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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering about whether this would happen. I am not enough of an expert to make a call on this either way of course, but if experts decided this was the right call would it even be possible to cancel/reschedule the Olympics? Imagine the financial impact on Rio.

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It's pretty well known and well documented at this point that the host cities for olympic games see no financial benefit at all, and in fact they lose money. Most recently, look at the Sochi games, which cost $50+bn. There is a 0% chance that the games brought in that much money. The entities making money are the IOC and the broadcast companies, NBC being the primary. It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.

Agreed that the Olympic games do not have financially benefit the host city. But, Rio has probably already spent a lot of money on the games. Not hosting them would probably hurt, financially, even more.

Please note I am not arguing that the Olympics should continue in Rio. We should do what is best for world health, even if that negatively impacts Rio financially.

But that is nonsense for Rio, which has already spent its capital outlays for the games. Overall Rio may and probably will lose money, but if the games were cancelled, it could be financially catastrophic.

You're right that it isn't a question that should be determined by finances, but that's a different issue.

    >It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.

The corruption, bribery, and kick backs that go into selecting host cities means that short of a host city being wiped off the map by a nuclear bomb, the games will go on.

Imagine the potential global financial impact of all of the visitors (and athletes) contracting Zika and bring that home with them to spread.

Tough call...

Why is the FINANCIAL impact the biggest one to be considered?

Because it's an objective unit of measurement. You can't objectively measure (or assign a value to) human suffering.

Except that we do. We assign monetary values to human lives in actuarial models every day. The statistical value of a human live in the Netherlands when considering traffic safety was E700k in the last project I worked on, but this varies by purpose and over time. Furthermore, there are several international standard methods of quantifying the burden of disease, like the DALY and QALY.

So yes, we can and we do 'objectively' (as in, per a standardized methodology) assign value to human suffering.

Yes, by using a model. The assumptions of the model are subjective in the sense of making judgments about what's important. For example, they don't take into account catastrophic collapse of the environment (overfishing, species extinction, ecological collapse eg from bees dying out, acidification of oceans from CO2 release). They also make assumptions about people's utility functions -- the famous example by Bill Gates that baldness has much more more research being done on it than malaria relative to the suffering, because people with more money speak with a larger economic voice and skew the results.

In your model, given certain starting conditions, can you ever get a positive value for human suffering? For example if rich people are willing to pay to see gladiators fight animals to the death, or just to see the poor people subjugated as slaves. I am pretty sure you assign positive financial value to animal suffering because factory farms torture animals to save a buck and therefore in purely economic terms they are doing "better".

You mean, assign FINANCIAL value.

Right, for some reason I thought the gp said monetary and I was keeping with what I thought was the terminology of the thread.

It depends what you are measuring. If a city could increase its financial prosperity at the expense of poisoning its population (fracking may be a good example) would they do it? After all, if money is the only thing that matters then human health only matters insofar as it affects the flow of money. And if other factors compensate to preserve "financial health" then human health outcomes become expendable.

If you could produce more meat cheaper at the expense of keeping animals in terrible conditions on factory farms, would you do it? After all, if money is all that matters the animal's suffering doesn't even enter the equation.

How about increasing financial gain at the expense of destroying the natural environment (eg overfishing, dumping plastics and releasing all the carbon from the ground)? Grandchildren may have to pay the bill, but what if you had perfect knowledge and knew they'd be economically richer, but with worse health outcomes and lots of species gone exinct?

Measuring implies a model, and the model makes assumptions about the world that may not be true, and the whole combination can be extremely harmful. Not to mention very human-centric (and "us" centric). As the Native American chief said:

When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money

'Tis a good question, and one I keep noticing on HN in particular. It feels like there is a small trend that primarily views world issues via an economic lens.

It's pretty common thing around here to see "the business case for doing [ethical thing]", as if being good business is a prerequisite to ethical behavior. It's particular disconcerting when it's applied to widespread problems.

Basic workplace safety is good... because it leads to higher returns on investment.

Discrimination is bad... because there's more money in equality.

Don't fuck over your employees... because you get better productivity that way.

It's a point of view that's pretty foreign to me.

Because we like to assume that the people we talk with are basically good people who aren't just looking for an excuse to twirl their moustaches. So you assume that you're arguing against "I would like to do this, but that threatens my ability to maintain my business and the jobs that depend on it. This evil act is the least-bad option."

Because the parent comment asked one to consider the financial impact to Rio if the games were cancelled/boycotted. Nothing more...

As the number of all the visitors (and athletes) of Olympics is far smaller than the number of "normal people" currently traveling to those areas, and we've yet to see any Zika cases outside of Brazil, then this means that it's quite likely that the actual impact of that will be zero.

Yes, it's likely that someone of them will contract Zika and bring that home with them to spread - but it's more likely that it will not happen, and the effect is dwarfed by the chances that the spread will be caused by the ordinary flow of people, and cancelling the Olympics will have no effect on that.

Wikipedia lists the only previously cancelled Olympics as 1916 (WWI) and 1940 and 1944 (WWII).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cancelled_Olympic_Gam...

So it's happened 3 times out of a possible 30. Doesn't even seem that dramatic when you put it that way.

I imagine Rio would be given the 2020 Summer Games. And then Tokyo would be moved to 2024 and so on. Just my guess though.

Well, the fair outcome would be that Tokyo was cancelled altogether, if the allegations of corruptions [1] are true.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/may/11/tokyo-olympics...

Wow, Japan is generally known as being clean and corruption free. I can only imagine the type of bribes Brazil and Russia handed out.

> Wow, Japan is generally known as being clean and corruption free.

Huh? This is the home of the keiretsu and the yakuza, you know. Corruption among the political elite is a standard assumption among the Japanese.

clean - yes, but corruption free? corruption is everywhere. if you have powers and decisions making you'll get corruption. look at lobbying in US - that's pretty much buying decisions. huge corps giving money to presidential candidates in US now - are there no strings attached and no further expectations?

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