4 ms·

Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions: > Instead we will try to: > 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation

Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions: > Instead we will try to: > 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs. This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years. This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.

robertwiblin 9y ago
It's a very subtle issue I can't go fully into here. I agree with a lot of your concerns. Personally I would usually go for cost-welfare analysis rather than cost-benefit analysis, which resolves many of the problems you're concerned about.
- conjectures 9y ago
  Sure, I was just hoping to move you a little towards the position that lazy exponential discounting is generally not compatible with longtermism. In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means: http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-climate-costs http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-clima... http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questions-epas-cost-estimates-waxman-markey-climate-change-legislation http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questio... So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear position on this.

robertwiblin 9y ago

It's a very subtle issue I can't go fully into here. I agree with a lot of your concerns. Personally I would usually go for cost-welfare analysis rather than cost-benefit analysis, which resolves many of the problems you're concerned about.

conjectures 9y ago
Sure, I was just hoping to move you a little towards the position that lazy exponential discounting is generally not compatible with longtermism. In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means: http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-climate-costs http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-clima... http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questions-epas-cost-estimates-waxman-markey-climate-change-legislation http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questio... So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear position on this.