Why Is It So Expensive to Save Lives? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is It So Expensive to Save Lives?

givewell.org

6 pointsbemmu9 comments

Isn’t it because a life is worth a lot? There might be a few lives you can save for $50 but those opportunities will get snapped up fast so the bulk of lives saved will be at the high end of the willingness to pay?

Also, there are 121 million unintended pregnancies a year globally. Is it cheaper to help women avoid unintended pregnancies (robust access to modern contraceptives, financial/household empowerment) before the (expensive to mitigate) suffering is kicked off for a lifetime?

TLDR Empowering and educating women is a key driver in this effort.

https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-...

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

The bulk of marginal lives saved will be at supply-demand curve point of the value of a life (as valued by the "buyer" -- so you will pay a lot, your family a bit less, your friends a bit less, your employer a bunch less, and a stranger a lot less; and rich people will pay more because they can afford to be less efficient)

It sounds like people have tunnel vision in regards to death statistics. Medical deaths are easy to count and record.

Partial "death" i.e. loss of limbs, senses, cognition, muscle control, emotion (happiness) is not as easy to capture in a single statistic.

The benefits a malaria net provides goes way beyond preventing death. The vast majority of people that have malaria do not die of that disease. They only have a significantly reduced quality of life which isn't as exciting as preventing medical death even though you could make the valid argument that a life without malaria counts as a saved life.

In the middle of the article they claim that for each dollar you spend on saving a life, someone else will stop giving 30c to save lives because they consider the problem solved.

Reality is complicated. That's why. Silver Bullet solutions presume reality is simple and simplistic. Reality is nonlinear and has feedback loops.

Apparently those saving the lives have to function in the same marketplace as those working to increase the cost of living.

Lawyers?

That is not what the article says. The article says: ‘you have to buy a lot of mosquito nets to save a life’ I am sure they spend some money on legal overhead not to mention on corruption in the countries they work in, but that doesn’t change the basic economics.

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