I find that I generally get along well with people who have some economic training. That's because economics training emphasizes that almost every choice involves trade-offs.
For example, if the government spends money on school lunch programs for schoolkids, that's less money available to spend on say, anti-malarial nets in Africa.
In order to make decisions as rationally as possible, you have to calculate the costs and benefits of different choices, and then, hopefully, pick the choices that provide the greatest net benefits.
In order to compare different policy choices, economists typically assign a value of around $10 million to a human life.
In other words, unless the policy saves at least one life per $10 million spent, economists typically don't believe it's worth doing. (The process by which economists arrive at this number is both fascinating and sometimes disputed -- reasonable people can disagree on what the number should be. But $10 million is a commonly used number.)
Using this number, we can evaluate claims like this:
"Call me crazy, but it seems like protection from police brutality is more important than [changing the marginal tax rate by 5%]."
Police kill approximately 1200 people a year (all causes).
Using that metric, if there were a policy change that could save all 1200 of those lives, it would be worth spending about $12 billion to achieve it ($10,000,000 * 1200 = $12 billion).
Of course, many police-caused deaths are justified, and it would be impossible to eliminate all police-caused deaths entirely. So, the $12 billion is an upper bound.
Also, much police brutality stops short of killing someone, and most people value reducing non-lethal brutality as well. For the sake of argument, let's say that eliminating non-lethal brutality would cost ten times as much as eliminating lethal brutality, or $120 billion. That puts the total value of reducing police brutality at ~$132 billion.
What about changing the marginal tax rate by 5%? Well, that depends a lot on one's assumptions as well.
But changing the rate would only need increase GDP by about 0.7% (~$150 billion) to be _more valuable_ than ending police brutality.
Now, obviously, these are back of the envelope calculations. Reasonable people can disagree with my assumptions / guesstimates.
And it doesn't have to be an either/or choice. One can be for reducing police brutality, _and also_ changing the marginal tax rate.
But if it were an either/or choice, it's not at all obvious that spending resources reducing police brutality has more merit than changing the marginal tax rate by 5%.
For example, if the government spends money on school lunch programs for schoolkids, that's less money available to spend on say, anti-malarial nets in Africa.
In order to make decisions as rationally as possible, you have to calculate the costs and benefits of different choices, and then, hopefully, pick the choices that provide the greatest net benefits.
In order to compare different policy choices, economists typically assign a value of around $10 million to a human life.
In other words, unless the policy saves at least one life per $10 million spent, economists typically don't believe it's worth doing. (The process by which economists arrive at this number is both fascinating and sometimes disputed -- reasonable people can disagree on what the number should be. But $10 million is a commonly used number.)
Using this number, we can evaluate claims like this:
"Call me crazy, but it seems like protection from police brutality is more important than [changing the marginal tax rate by 5%]."
Police kill approximately 1200 people a year (all causes).
Using that metric, if there were a policy change that could save all 1200 of those lives, it would be worth spending about $12 billion to achieve it ($10,000,000 * 1200 = $12 billion).
Of course, many police-caused deaths are justified, and it would be impossible to eliminate all police-caused deaths entirely. So, the $12 billion is an upper bound.
Also, much police brutality stops short of killing someone, and most people value reducing non-lethal brutality as well. For the sake of argument, let's say that eliminating non-lethal brutality would cost ten times as much as eliminating lethal brutality, or $120 billion. That puts the total value of reducing police brutality at ~$132 billion.
What about changing the marginal tax rate by 5%? Well, that depends a lot on one's assumptions as well.
But changing the rate would only need increase GDP by about 0.7% (~$150 billion) to be _more valuable_ than ending police brutality.
Now, obviously, these are back of the envelope calculations. Reasonable people can disagree with my assumptions / guesstimates.
And it doesn't have to be an either/or choice. One can be for reducing police brutality, _and also_ changing the marginal tax rate.
But if it were an either/or choice, it's not at all obvious that spending resources reducing police brutality has more merit than changing the marginal tax rate by 5%.