I wonder about this kind of article. It is a big list of problems, so it seems like we’ll end up having a bunch of unrelated conversations here, which seems unfortunate.
But, to start chipping away… For the wealth inequality section, I gather the goal is to let people provide a signal based on how much they are willing to spend. Shouldn’t that be corrected for their wealth, because that shows how much they value the thing? If the art patrons are all 1B-aires, and the anti-lead-pipe folks are 100k-aires (just to make the math easier), we could do:
Art:
10*(sqrt(1M/1B)^2) = 1/100
Pipes:
100*(sqrt(100/100k)^2) = 1/10
Now we’ve got some measure of everybody’s preference, and can allocate the budget appropriately. Whatever the overall budgets is, 10x more for pipes than art seems… well, at least a lot closer to reasonable than ~100x more on art than pipes
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I wonder about this kind of article. It is a big list of problems, so it seems like we’ll end up having a bunch of unrelated conversations here, which seems unfortunate.
But, to start chipping away… For the wealth inequality section, I gather the goal is to let people provide a signal based on how much they are willing to spend. Shouldn’t that be corrected for their wealth, because that shows how much they value the thing? If the art patrons are all 1B-aires, and the anti-lead-pipe folks are 100k-aires (just to make the math easier), we could do:
Art:
10*(sqrt(1M/1B)^2) = 1/100
Pipes:
100*(sqrt(100/100k)^2) = 1/10
Now we’ve got some measure of everybody’s preference, and can allocate the budget appropriately. Whatever the overall budgets is, 10x more for pipes than art seems… well, at least a lot closer to reasonable than ~100x more on art than pipes
You might also want to factor the relative marginal utility of a dollar.
But yes, that part does seem solvable with a correction like that even if my preferred fix would be removing the billionaires ;)