[extropy-chat] Professor Being Sued Over Anti-Aging Comments

[Matthew Gingell]

On Jun 21, 2005, at 9:43 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote:

> Of course, it would be better if no one was killed by Islamic  
> terrorists. But we don't live in a perfect world, and must perforce  
> make incremental progress. You think this is a BAD thing? Saving  
> 2,356 lives a month on average?

May 1, 2003 to June 1, 2005 is 25 months, so accepting your numbers  
for the sake of argument that's a total of 2,356 * 25 = 58,900 lives  
saved. I haven't kept up with every single supplemental  
appropriation, but we're only really talking rough order of magnitude  
here so lets call the cost about $200 billion spent. That comes out  
to $3.4 million per life. If we think about the opportunity cost,  
that is if we consider what we gave up when we spent this money on  
Iraq rather than on something else, it's incredibly easy to think  
that's a bad thing.

Imagine for an instant that we actually were interested in  
accomplishing a humanitarian end measured in human lives. How many  
mosquitos in malaria infested regions of Africa did we not kill?  
Cholera kills far more people than crazy dictators: How many deep,  
clean wells did we not dig? If in May 2003 I gave you $200 billion  
and the entire U.S. military, and I told you your mission was to make  
the world a better place, would invading Iraq really be the best you  
could do?

What is the net outcome measured in human lives of the decision to  
dump all this money in Iraq, relative to the other things we decided  
not to do instead? How does the outcome we're looking at now stack up  
relative to picking up the smartest million third world subsistence  
farmers we could find and handing them a U.S. passport and a $200  
thousand dollar education?

> Pardon my bluntness, but Sweet Reason, man! We're SAVING lives  
> every day that we're there! If Saddam had been left in power, some  
> 61,000 people would be dead right now that are alive.

Saving 58,900 lives was a good thing. If it cost a trillion dollars  
it would have been a good thing. If it killed a billion people, the  
fact those 58,900 were saved would *still* be a good thing. If you  
want to invoke "Reason" though, you really have to admit there's more  
to the analysis than that.

I don't mean to jump on you, but some of us who opposed the war from  
the beginning are fed up with the contention that we thought Saddam  
was just great and we wouldn't, all else being equal, love to see him  
flogged through the streets then locked up in a dark hole forever.  
That simply isn't and never has been the anti-war argument. The  
argument is that the benefits don't justify the costs.

Matt