Comment by kube-system
7 months ago
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.