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Simple_Rules t1_itid024 wrote

Okay so take the second example they provide. "Saving polar bears would cost X children's lives".

It is absolutely amazing to me that anyone could write this article, include this example, and then continue on to publish it.

They literally rebut themselves, with their own example.

Measuring every good act as a cost in children's lives does not "properly capture the externalities" or whatever hoohah term you want to use. It's literally a weaponized guilt trip to force shortsightedness.

You can follow the logic. Saving a polar bear is obviously worse than saving a child. So is saving an acre of rainforest. So is saving any individual hive of bees. So is preventing any one small impact of global warming.

But writ large, those impacts add up to a world where saving children is more and more and more expensive. Children's lives being worth 4k is not a fixed fact of the universe. It's literally market price. When the world is burning and the only place you can grow corn is northern Siberia, it won't cost us $4k to save a child any more.

Though conveniently for us of course, there will be many fewer children left to save.

Your cruise ship is not powered by the souls of screaming children. Your coffee was not heated with 100% organic child suffering.

Pushing back on individual consumers as though their morning latte is murdering children in Africa is every bit as sick and stupid as blaming individual commuters for global warming. The systems that are ruining the world are not vulnerable to individual action - by design!

No amount of you ordering less coffee will make manipulating impovershed countries less appealing to governments and corporations.

This article is just another in a long list of attempts to pass the buck - to argue that you may not have ruined the world but by golly if you are drinking a coffee right now, you can't complain about a major corporation making children sew t-shirts for pennies!

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TheOnlyVertigo t1_itirgz7 wrote

And let’s be honest, corporate and government inaction leads to the vast majority of, to borrow their metaphor, dead children.

I mean, at a local level, you can try to be as conscientious as possible, but at the end of the day, the changes you as a consumer make, when an individual or even small collective, is a drop in the bucket compared to the real source of global change needed to resolve any of this.

Basically the article wants people who are already aware of the problems that plague the world right now to feel even more hopeless.

I look at it like being stuck on a speeding train as a passenger. Sure you could probably get the train to stop if you get every passenger to help stop the train, but the conductor is locked in the engine, with the throttle on full, complaining that the passengers aren’t doing enough, and telling them that they need to do more to slow the train down. And to make matters worse, they’ve got other people on the train convincing majorities of the passengers that either nothing is wrong, nothing can be done, or that they themselves are the sole blame holder.

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FrmrPresJamesTaylor t1_itisizk wrote

I say we put this nonsense to bed, there are 2.2bn children on earth and for the very reasonable price of $4k per head (or $8.8 trillion) we can save them all and return our focus to less important matters.

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Simple_Rules t1_itjg3y1 wrote

The funniest part is that this article is trying to make an economic argument without even pausing to consider that since aid programs are underfunded, they are obviously serving the most easily saved children first.

Each child doesn't cost exactly the same amount of money to save, and the current estimates presumably are based on trying to save the most easily saved children.

I bet you that number doubles or triples or quadruples real fast, once you actually start seriously spending money on it.

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TheOnlyVertigo t1_itit7h5 wrote

I’d love for it to be that simple.

But no complex system is, and the onus is on all of us to contribute to resolving the problem, and since the true ability to control public policy, on a global scale, is effectively out of the hands of the overwhelmingly vast majority of us because of competing groups that want the power to manipulate everything in their favor, we are basically screwed.

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FrmrPresJamesTaylor t1_ititxk4 wrote

Yes. Sorry, I was just ridiculing the concept by raising the fact that the sum total cost to “save all children” is actually within reach (it’s about 25% more than the US federal governments current year-to-date expenditure).

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TheOnlyVertigo t1_itiu36s wrote

My bad. Misunderstood your point.

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FrmrPresJamesTaylor t1_itiu6s5 wrote

No worries! It was probably too “low effort” for this sub to be completely honest.

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TheOnlyVertigo t1_itiug0o wrote

It’s easy to assume someone may be taking an opposing view of what you say on Reddit these days, given the sheer level of trolling you run across, I made a hasty conclusion.

I’m probably too dumb for this sub myself, but I like to think I’m at least a little bit intellectual on occasion.

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Simple_Rules t1_itjfq0v wrote

Of course, absolutely - that's the point of arguments like this. They all, ultimately, boil down to well paid stooges trying to convince you that you have an equal share of culpability and blame for the horrors of the world.

The goal of this article isn't to convince you to buy one less coffee. It's not to convince you to go on less cruises. The goal of this article is to make it so the next time you read an article about how Apple is forging iPhones directly out of the bones of orphans and kittens or whatever, you just go "meh but I can't complain or I'd be a hypocrite", as if your morning cup of coffee has made you morally equal to a board of directors who have done the math and figured out that if they throw literal babies into a literal wood chipper, they'll sell 2% more iPhones next year.

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Swoshu t1_itjqbhq wrote

why is saving a polar bear obviously worse than saving a child?

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Simple_Rules t1_itjrjvh wrote

I did the "which would I shoot in the head" test.

If you handed me a pistol and made me shoot either a polar bear or a five year old, I'd shoot the polar bear 100% of the time.

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