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What about the cost of pain from the flu shot? Based on my past experiences (all from childhood, so maybe not that accurate for me now), I would be willing to pay $20-$50 to avoid the pain from a shot. I also didn't find the flu that unpleasant, so I might only be willing to pay $120-150 to avoid it assuming no risk of death. It seems like the expected value of a flu shot is small enough for these sorts of subjective preferences to tip the balance in many cases.
Link: The Openness-Equality Trade-Off in Global Redistribution
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2509305
A very interesting (draft of a) paper that discusses trade-offs between immigrants' civil/political rights and the number of immigrants allowed. Is it better to decrease inequality within a rich country by treating immigrants well, or is it better to let in more immigrants with fewer rights?
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
But unless your population ethics are "fine-tuned" to make Plus and Minus equally cost-effective, one of them will be clearly better (more cost-effective) than the other. If you think Minus is better than Plus, then Minus is better than Plus+Minus, which is better than Growth, so you should donate exclusively to Minus.
I don't think this follows. If you think that Minus is better than Plus, it does not follow that Minus is better than Plus+Minus. Likewise, if you think that Plus is better than Minus, it does not follow that Plus is better than Plus+Minus. The key is that with certain population ethics, the change caused by Plus or Minus is context-dependent.
For instance, suppose you have average utilitarianism and utility is proportional to income per year. Also assume an existing population of two people each earning $500 in a poor country.
Minus causes one less person to be born in the poor country. This doesn't change the average, so with Minus you have spent $1000 for no change in utility at all.
Plus costs $6000 and causes there to now be 3 people. Overall utility is (5000 + 500 + 500)/3 = 2000
Minus + plus costs $7000 and causes there to be 2 people with overall utility of (5000 + 500)/2 = 2750
Plus has a cost per added utilon of 6000 / (2000 - 500) = 4. Minus+plus has a cost per added utilon of 7000 / (2750 - 500) = 3 + change
Therefore plus+minus is better than plus which is better than minus.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
I assumed that the effect of the intervention is "small enough relative to the world" for your population ethics to be smooth. For average utilitarianism in particular, this corresponds to the percentage change in population being small. In your scenario, this isn't true, since there are only 2 people, but in the real world it holds up very well. Just 1% of the world population is 70 million people, and virtually no intervention (except for things like existential risk reduction) could cause such a large population change.
Forcing anyone to stay in their current relationship forever or forever preventing them from entering a relationship would be quite bad. In order to help him, he'd have to be doing worse than that.
The way to help him would be a bit trickier than that: let him have "good" relationships but not bad. Let him leave "bad" relationships but not good. And then control his mental behaviors so that he's not allowed to spend time being miserable about his lack of options... (it's hard to force rationality)
Controlling his mental behaviors would either be changing his preferences or giving him another option. For judging whether he is behaving irrationally, shouldn't his preferences and set of choices be held fixed?
How do you distinguish his preferences being irrationally inconsistent [...] from him truly wanting to be in relationships periodically[...]?
By talking to him. If it's the latter, he'll be able to say he prefers flip flopping like it's just a matter of fact and if you probe into why he likes flip flopping, he'll either have an answer that makes sense or he'll talk about it in a way that shows that he is comfortable with not knowing. If it's the former, he'll probably say that he doesn't like flip flopping, and if he doesn't, it'll leak signs of bullshit. It'll come off like he's trying to convince you of something because he is. And if you probe his answers for inconsistencies he'll get hostile because he doesn't want you to.
I'm not sure where you're going with the "magic pill" hypotheticals, but I agree. The only thing I can think to add is that a lot of times the "winning behaviors" are largely mental and aren't really available until you understand the situation better.
For example, if you break your foot and can't get it x-rayed for a day, the right answer might be to just get some writing done - but if you try to force that behavior while you're suffering, it's not gonna go well. You have to actually be able to dismiss the pain signal before you have a mental space to write in.
I'm not sure where you're going with the "magic pill" hypotheticals, but I agree.
I meant that if someone is behaving irrationally, forcing them to stop that behavior should make them better off. But it seems unlikely to me that forcing him to stay in his current relationship forever, or preventing him from ever entering a relationship (these are the two ways he can be stopped from flip-flopping) actually benefit him.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
Have people made estimates of how cost-effective these are?
Yes, they did. In real world, "Plus" option means "one more person born in a middle-income country, in a poor and uneducated family". And even that is expensive.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
That might be the most cost-effective Plus option, actually - if you crudely model the cost of one extra birth as proportional to the child's future income, then diminishing marginal utility of income means that it's better to promote births in poorer countries (up to a point). The optimal income level at which to do a Plus intervention (in terms of maximizing the cost-effectiveness of Plus+Minus) depends on the cost of preventing a birth in a poor country. If the cost is high, you'd want Plus to be in a richer country due to the "overhead" of the Minus intervention, but if Minus costs almost nothing, you'd want Plus to be in a country only slightly richer than the Minus country.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
That would be an example of Growth.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
I think this would almost certainly be more cost-effective than Plus+Minus if you were a government, but I'm not sure how easy or hard it would be for an individual to influence their government's immigration policy.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
It seems to me that there's a simpler argument for the same conclusion with the same premises. Consider any small population-changing intervention. If it's small then it's approximately reversible. Either it or its reverse will have positive rather than negative impact. It such interventions are cheap enough, the impact will still be positive after accounting for cost. If you got staggeringly unlucky and picked an intervention of near-zero net impact, pick a different one instead.
Of course all the premises are somewhat questionable, but that's true whichever formulation of the argument one uses.
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If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
It's not obvious to me why small interventions should be reversible - can you explain? The fact that lives of type X (e.g. people born in a particular place) are cheap to create and prevent doesn't mean it should be done independent of your population ethics: if you think X-type lives are neutral, it's not worth changing the number of them. It needs to be cheap to create/prevent at least two different types of lives which are clearly different in expected utility. That way, someone who thinks that one type is neutral will find the other type highly non-neutral and be in favor of changing its population size.
For example, even if it's cheap to change the number of people living on $500 per year, someone who thinks those lives are barely worth living wouldn't do it. But if it's also cheap to change the number living on $50,000 per year, then the same person would be in favor of increasing that number. The idea is that nobody should view both types of lives as neutral, since they are very different and most people think it's very good to improve an existing person's income by 100-fold.
If interventions changing population size are cheap, they may be the best option independent of your population ethics
In this post I'll explain why you might want to assist altruistic interventions that change the size of the world population regardless of how valuable you think additional lives are. The argument relies on a combination of 2 population-changing interventions that combine to produce the effect of a non-population-changing intervention, but at a lower cost.
Suppose you can donate to the following 3 interventions:
- "Growth": increase one future person's income from $500/yr to $5,000/yr for $10,000
- "Plus": cause one more person to be born in a middle-income country (income ~$5,000/yr) for $6,000
- "Minus": cause one less person to be born in a poor country (income ~$500/yr) for $1,000
Assume that the interventions are independent, and that donating multiples of the cost produces multiples of the effect without diminishing returns.
The cost estimates are completely made up; the point of this post is to explain what happens if the total cost of Plus and Minus is less than the cost of Growth. The cost of Plus is probably least well-known, since it's the least popular of the 3. Also, in the real world, you would probably want to spread the impact of $10,000 across at least several people instead of increasing one person's income by 10x, but I think the post makes more sense this way. If you know a more reasonable estimate for the costs, please post them!
If you donate to Plus and Minus, the total effect is the same as the effect of Growth in many ways - in the future, there is one more person with income $5,000, one less person with income $500, and the size of the world population remains the same. In my last post, I asked about whether consequentialists actually view the two outcomes as equivalent, and people seemed to think yes, so it's reasonable to say that Plus+Minus is just as beneficial as Growth. But Plus+Minus only costs $7,000 while Growth costs $10,000, so regardless of your population ethics, you should prefer donating to Plus+Minus.
But unless your population ethics are "fine-tuned" to make Plus and Minus equally cost-effective, one of them will be clearly better (more cost-effective) than the other. If you think Minus is better than Plus, then Minus is better than Plus+Minus, which is better than Growth, so you should donate exclusively to Minus. The same argument applies if you think Plus is better than Minus. If you donate to only one of Plus and Minus, you will change the size of the world population. So this seems to show that if population-changing interventions are cheap, you should act to change population size regardless of what you think about population ethics. Even if you are very uncertain what the value of a new life is, you can still use your best guess to decide between Plus and Minus as long as you are risk-neutral about how much good you do.
Numerical example: suppose that Growth yields 100 "points" of benefit, where "point" is an arbitrary unit. Then regardless of population ethics, Plus+Minus yields 100 points as well. How these points are distributed between Plus and Minus depends on your population ethics, however. If you are a total utilitarian, you might say that Minus is worth -20 points and Plus is worth 120 points, and if you're a negative utilitarian, you might say that Minus is worth 150 points and Plus -50 points. If you're an average utilitarian, you might say that Minus is worth 70 and Plus is worth 30. But these all sum up to 100, and they would all choose Plus or Minus over Growth: Plus for the total utilitarian and Minus for the others.
What might be wrong with this reasoning? I can think of a few things:
- Plus+Minus is more costly than Growth in reality (quite likely)
- Growth and Plus+Minus are actually not equivalent, since Growth actually helps a particular person (again, see my last post)
I'm really curious about what the costs of economic-growth and population interventions are. I'd guess that population interventions would be competitive with unconditional cash transfer programs like GiveDirectly, but I don't know that much about their effectiveness, and I don't know whether there are economic interventions that are more cost-effective than cash transfers. Here are some population interventions that can be done or funded by individuals:
- Education about contraception
- Having children yourself (cost varies from person to person)
- Paying others to have children
- Subsidizing contraception
- Subsidizing surrogacy (there are replaceability issues here, but I couldn't find any estimates of supply/demand elasticity)
- Being a surrogate yourself (doesn't cost you any money, but can be unpleasant, so the cost varies from person to person)
Have people made estimates of how cost-effective these are? The Plus+Minus vs. Growth hypothetical doesn't work if Growth is actually cheaper, so I want to know if I'm thinking too much about something irrelevant!
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I don't think you do, you are just saying that you do.
I don't see how you can distinguish the two? For a ethical belief that has direct practical implications (e.g. "eating animals is bad"), you can accuse someone of being hypocritical by pointing out that they don't actually act that way (e.g. they eat a lot of meat). But the repugnant conclusion isn't directly applicable to practical decisions - nothing an individual can do will change the world enough to bring it about, and the repugnant conclusion doesn't directly imply anything about the marginal value of quality vs. quantity of lives.