Hm, that's an interesting way of looking at it, to be polite.
So, how much would you pay to prevent me from, say, burning the Mona Lisa? Or pulverizing the Statue of David? Or bombing the Sistine Chapel?
I don't think it's valid at all to assume that everything can have a dollar value associated with it; that would mean that the word "priceless" would be meaningless.
...and I happen to think that the value of life in the Gulf is pretty priceless.
Would you sacrifice your father, mother, sister, brother, etc, to save the Mona Lisa?
Would you allow a type of fish to go extinct because some eccentric billionaire has a grudge against it and offers to end world hunger if you do?
Not easy questions, and clearly not all "priceless" things are equal. But if you go about ranking things and comparing how much you want one thing or another, you're basically giving it a price.
A loaf of bread isn't "worth" $4. It being $4 just means that you would like a loaf of bread approximately as much as a venti frappuccino, or that you'd be willing to work 15 mins (if you make $16/hr) for it.
So, yes, I could assign dollar amounts to all of those questions.
Think of it this way: What positive thing would you see done in exchange for the burning of the Mona Lisa? Nothing at all, really? You wouldn't have us land a man on Mars? Surely that would be as historic and beautiful as the Mona Lisa. What about free art supplies for life for an entire generation? Maybe that would inspire some artist to create something as breathtaking as the Mona Lisa.
Now, once you have that minimum positive thing, ask how much it costs. (e.g. free art supplies for life for a generation: 100M people * $250/yr * 80 yrs = $2T.) That's the worth of "priceless" Mona Lisa.
Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the chance to trade the existence of an entire species in order to end world hunger, I would have to decline. I might forever regret the decision, but I have no natural right to make that decision. (Unless we're talking about mosquitoes. I would happily contribute to their extinction.)
If philosophy isn't the proper arena for this crowd, then perhaps game theory is more applicable: if I decline that offer, then we're no worse off than before; however, if I accept, we may be better off -- if the gambit works -- unless there are consequences, in which case we may end up worse off. This is a classic high-risk/high-payoff situation, and I do not gamble.
A loaf of bread is $4 not because it has anything to do with what I'm "willing" to pay for, but because someone has calculated that they can produce that product and sell it for that price and continue doing business. You might counter-argue that they only charge that because enough people are willing to pay for it, but the reality is macroeconomics is much different -- as is the reality of supermarket pricing.
It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people.
I mean, to bring this point home, how about if someone asks me if I'm willing to trade the lives of your family for the sake of feeding the homeless in my county? Based on your argument so far, that should be an easy choice for me to make ...
"Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make."
Ah, but here's the kicker: When it comes to valuing things, you can't help but choose. If you refuse to choose between the life of your $FAVORITE_PERSON and the destruction of the Sistene Chapel, then you have chosen whatever consequences arise when you refuse to choose.
The important thing is not the specifics at stake, which are quite silly here, but the fact that you have to choose. You can't not. You don't get to not choose because it's "arrogant" to choose. You don't get to not choose because "it's hard". You have to choose. Choosing to "not choose" is a choice and in whatever situation your are in constitutes some choice itself.
People in the real world have literally and truly faced the choice of which of their children they will save. They chose something. I imagine a non-trivial number of them were paralyzed by the logic you are applying and chose poorly as a result.
It may help if you realize that a dollar isn't just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one's family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They're not just scores in a game. They're human life.
(In other news, I consider white collar crime grotesquely under punished. Bernie Madoff may not have killed a man, but the damage he did in the aggregate adds up to at least one murder, in my book. He did not steal dollars, he stole life.)
I agree with you in general, but I'm not so sure when we look at something like Madoff where money literally vanishes. That money, as you say, represents an actual value that did not actually vanish. It's rather hard to say where it went, but it's unclear that there's a net drop in value for humanity.
This could in a certain sense be a case where the broken window fallacy actually holds up to scrutiny. Since the money is merely symbolic, no value is actually lost, merely shifted. People are adversely affected, but if they are spurred to create more value, it's plausible that the net benefit is positive to society.
There is, if nothing else, the opportunity cost of where that money could have been productively invested instead of wasted to no effect.
Money and wealth aren't directly connected (IMHO a critical and underrated aspect of understanding real-world economics), and it is true that money rarely justs evaporates. Wealth can, though, and even merely inefficiently applying money can build up to an opportunity cost. There were better things to do with that money than to spend effort making it, then piss it away.
You're right. It was a consumption transfer away from Madoff's victims and to Madoff and his beneficiaries (with some blow-off to the rest of the economy when Madoff lost money in bad investments). Although there is some value lost whenever anyone invests in unproductive activities, because investment is an encouragement to those inefficient activities.
Theoretically, that would mean that none of the victims were defrauded of any money, or the ones that received money fraudulently could conceivably be forced to return it. But that's not my understanding of what has happened.
Actually, the earlier "victims" tend to make out pretty well, especially in the beginning. Later victims purely lost out. And Madoff certainly "skimmed" enough to live pretty well on.
Most of the Madoff money didn't "vanish", it never existed in the first place. He just made up numbers and sent them out on account statements. That money didn't go anywhere since it wasn't actually money to begin with.
> you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make
Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose?
It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option.
Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.
I am refusing to be backed into the corner you're painting with your hypotheticals, yes.
I think we'll have to simply disagree here. I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.
If deepwater oil drilling cannot be done without a near 100% guarantee against disasters like this one, then I simply think it shouldn't be done. I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.
Well, what percent guarantee would you need? Is 99.9% per year per well good enough? 99.999%? Seven nines? And how do you propose to measure that risk? These types of situations are after all inherently unforeseen.
Anyway, by admitting that a near 100% guarantee is good enough for you (no matter what that "near" is), you've admitted that you're willing to put a price on it. That price is, naturally, the dollar amount that would be required to reach the level of guarantee you want. So yes, the rest of this conversation has just been you being difficult.
I try to live deontologically in my personal life. With limited success, as you can see by my harassing this guy even though I should just leave him alone. But it just gets too complicated when you apply it to large systems like society . . . it becomes impossible to reason about. Nice observation though.
I am a virtue ethicist for consequentialist reasons. While good results (consequences) are the end of my ethics, the real world is too complex for a real time evaluation of the likely results of even relatively simple decisions. So you use virtues (my definition is slightly non-standard) - rules that are more likely than not to result in better outcomes.
No, and your accusation that I'm "just being difficult" is starting to piss me off. I think you're a short-sighted, self-centered, argumentative, nihilistic, and stubborn little annoyance -- but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so.
Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed.
Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything.
Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster.
Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.
> but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so
Sure you did; you were just passive-aggressive about it with that "to be polite" bit at the start. You're the one who took the dialogue to this level. I'm just more direct.
> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster
Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner. There are other adjectives to describe it but I think the one I've already used is apt. Anyway, I'm sure you don't mean this, or wouldn't if you would just think about what you're asking for for a second. Since I can't seem to get a thoughtful, honest answer out of you, continuing this is probably not productive . . . although that was probably true several posts ago.
>> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster
>Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner.
But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?
That said, by allowing for a dollar cost thaumaturgy was not holding the debate hostage. In fact, he accepted your challenge to debate him in the frame of reference YOU set up. A frame of reference which, btw, is not the only one in common use to decide such questions.
What you need to respond with now to keep your credibility is whether the 'true' dollar cost is:
a) The cost to mitigate every single effect from the disaster.
or
b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells then perhaps we should explore them rather than drilling.
> But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?
It's not an ethical impossibility. It's a pragmatic imperative. AND it's the root of the entire conversation. It's what I started this comment tree about! How can it possibly be holding up the debate to talk about it?
> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible. Some obvious things I don't really care about are restoring BPs bottom-line to its pre-disaster levels. As a general rule I'm also not interested in paying to mitigate damage to wildlife that would fall under ICUN's Least Concern designation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_Concern) even after all harm to populations from the spill are taken into account. I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.
Endangered animals I do want to protect, but once again there's a line somewhere (I don't know where) where their protection costs more than its worth. For example, if there is a rare mosquito in the marshes of southern Louisiana that ends up being wiped out entirely because of this crisis, I would not assign a cost of a billion dollars to that lost. Some cost, yes, but not a billion dollars.
If the oil slick bears out to be very large but cause small or questionable harm across a huge region, I also don't think we should necessarily spend money compensating the victims of such small harms. (For example, even if the oil spill stopped now some amount of oil would probably disperse even as far as the west coast of the U.S. after enough time.) To assign a metric, if the amount of compensation we might provide to a given victim is less than ten times the administrative cost of giving that compensation, we should not compensate.
Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up. Obviously this would be a really bad trade because the fishing in that region accounts for a much smaller portion of GDP than a quarter. BP should have to pay to support the people in that region, but realistically even the profits of an oil giant like BP would quickly be quenched under such a deluge of liability. Maybe the government can help them move and pay for their retraining, but in the end there is no point throwing good money after bad. They would need to do something else or maybe relocate to another place.
Obviously all these numbers are sketches. I can hardly tell you what the actual numbers are (if you'll recall, my initial comment was a request for speculation on what that number might be). But there is no question that there is a number, or a range of reasonable numbers, to describe the cost of this disaster.
> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .
That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling? We are talking about whether it makes sense to assign a numeric cost to the disaster, which it obviously does.
>> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.
> Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible.
So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?
> I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.
Often yes I agree with you. Although that is not an absolute. Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem so the extinction of a species not directly used by humans may cause difficulties if it is necessary for the continued survival of another species which IS directly used by humans.
> Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up.
Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!
:)
>> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .
> That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling?
My bad, I completely misread you.
I think you will be sympathetic to my mistake given that cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms are so commonly used to justify ideas that would still be bad no matter how good the numbers looked.
> So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?
No, I'm quantifying it in terms of how much I'd want to see paid to avoid that outcome, or in terms of how much would need to be spent to "make it right" to my own satisfaction. There's nothing about such a quantification that is entropically impossible. Put another way, there's basically no possible outcome of this disaster that you could not pay me _some_ amount of money to endure. But the amount might have to be very high.
> Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem . . .
I agreed elsewhere that that would have to be taken into account when calculating the total cost.
> Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!
Yeah, that's pretty bad, right? Hopefully that is the worst case scenario, but I'm no biologist so I'd have to leave that to them. One of my friends tells me that oil does break down in water over time and that it is unlikely it would be that bad.
But even if that were to happen, life would go on, albeit worse than before. This account of the after affects of the gulf war spill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) gives me some hope that although there will doubtless be great harm from this spill, it is not going to be the end of the world.
> cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms
OK, I see where you are coming from. I am entirely amenable to the outcome being that offshore drilling is not worth it given the extent of this disaster. Personally I think gasoline should cost much more than it does in the U.S. today, and that would go some way toward making that a reality. But I do want to look at it honestly.
Mate, I think you should seriously reread what he wrote. It seems like you literally don't understand what he wrote, not that you understand but disagree.
> I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.
That's nice, but how about some evidence. After all, you're wanting to spend a lot of money.
> I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.
You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the statement, your actions "put a price" on the existence many species. You may not want that to be true, but it is.
As a result, the question really is "What is the price?", not "Do you want to put a price on it?"
Not to butt in, but I think he is alluding to the value of things are inherent in you placing importance on them. That you possibly value a species more than 1 single human life is your personal values, but they exist nonetheless. Also, without the "death" part of it on one end: do you value a species enough to spend a full year of your time on helping that species continue to exist? A month? A day? An hour?
We inherently place importance on things by a) spending time on those things, or b) spending money we earned by working on those things.
To be fair thaumaturgy, even economists regularly append values onto 'priceless' things. For instance (this excerpt taken from Freakonomics):
> "Consider the effort to save the modern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs -- that is, the income surrendered by the logging company and others -- would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million an owl."
This is followed by a list used by the state of Connecticut in determining the amount of compensation allocated to work-related incidents - a specific value for the dismemberment of each body part.
The OP's point wasn't that this habit of affixing values is ethical, or even wanted, but that it is possible. You are arguing that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) it is not wanted.
The first is not true because thought experiments usually are ridiculous (hence the qualifier 'if') and even if this were not so, as the Freakonomics example shows, there are certain instances in real life where you would have to put a dollar value on a 'priceless' transaction in order for things to work.
And the second is also mistaken because, while something may not be nice to think about, that fact doesn't detract from the fact that it can be done, and is done, sometimes for good reason.
Quoting the figure that way is really strange. The relevant thing isn't the cost per owl alive now but either the cost per owl potentially alive now and in the future (probably with some discount rate) or the cost for the species considered as a whole.
Imagine three alternative worlds. One is ours. One has 10x as many spotted owls currently alive. One has 1/10 as many. In all of them, the owls will (all) go extinct unless we spend $46bn. Does it really make sense to say that in one case the cost is $900k/owl, in another it's $9M/owl, and in another it's $90M/owl? Is there any plausible belief about the value of these owls that would say we should be willing to pay 100x more to prevent extinction in the case where there are 50k of them rather than 500?
(It would probably make sense to pay some more when the population is larger. Larger population now means (a) probably larger populations in the future if extinction is averted and (b) better prospects that avoiding extinction now really will avoid extinction for longer. But I don't see any reason to think that either of these is simply proportional to the present population, or anything like it.)
> It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people.
Air for electricity. Risk (ie, life) for progress.
The choices have been made before, and will be made in the future. Refusing to admit that such choices exist is your choice... but then how do you explain reality? Doublethink?
No big, homie. It apparently wasn't very popular and I guess it wasn't adding much. So I figured I'd delete it to avoid cluttering up this discussion with things people unambiguously did not want to see.
The amount that people are willing to pay to prevent the Mona Lisa burning is proportional to the amount that the Louvre spends on fire prevention, etc. You can put a value on anything, even if only implicitly. It's silly to call something "priceless" (except rhetorically.)
I am sure there is someone who would pay you $60 million to prevent burning the Mona Lisa. I don't value it that highly. David even less so. Sistine Chapel in my mind is worth more than both.
You and I disagree on the ability to measure disasters in terms of money. OK, how about this: let's measure it in terms of Iraq wars.
If you had the choice to put our national/world life through this N times or the Iraq war once, how large is N?
We all like to think that life is 'priceless' but the truth is we put dollar values on people's lives routinely. Just ask insurance companies or the health care system or charities.
There's no such thing as 'priceless'. The Mona Lisa is worth more than $10 million but certainly less than $10 billion. Same for David or the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure these treasures are also insured for some fixed amount too. We may call them 'priceless' mainly because they can't be replaced, not because they actually have infinite value.
Actually : common misconception on the insurance for 'priceless' artworks.
Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of their budgets, which are usually state / ticket sales funded, and there are major valuation problems on irreplaceable artworks, as you have pointed out. Musuems probably spend more money on public liability insurance than they do on their artworks.
Instead they put the money they would have spent on premiums into fire and security systems, and 'self insure' to an extent.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 'priceless' is actually originally a technical insurance term, like 'write off' that has entered the lexicon (probably not true, just using it to make a point)
disclosure : used to do some coding for one of the worlds 'great' museums, learned a lot of this stuff.
So, how much would you pay to prevent me from, say, burning the Mona Lisa? Or pulverizing the Statue of David? Or bombing the Sistine Chapel?
I don't think it's valid at all to assume that everything can have a dollar value associated with it; that would mean that the word "priceless" would be meaningless.
...and I happen to think that the value of life in the Gulf is pretty priceless.