I don't see the relevance of this – can you elaborate?
You told us that the value of a year of our life is the value of a year of our work, which is in turn assumed to be $60k. We are also assuming we created 51 years of life in someone and that each of their years is worth at least 1/3 of the value of ours. You then directly divide one of these by the other in order to pull out "17x as much". Either you are equivocating between two entirely different measures of value (in which case you can't just divide one by the other and produce a meaningful scale factor) or "to a first approximation" the average amount yearly income over those 51 years for the hypothetical saved person must be $20k.
Essentially, this number (17x) that you produce is utterly meaningless. The post would be strictly better if you had just said "You can save 51 years of life for just $2k to $10k. That's probably more important than most things you will do. How amazing!"
Either you are equivocating between two entirely different measures of value (in which case you can't just divide one by the other and produce a meaningful scale factor) or "to a first approximation" the average amount yearly income over those 51 years for the hypothetical saved person must be $20k.
I was using two different measures of value.
...Essentially, this number (17x) that you produce is utterly meaningless. The post would be strictly better if you had just said "You can save 51 years of life for just $2k to $10k. That's probably mo
In my last post I wrote about how Peter Singer’s implicit past claim that [one can save a child’s life for the cost of a pair of shoes] is misleading.
Having said that, it’s important to highlight that if one ignores indirect effects, funding bed net distribution to save lives is an extremely good opportunity for people in the developed world to increase the number of valuable years of life that people experience.
The situation is probably completely different when one considers indirect effects. I’ll postpone discussion of indirect effects to a later date.
Consider the question of what the quality of life is in the developing world. The GiveWell blog post Quality of life in the developing world reads:
The reader can draw his or her own conclusion from this. It seems likely to me that the average life in the developing world is worth living, and that the value of an average year of life in the developing world is no more than 3x lower than the value of an average year of life in the developed world.
In my last post, I wrote about how the explicit estimate for Against Malaria Foundation’s marginal cost per life saved is $2k, and the fact that the actual cost could be significantly higher owing to Bayesian regression.
Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell. All views are my own.