The mysteries of welfare economics There is a whole discipline that profoundly shapes government decisions everywhere. Even some very educated people know nothing about it. It is laden with philosophically and politically interesting and debatable premises. Despite this, some relatively modest technical barriers mean the public scarcely ever talks about it. It’s called welfare economics, and in respect of how it influences our life, it may be
The simple reason why this psychometric method does not work directly, is that "welfare" currently is optimized for tapping latent productivity (think fracking) and reducing damages (think smoke stacks), not the "wellbeing" per capita. If this is the case, the unspoken intermediary rule would be: (a) reducing the amount of damage done by those with low intelligence, since the bottom 10%ile are so anti-productive they are barred from the military (b) rehabilitate those with high intelligence, since every 9 IQ increase yield ~10x return in productivity (from IFS to PumpkinPerson's conjecture).
One of the difficulties in forming even a temporary coalition to depose unweighted CBA paradigms will be that everyone is suspicious of what comes next. It’s a Pareto improvement in the sense that your utilitarian weighting system is more likely to approach at least a locally-maximal area of the economic modeling fitness landscape… but what if my hill is higher than yours, and we’ll never be able to reach it if we try your idea first?
This seems to come up quite a lot as a theme in broader leftist in-fighting as well. I’ll avoid mentioning any specific topics here since doing so tends to just re-create the argument without generating any truly novel ideas, but I think anyone who’s tried to engage with multiple left-leaning subdomains will have encountered this at least once: Carol, Dylan, and the poor fellow with the traumatic brain injury get very suspicious that the proposed improvement will be enough of an improvement to obviate the coalition and placate the masses, but would not be as much of an improvement as the specific improvements they wanted to see, and refuse to pay the opportunity cost by allowing that things need not suck this badly, indefinitely.
The simple reason why this psychometric method does not work directly, is that "welfare" currently is optimized for tapping latent productivity (think fracking) and reducing damages (think smoke stacks), not the "wellbeing" per capita. If this is the case, the unspoken intermediary rule would be: (a) reducing the amount of damage done by those with low intelligence, since the bottom 10%ile are so anti-productive they are barred from the military (b) rehabilitate those with high intelligence, since every 9 IQ increase yield ~10x return in productivity (from IFS to PumpkinPerson's conjecture).
One of the difficulties in forming even a temporary coalition to depose unweighted CBA paradigms will be that everyone is suspicious of what comes next. It’s a Pareto improvement in the sense that your utilitarian weighting system is more likely to approach at least a locally-maximal area of the economic modeling fitness landscape… but what if my hill is higher than yours, and we’ll never be able to reach it if we try your idea first?
This seems to come up quite a lot as a theme in broader leftist in-fighting as well. I’ll avoid mentioning any specific topics here since doing so tends to just re-create the argument without generating any truly novel ideas, but I think anyone who’s tried to engage with multiple left-leaning subdomains will have encountered this at least once: Carol, Dylan, and the poor fellow with the traumatic brain injury get very suspicious that the proposed improvement will be enough of an improvement to obviate the coalition and placate the masses, but would not be as much of an improvement as the specific improvements they wanted to see, and refuse to pay the opportunity cost by allowing that things need not suck this badly, indefinitely.