But it's far from obvious, and I'm suspicious of this kind of armchair reasoning.
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
A temporary wave of mass death (especially if they're largely people who would soon have died anyway) could well be easier to recover from.
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
And as I've pointed out: just as both forks in our path lead to economic ruin, both lead to mass illness and death.
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
And there is diminishing marginal disutility—in terms of economic impact—on these deaths. That is to say...
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
The economic impact of 10,000 deaths will not be anything like twice as bad as the economic impact of 5,000.
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
Right, it’s MORE disruptive. That’s literally how diminishing marginal utility works. Each inch improved matters less, each inch backslid matters more. If ten thousand people die unexpectedly, moreover, there are discontinuities. Like “we run out of morgue space”
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Replying to @lawnerdbarak @RayTski and
Henry Fitzgerald Retweeted Henry Fitzgerald
I've addressed both those points elsewhere. On the first:https://twitter.com/HenryTarquin/status/1256010077250523138 …
Henry Fitzgerald added,
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @lawnerdbarak and
On the second: yes, there are discontinuities. But the same applies in both directions...
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Replying to @HenryTarquin @RayTski and
What on earth does “in both directions” mean? When does the social disutility of death abruptly discontinuously slacken when more people die? “The entire family was wiped out so no eyes remain open to weep for those which have closed”?
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Replying to @lawnerdbarak @RayTski and
There are discontinuities that interrupt smooth curves whether we're talking about diminishing utility or diminishing disutility
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I'm pretty sure what Henry means here without saying it is he's confident the virus will only take people he considers useless to the economy and no actual productive workers will be affected until it hits some threshold like 5%
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HenryTarquin and
He is obviously wrong about this, but I'd rather not talk about that, I'd rather talk about how fucking evil the attitude of "Once we realize all the Grandmas are gonna die we'll just get used to it" is
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Replying to @arthur_affect @HenryTarquin and
And how slimy it is to hide this sentiment behind academic language like "diminishing marginal disutility"
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End of conversation
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