People often say to me that certain actions, outcomes or policies are ‘good’. Something I usually try to establish right away is ‘compared to what?’ There are three common responses: relative to nothing, relative to the status quo and relative to anything else. In most circumstances the first two comparisons are red herrings; the standard we should usually instinctively apply is the last.
In personal decisions this is clear enough. If you are trying to decide what to do and are going through programs you could watch on television, there is no use comparing each program to staring at a blank TV screen, to whatever channel it happens to be tuned to now, or to sitting and doing nothing. The fact that a show is better than a blank screen is irrelevant to your decision. Instead you should compare watching each program to the best alternative activity you can think of and only watch it if it is better.
When someone says that giving money to a charity is ‘a good thing to do,’ for some reason that standard tends to be relaxed. They ought to compare that charity to the best way to spend that money, not just to destroying it or spending it on themselves. For some reason wastefully spending the money on oneself is the standard comparison in this case. Similarly, when we consider a government policy, we should compare it to the best policy in that area that we can think of, not to doing nothing at all or continuing to do whatever we are already doing.
That’s not to say you should never consider other more limited comparisons. For example, we might restrict our comparison to ‘other charitable acts we would actually be willing to do’, or ‘other policies that would be able to get through parliament.’ If someone else thinks that doing nothing is the best option, then in a conversation with them we may want to use that as the comparison for the sake of argument. However, when we want to make a more limited claim we should ensure everyone understands what comparison we are drawing and why we have chosen that counterfactual.
I’ve heard a lot of conversations over the last few years about the merit or lack thereof of the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network rollout. Many people evaluate the network compared to ‘changing nothing’. Most others evaluate it relative to ‘the best alternative broadband policy I can think of,’ or ‘the best way to spend that money.’ [2] Needless to say, the people who draw the first comparison tend to judge the NBN positively, while those who apply the latter standards are more likely to evaluate it negatively. [1] To my mind the first comparison would only be interesting if doing nothing were the likely alternative, which I’m pretty sure is not the case. We should at least ask whether the NBN is ‘good’ compared to other broadband policies, and ideally whether it is good relative to all the other things the government could spend that money on.
[1] I am taking no position on the merits of the NBN.
[2] If we are spending money to achieve some goal, at a minimum we should compare that expenditure to the best alternative way of achieving that goal we can find. This is called cost-effectiveness. Ideally we would go further and compare spending money on that goal to the best way we could spend money to achieve any goal. That is usually much more difficult to do, and requires agreement not only about whether that goal is desirable, but how important all goals are relative to one another. So if we going to dedicate some resources to achieving that original goal, it can be useful to search for the most cost effective way to do so without comparing it to all possible alternatives.
Tagged: economics, effective altruism, ethics, public policy, rationality
