On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 09:08:38PM -0400, John Clark wrote: > On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 7:23 PM Russell Standish <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > Is it different with people, do you know the impact removing 725,000 > people from the realm of the living every year will have? If not and > their impacts are equally unknown then I think you should give the > benefit of the doubt to the human not the mosquito. > > > > >Yes it is different. According to the first hit on Google, the > economic cost of malaria runs to $12 billion per > annum. (https://www.malariafreefuture.org/malaria). > > It is not equally unknown. > > > Do you really think the figure "12 billion dollars" answers all or even most > questions regarding the death of 725.000 people or even comes within a > thousand > light years of doing so? Even something as simple as the wind needs a vector > to > describe it, 2 numbers are needed one for speed and one for direction; but you > think the lives of 725,000 people just needs a scalar, one number, 12 billion. >
It answers questions along the lines of should we invest in this or that. If we had a similar economic calculation on the detrimental effects to the ecology of removing those mosquitos, then it allows a straight forward calculus for decision making. Of course it is nuanced - one would hope that decision makers don't just take one random study at face value, but look at all the evidence available, and commission studies to cover obvious gaps. > > >ecosystems are complex systems, and small changes can have outsized > effects. > > > People are part of the ecosystem too, and the most complex and unpredictable > part. One of those 725,000 people who lost their lives because you thought > mosquitoes were more important might have been the next Einstein, or been the > father or grandfather of one, or maybe the next Hitler, nobody knows. > Of course. Over 10 years (say) 7 million lives are lost, diminishing our capacity for producing the next Einstein by 0.1%. In the same time, the world's population has grown by 11.5%, offsetting that loss many times over. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected] Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
