Comment by marcusverus
7 months ago
> The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that when a person is hospitalized, the societal cost per table saw injury exceeds $500,000 when you also factor in loss of income and pain and suffering.
Seems fishy[0][1], so I checked the study:
> Overall, medical costs and work losses account for about 30 percent of these costs, or about $1.2 billion. The intangible costs associated with pain and suffering account for the remaining 70 percent of injury costs.
So the actual cost of each injury which results in hospitalization is (allegedly) $150,000, and they only get to the $500,000 figure by adding $350,000 in intangible "costs" tacked on. Totally legit.
> Because of the substantial societal costs attributable to blade-contact injuries, and the expected high rate of effectiveness of the proposed requirement in preventing blade-contact injuries, the estimated net benefits (i.e. benefits minus costs) for the market as a whole averaged $1,500 to $4,000 per saw.
There is no cost to the regulation, but rather a "net benefit", because the cost (in real dollars) of the saw-stop devices is more than offset by the savings (in intangible pain-and-suffering-dollars)! Based on this obviously, intentionally misleading "math", they include this canard in the summary:
> The Commission estimates that the proposed rule's aggregate net benefits on an annual basis could range from about $625 million to about $2,300 million.
Did you catch that? They didn't include so much as a hint that these dollar savings are, in fact, not dollars, but pain in suffering, measured in dollars!
In this life, only three things are certain: death, taxes, and being lied to by the United States federal government.
[0] https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb261-Most-Expen... [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Day-Laborer-Salary
How much money would it take for you to get your index finger chopped off? Would you do it for $350,000? I personally wouldn't.
How about a nasty nick that mostly heals in a couple months?
There’s nothing misleading in the study, because they very clearly state the methodology for intangibles, and even provide an alternate calculation excluding it:
Finally, net benefits were significantly reduced when benefits were limited to the reduction in economic losses associated with medical costs and work losses, excluding the intangible costs associated with pain and suffering
…although net benefits appear to have remained positive using a 3 percent discount rate, benefits were generally comparable to costs when a 7 percent discount rate was applied.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-05-12/pdf/2017-0...
There's nothing dishonest about it. If you want to measure something, you need to pick a unit. For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
> You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
Choosing to re-define a word (like 'dollar') to mean something other than its actual meaning is perfectly fine, so long as you take care to inform the reader whenever you employ your nonstandard definition.
If you do not take care to make this distinction, then you are putting a false idea in another person's mind, which is, by definition, deception.
If you intentionally use your bespoke definition of 'dollar' to communicate about pain and suffering, refusing to define it (as the author of the paper did in the summary), while knowing full well that the reader will assume you mean actual dollars, then you are lying.
> For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
That's a noble goal. Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents. Laundering that suffering into "per-unit economic benefits" adds zero clarity to the issue of suffering. It adds zero urgency. All it adds is a likelihood of misunderstanding, which is clearly the point.
It is common for people to measure the value of a lot of things that aren't literally money in dollars. e.g. equity, risk, debt, etc. In a lot of these cases I think it is completely normal for a reader to understand that the value is not actualized.
> Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents
But do we have any better economic units to measure it other than dollars and cents? I don't think we do. So in the context of an economic discussion, it's the best that can be done.