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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.

People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead

I'll trade safety seminars 1:1 for shortened lifespan any day of the week.

Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.

Note my trade is not at par for QALYs, it's at par for unadjusted LYs.

Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.