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Comment by IanDrake | Hacker News Reader

Measuring these disasters with money is about as meaningful as measuring IQ with potatoes.

It is meaningful but in a slightly confusing way as a mixed proxy for wealth of the area, density, and severity with the last potentially "rounded down to zero" by appropriate countermeasures.

It does ignore the human costs so one empty mansion getting wrecked vs an entire favella killing thousands for instance the previous looking worse.

Combine that with a rise in development making it look worse without completly mitigating counter measures - it models the fiscals of the disastee only. Important if it is your job to try to assess liabilities and baseline what is cost effective for prevention but not a measure directly of human cost or devestation.

You can measure almost anything with money, provided you're careful about it. That's how insurance companies evaluate risk without loosing money. In the case of disasters, it's really quite simple. Somebody has to pay for the damages (incl. life insurance, medical bills, etc.), and you can estimate these costs fairly accurately if you have enough data.

I'm not saying that all values can be compared to monetary value. There are (or may be, depending on your viewpoint) certain kinds of value that are hard to translate to monetary value, for example those that are based on merely ordinal comparisons, those that are highly subjective and for which at the same time there is no market and it makes no sense to assume one, or those that involve context-dependent preferences or other non-standard features like non-transitive preferences with semiorder or interval order representations. However, those rarely play a role in policy making where every implementation of a policy has a cost and different budgets need to be brought into some reasonable equilibrium.

Why on earth would you say that? Arguments against attempting to avert these disasters will inevitably be based on cost. Presenting the consequences in monetary terms will help counter these arguments.

Because first there’s M0 inflation to take out, and then it’s well known that claims inflate for the same damage over time, and courts award bigger damages and so on.

Dollars are a problematic way to measure it.

They're a problematic way to measure anything, but often they're the best we've got, especially when what we're measuring is economic costs.

It depends on what we want to measure and for what reason.

Here I expect this time series will be used to illustrate consequences of climate change without taking into account that the US' population has grown by 45% since 1980 and that the US' real GDP has grown by 171%, which makes this time series a poor proxy metric especially when there are direct metrics (e.g. number of hurricanes, etc. per year) available.

This sounds interesting and, to my amateur ears, at least worth considering. Is there any possibility of correcting for those factors? Would that satisfy as an indicator of climate change (or lack thereof)?

The fact that more people are building in climate-vulnerable areas is a very good thing to know about — and that’s the kind of data that this kind of series will highlight. If you want historical hurricane data I’m sure you can get that from NOAA. However, that kind of data won’t give you insight into the human impact of that weather in the same way this series does.

number of billion dollar events per billion dollars real gdp should be easy enough to calculate once the page comes back online.

Excluding the "well known" claim, and passively agreeing on inflation, population density might increase underneath + (real) gdp growth per capita might occur underneath (+/-) we might be better or worse at surviving through various catastrophes now (think of wood only buildings in old huricanes). Kind of fascinating having to disentangle all the comingling elements.

For the evaluation of costs of prevention measures it is exactly the right way to measure it, isnt it?

Prevention measure cost dollars are identical to catastrophe damage cost dollars.

Likely because trying to measure using some nth order variable will leave you open to attacks on the quality of your data. Measuring cyclone landfall events, number of cyclones, and cyclone energy are all first order events, nearly impossible to argue with, and certainly impossible to argue against general trends.

But I'm starting to think throwing crap against the wall for people to argue about is now the point since it divides us into tribes. If all we discussed were incontrovertible facts, we'd quickly reach consensus.

As you can see by the replies, most people can only think in terms of potatoes. If we were smarter we'd do it a better way.

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