On 4/14/05, Ronn!Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If the idea is that life is so valuable that saving lives is worth any > financial cost, then the only logical thing is to ban all forms of > transportation, since all have a finite, nonzero probability of death . . . > as does just getting out of bed in the morning, as does staying in bed in > the morning . . .
Exactly. I was trying to make the point that a pure assessment of "will fund allocation X result in more good than fund allocation Y" is tricky in many situations. There are many people involved in the national budget making decisions, and each of them has their own interests groups that they listen to and attempt to satisfy. Thus the large number of, and variety of programs that receive funding. Trying to tell one group that they did not take the "opportunity costs" of not allocating funds to some other project into account is not going to result in much success. This is why I am always skeptical when people try to use economic arguments and tools to comment on non-economic subjects. Yes you can try to assign a cost to anything, but as Nick points out, many people are going to (and should) assign "priceless" to many different things, and they will probably contradict each other. This makes a pure economic assessment using things like opportunity cost very difficult, if not impossible. Thus my comments on why I feel it is not a good tool (for each side) to use when trying to convince their counter parts. > > Someone else has read "The Mythical Man-Month," I see . . . > I really wish the only experience I had in that subject was from a book. John _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
