This is a great formalization of a three-resource model - time, money and mental energy - which clearly gives much better answers than a two-resource model of only time and money in cases where mental energy is a relevant resource, which is often true.
Despite that, it still feels woefully incomplete/simplified, given how important it is to get something like this right. One of these is that there are lots of resources (N is large) and trading is not cost-less between them; you have to draw the line somewhere, however, and can draw it as needed by a given exercise. I think more importantly than that, it comes down to the fact that while money is fungible and savable, time and mental energy (and many other key resources) aren't. Resources that are use-it-or-lose-it, but vital to pretty much everything, like time, have highly variable marginal value, which makes the calculations very different than described in the paper. I'm going to try and expand/formalize this concept more.
Thanks, I'd love to see what you come up.
I agree that it is a big simplification, but I don't know how much of a practical problem that is, given that a lot of people can get things wrong that would be fixable even by the two-resource model. Still, I fully support having a range of different models of different complexities!
Prioritisation is mostly about working out how to trade different resources off against one another. Prioritisation problems come at different scales: for individuals, for companies or organisations, for the world at large. At the Global Priorities Project we’re mostly interested in the large-scale questions. But we sometimes have something to say about smaller scale problems, too.
I’ve just tidied and released old research notes (mostly from 2013) on the personal prioritisation problem of how to value time spent on different activities. This is primarily of use for individuals making decisions about how to spend their time, money, and mental energy.
There may be benefits for broader prioritisation questions. Since societies are comprised of individuals, it could help to know how to value time savings or costs to individuals when performing cost-benefit analysis on larger projects. And there may be techniques for comparing between different resources that we could usefully apply in wider contexts. However we think these benefits are secondary. We’re releasing this work now to let others take advantage of it: either for personal benefit; or to build on it and release easier-to-use guidance or tools.
You can find the full document here. I'm happy to answer questions and I'd love to know if people have thoughts on this material.