Economics of Saving Lives

Preventing unnecessary loss of life is a noble goal.But every preventative measure has its costs, and it's probably worth while - before devoting limited resources to any method of saving life - to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the possible methods to make sure we are getting the most for our efforts.So pound for pound what're the most effective life-saving measures we have at our disposal?Keep in mind proposals should include not only a measure of the benefits (lives saved) but also the costs, monetary our otherwise.

Is this specific to the united States? I might point out that if we were able to save or extend every life on the planet, the resources would get choked out and we would have wars.

It's specific to societies that have such options and the ability to choose from them.

Globally, due to excess supplies, humans aren't worth much, pound for pound; say, compared to a beef tenderloin. Perhaps there are no cost-effective measures. If you will persist in saving worthless lives, so those unfortunates can continue to roll from one misery to another, then you could save millions annually cheap: vaccines and toilets. The bumper crop effects of disease prevention and effective sanitation are well established in animal husbandry: pound for pound, you can't do better on the feed lot.If you have a particularly soft spot for children, access to IV fluids and other diarrhea treatments would produce a bumper crop for the next genocidal opportunist. If there's anything left in your charitable pocket, feed my sheep.Nationally, why bother? Way too many people...introduce more wolves instead; grizzlies, too. More and bigger gators could improve the Florida experience for the young. Most Americans have no use for at least half of all other Americans, anyway. One might want to stop suicide prevention and other outreach programs: if there are too many of us to assure a decent life for all, then why string the weak along?Maybe I'm being too cynical. How many lives did you want to save? We need scale to calculate cost.What's my motivation here?

A extra ration of Soylent Green.

How do you decide a priori what will be the "most effective"? How do you know whether that premature baby will become a heart surgeon or a mass murderer? When a man is drowning, do you check him for priors before jumping in after him?As far as I'm concerned, the "most effective" life-saving measures are the universal ones that try to preserve ALL of the potential - for example, universal healthcare.

My kid bro the doctor says:
Don't smoke, don't drink and drive, wear your seatbelt and eat well. These are the most effective health measures of all. And very cost effective too.I doubt they originate with him.And as for what society can do? Make it easier to do the right thing and avoid the wrong thing. Therefore seatbelt laws are very very cost effective.

I guess this thread was mainly started as a response to the Gun Control Again thread, where very little meaningful discussion about the cost and benefits of various types of gun control is taking place (and indeed, has been labeled as off topic several times).I think as far as benefits go the only moral position to take is to treat all lives as equal.A method that saves 1000 people from dying in car accidents offers more benefit than one that saves 500 people from being shot to death.The next point comes in comparing their costs. If the costs are the same, then choosing the latter method is simply immoral. In fact, it is immoral to choose any method that does not maximize the lives saved in exchange for the use of all the resources able to be devoted to saving lives, and so the most cost-effective methods are always better.Of course this thread isn't limited to discussions of gun control just because that was my motivation behind starting it.

This particular principle is not self evident. Perhaps you should make an argument for it. Let's assume for example that the most cost effective measure to preserve life is an anti smoking campaign. Explain to the audience why such a fact makes it immoral to spend any money putting air bags in automobiles if that cost is say twice as much the anti-smoking campaign in terms of dollars per life.Isn't the natural conclusion of your premise that we there should be a single (or at least very few) life savings concerns that are worth any time or attention?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No, it is not, for several reasons, chief among them being the law of diminishing marginal returns.Suppose Method A can initially save 500 lives at a cost of $1 per life (for convenience, I'm using monetary measures of cost, but we can discuss any measures) but an additional 500 lives only come at a cost of $2/life. Suppose Method B can save an initial 500 lives at a cost of $1.50/life and a further 500 at $1.75/life. If we have, let's say, $750 in resources, the logical and moral approach is to devote the first $500 of it toward Method A and the remaining $250 toward Method B for a total lives saved of 666 (no that wasn't intentional ).Another fact, related to this, is that in wealthy first-world societies with many resources the point at which returns start diminishing, even when high, is probably relatively easy to reach for most methods (e.g., methods such as the ones mentioned already by Omnivorous like vaccination and sanitation).Hence we are already dealing with a very limited set of lesser-productive methods left over to choose from for further reducing loss of life and the ideal situation likely involves balancing several or all of them in different proportions to maximize overall cost-effectiveness.So, no, the natural conclusion is not that there will be only a few 'life saving concerns that are worth any time or attention' but that there will be a large number of basic methods employed and a hefty dosage of others strategically combined to maximize their effectiveness.The question is: What will those be?

In fact there are dozens of reasons why we don't pursue only the most cost effective life saving treatment. It turns out that even if we prioritize by cost, not everyone is subject to every situation. It might well be that 1 million dollars will save 100,000 people from disease A, will 2 million dollars will save 50,000 people who are subjected to disease B. So the question is not which disease we will treat, or even which we will treat first. The question is whether we are willing to budget 3 million dollars to address both or whether our money is best spent on something else entirely.Your diminishing returns example is one problem with the principle that we should only spend money or have a discussion about guns when traffic deaths are larger in number than gun death. Another issue is that we can talk about, and be concerned about more than one thing at a time.There are some economics involved, but the idea that talking about curbing traffic deaths is a bad idea when more people die from something else that might be marginally cheaper to fix is pretty much a non-starter. There are lots of things we might divert money away from to enable us to spend money on a second or third level concern.

We can tackle more than one problem at a time. In fact, I gave an example involving just that.It would seem you're not even reading my posts. Your objections to the methodology are entirely meritless.

I directly addressed your claim that addressing a problem that saved fewer people per dollar than another did problem was somehow immoral. If yet another reason that your premise is BS is that we can talk about two problems at once, then that casts even more shadow on your premise.Just as a reminder, here is the statement in dispute. Perhaps my mistake here is assuming I needed to show anyone how stupid the above premise is. I should not have posted at all. I am sure everyone else noticed.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

It is immoral. How can it be anything but immoral? If we have only the resources necessary to address one of the problems, then knowingly addressing the problem that saves fewer lives is immoral. So in Message 9 you thought my method couldn't attend to enough of the life-saving concerns and now you think it is 'BS' because it can consider more than one at a time?Do you enjoy being a tool or is it just something you can't help? Your mistake is the same as it always is: your inability to read and your desire to invent disagreement with me no matter how mundanely true my point.I imagine if I mentioned the sun being yellow you'd find a problem to argue about.Everything has a cost and everything has a benefit; that includes saving lives.

If "life" is not your highest moral priority. I have only minor issues with killing vicious abusers. Sometimes even only animal abusers... not even human abusers.Or if "population control" is something that merits consideration. Not necessarily based on resource management, but perhaps abusive parenting and such instead.There are probably others I can't think of right now.It's easy to say that you don't have to consider such things in an example.
But as soon as you take the lessons of that example and try to apply it to practical, real life... those lessons are useless because now you do have to consider those other obviously-existing issues which will skew the results of the lessons.