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title: "The executives of all large organizations (including socialist…"
date: 2024-12-07
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a post.
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# The executives of all large organizations (including socialist…

*December 7, 2024 · Facebook*

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The executives of all large organizations (including socialist healthcare systems) must make tradeoffs when deciding whether to spend money to save lives.\
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For example, suppose a medical intervention would save 20 lives, but costs \$200 billion. Is it worth doing?\
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Remember that the \$200 billion that goes toward saving those lives is then not available for other goods, such as saving lives via other means. If \$200 billion would save 100,000 lives if spent on say, childhood vaccination, then spending that \$200 billion to save 20 lives is not worthwhile.\
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Car company executives must make similar tradeoffs. If they try to address every risk with a recall, the costs of their cars would skyrocket, almost no one would be able to afford to buy their cars, and they would go out of business.\
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If regulations make cars unaffordable, that too has many large impacts on the length and quality of one\'s life, such as not being able to get a much more lucrative (but more distant) job. Less income means less healthcare, less healthy food, lower quality shelter, etc.\
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In order to make rational decisions when faced with these tradeoffs, executives have to assign a monetary value to human lives:\
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life){target="_blank"}\
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Obviously, people of good will are going to disagree over how these calculations are made.\
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Some people are much less risk tolerant than others, for example.\
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Some people prefer greater pleasure at the cost of greater risk: motorcycle riders, swingers, psychedelic users, etc.\
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Some people still mask and self-isolate two years after the Covid 19 pandemic \"ended\".\
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Some people would rather save \$50 and face a 1:100000 increased risk of death from ignition failure.\
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It\'s typically impossible to negotiate these risk/reward tradeoffs 1:1 with customers, so executives have to guestimate what the average buyer of their product would want them to do.\
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Due to these differences in risk preferences, many customers will think they made the \"wrong\" decision, no matter what decision they make.
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