just ignored OBL. Or treated the issue of terrorism on a purely law enforcement/border control level.”
I’m happy to put this aside, but I will note that treating it as a minor nuisance or problem to deal with via existing channels was tried for the decades under Reagan and Clinton. What happens is eventually something so bad happens that your stance of disinterest drops. The only way to avoid that (in a democracy) is have a populace set its expectations on terrorism acceptance to levels that I can’t imagine any democracy accepting [1].
”it is itself quite contradictory, and not exactly clearly of one form or another, and it definitely doesn’t support “spending any amount””
Hmm, I agree it doesn’t support spending any amount. That’s my own dislike of it speaking. I’ve primarily seen it used to deny a new technology regardless of the foregone advantage (which is different to spending any amount) simply because the technology cannot be proven 100% safe. An example was the court case to prevent the Large Hadron Collider from turning on as it could create black holes. Obviously that couldn’t be 100% disproven except by turning it on.
Theoretically you could apply it to any change (making it a conservative argument instead of a green one), but practically I believe that most people who argue that way are just being “pesky”.
”Incidentally, the precautionary principle is at the heart of modern pharmaceutical research.”
This is incorrect in my observations of its use. The precautionary principle is invoked not as call to proceed cautiously, but instead as a reason to not proceed unless the course of action can be demonstrated to be risk free. So unless the GM food can be shown to be risk free it should not be grow instead of “don’t grow too much and be ready to set the area alight if we think it’s escaped the fields it should be in”.
To provide some guide on its use, a Google search shows:
1.69M uses of “Precautionary principle”
147k uses of “Precautionary principle genetically modified food”
548k uses of “Precautionary principle food”
63k uses of “Precautionary principle nanotechnology”
20k uses of “Precautionary principle AGW”
188k uses of “Precautionary principle global warming”
I can’t find a way to split the global warming usage into pro action or inaction, but we can assume the food and nanotechnology ones are all talking about its use to prevent the technology in question. Based on that, it’s primarily a green argument, though if you can split the AGW category I’m willing to discuss further.
”I was hoping in this post to have segued away from a direct comparison of disease prevention and military spending”
I’ve got to confess I had a hard time grasping the point of the post, especially given that your update at the end contradicted (and corrected) what seemed to be its main point about assessing theoretically infinite returns.
”Consider, for example, the 200 billion US$ spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 10 years. I don’t think anyone seriously accepts that Hussein was murdering millions, or even tens of thousands of people, nor that he was ever going to again, even putting aside the possibilities inherent in the Arab spring.”
While the suffering of Iraqis (or any nation) is a terrible thing, it’s not the primary cost assessment reason to go to war. The primary cost driver is “I think that if we don’t go to war with this person it significantly risks our way of life.” “Our way of life” is code for “Threatens a cost of everything we have for all future time periods assessed.” Examples would be the Soviet Union invading or being invaded by America. While their people may have survived [2] the nations planners didn’t assess life under the other government as having a value. If they had then the Soviet’s should have assessed that life was better under the American system, therefore they should have minimised the defence spending then triggered something that would get them invaded.
Instead the Soviets assessed not living under Soviet rules as worth $0. And it is how countries tend to think about defence. And probably should in my opinion – I don’t want defence spending aimed at convincing the invaders to give me tax breaks or perks in exchange for not fighting, I want to convince the invaders to not invade.
Likewise, governments should prioritise their own people when assessing benefits. That’s way NHS funding is spent on helping people in the UK instead of vaccinations in Bangladesh. Comparing US defence spending and sub-Saharan vaccination in a cost benefit analysis is a total wank. You may as well assess university funding for mathematics against the vaccinations, the answer is always that the vaccinations are better but no one actually volunteers the funding from their job to be removed to go to the vaccinations.
”Historical dictators are a different issue”
No sorry. My point is that historical dictators are exactly the same issue. When you assess defence spending you don’t say “Hitler liked killing people, but OBL is a jolly fellow who only wants you to bow in the right direction”. You say “Hitler and OBL enjoy killing people who disagree with them, and we disagree with them.” After that it’s just an analysis of the effectiveness of your opponent. Hitler in 1932 to the mid 1930s is probably assessed as an equal risk to OBL, not serious unless he succeeds in his stated goal of becoming a bigger threat. In both cases the answer isn’t “Increase aid payments” it’s “Stop him now before the cost effective solution becomes investigate time travel and killing him in his crib.”
The fact that the West tolerated one way too long and tried at a massive cost to stop the other in a really ineffectual manner means that the resulting costs can’t be directly compared. But we can compare the cost of WWII to the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan and in essence that answer is “nigh trivial”. We can support fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan forever if it avoids another WWII style event. This type of war can be compared to the school of thought that says “We should just tolerate terrorism, the odds of being killed by it are tiny compared to X”, well “We should just tolerate incessant badly planned and executed attempts to bring democracy to countries that don’t want it, the cost is trivial compared to allowing another low probability massive impact event like WWII happening.”
But that point loops back to my earlier one that you assess wars (and AGW) using different assessments to ones for disease prevention.
[1] Your going to provide the Troubles or something similar as an example of what people will accept. If should be pretty clear I mean “accept without insisting on stronger counteraction”.
[2] Assuming it’s not total nuclear war