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 more important than most things you will do. How amazing!"
My post addresses the differential in quality of life. The choice of a factor of 3x is somewhat arbitrary. But it arguably makes things more vivid than "51 years of life."
I don't necessarily stand by an upper bound of $10k on cost per life saved.
I was using two different measures of value.
Yes. Creating arbitrary assumptions that are in opposition to each other is not necessarily outright fallacious but it is certainly something that requires some significant justification. There is a rather large 'arbitrariness' overhead for assuming two contradictory measures of value in a way that happens to be convenient for a desired agenda that is above and beyond the arbitrariness of the assumptions considered separately.
The calculations and conclusions in this post are presented as shutting up and multip...
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.