I’m going to horribly oversimply this. For example. Say I am wearing a shirt a cheap one for Wal-Mart.
This shirt was produced in a sweat shop. That sweat shop has .0005 deaths per day. Thus by wearing this shirt and supporting the mechanisms that brought it to me. I have a killcount for today a number substantially smaller then .0005 and obviously there’s a tonne of subjectivity on what that number might be.
Now include the dye factory that made the shirt green, the shoes I am wearing, the bus I am riding in, the coffee I drink. All these luxuries and that number may go up a little.
I am wondering if this is somthing that is being considered anywhere is somone building a calculation to determine our daily kill counts.
I’m sure most of us probably don’t what to know what ours might be, but knowing what parts of our daily lives have the highest values we might work harder to change for the better.
I understood the title totally the opposite way :D
Like, how many people die because of a every day objects for example a spoon or a bar of soap or an office chair etc.After reading the whole post it reminded me so much of the points system from the series “The Good Place”
It’s not far off from that. Though I don’t really belive in any kind if afterlife I belive we need to do our best while we in the boring place.
But I also belive the consequences of our daily actions, purchases ect. are obscured from us. Shirt conpanies are not exactlly going to willing advertise that by purchusing ther product your resonsbile for .0005 deaths. So it can be a bit difficult to know where we actually stand morally.
It’s interesting, but I would argue that suffering would be more importsnt than killing. And maybe if there was a way to measure a “suffering/price ratio” it would be definitely what I would look at before spending my money on something.
You’re not wrong, but how would you measure that?
Kill counts are at least in principle very easy to count. Work out how many people die, divide that by the number of items produced. That’s your death number.
Also add in the death number for all the constituent parts. If a shirt contains 10 metres of cotton from a source where cotton is produced at 1 nanodeath per metre, you add on 10 nD to your shirt’s death count.
Very hard to do in practice (because who’s sharing that data?), but it’s quite simple to do in principle.
But how do you even begin to put a number on “suffering”?
While you are correct that suffering is a better metric, there would be many in our society that would gravitate towards higher rated suffering items in the same way they want real fur coats and real leather in their Ferraris. That would backfire quickly.
As someone that looks for real leather jackets (they last longer in my experience) which means less garbage in the landfill, it also means less money out of my pocket. I sadly wouldn’t care about the kill count when to my jacket.
The jacket was just one example of many.
Leather is an interesting case, though, because regardless of whether or not people buy it, the cows will still be killed for meat (unless there’s a drastic change in food consumption habits).
You could make the argument that, at least in the current landscape, the purchase of leather doesn’t increase animal suffering or suffering due to the many deleterious effects of large scale beef production (deforestation for feed, the carbon output, etc.).
The only way to reduce the suffering created by a cow economy is to hit the main product driving it: beef. There are three times more beef cows than dairy cows in the U.S., so dairy consumption has an effect but it’s dwarfed by beef consumption.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I hope you’re not doing this for chasing a high KillToDeath-ratio, like we do in FPS games. 😅
No. It’s just a terrible thought that plagues my mind from time to time. My goal whould be to keep that number as low as possible.
What about taxes?
Yhea thatd probably increase the score a bit. I whouldnt consider any kind if offsetting either. Even if your taxes go to Healthcare and support systems it doesn’t subtract from the amount going to military spending, wars, weapons, ect. Even smaller things like road expansions, and law enforcement count. Depending on the area these can cause more death.
Depends on the country at that point tbh
Depends on the country for much of this I’d imagine. If your dependent on imports of common needs then you’d be creating a need for a massive transit network to supply it.
Though the study should focus on the number and not how people use it. I could speculate that if all your neighbours have the same number as you you’d be tolerant of that.
Can’t wait until we can make a supercomputer that can calculate this. Tbh the algorithm might be the hardest bit
Agreed. I suspect we are nearly there.
We probably could calculate it. But we’d need the algorithm.
I belive so, though it isn’t to be trusted. You know the whole thing about coconuts kill more that sharks? That’s a lie and was actually and experiment to see how far a lie could spread.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
Micromorts is an adjacent topic and has the data you’re looking for, just not the grouping. Somewhere to start if you’re curious.
This could be used. Though the examples here here are more oriented to risk of death for doing X. Micromorts could probably be used in determining values I am thinking of.
I am terrible at math so excuse the terrible example.
Let’s say working in a sweatshop in Vietnam has a micromort of .6 and the resouce you are calculating uses up to one third of these shops. Then you’d be adding .3 to your count.
We can say 1000 micromorts is one probable death.
It might be worth looking how the medical industry does calculations. I’ve not looked deep, but it seem similar to what you want.
They have a quality of life index. Basically you calculate both the increased life expectancy of a treatment, and the patients quality of life, as a percentage. By combining them together, you get a semi useful measure of treatment effectiveness. E.g. a treatment that gave a cancer patient 1 year of perfect health (100%) would have a score of 1 year. A treatment that give 4 bad years of life (20% quality) would only have a score of 0.8 years. The first one would win out, despite having 3 less years of life.
I believe the UK’s NHS uses it. It helps balance things on a large scale. E.g. do they invest extra money in improving cancer treatment in children, or in improving hip replacements in OAPs? Both will help, but how to weigh them against each other? I also believe they have a soft figure for cost effectiveness. It’s caught a few drugs companies short, when the NHS wouldn’t pay for a cancer drug that only offered a minor improvement over the current one, with a huge cost difference.
In your case, the index can be reversed, giving a useful metric. The big challenge would be calculating the index in a reliable manner. A lot of it is subjective, and prone to manipulation.
Interestingly one of the disc world books plays with this. “Going Postal” I believe. A conman is forceably recruited to fix the post office. His golem guard informs him how many people he’s killed, despite never raising a sword.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/451702
This seems exactly like what you want.
Ha! I remember this one.I think that exact quote from may be what caused me ponder this over many years.
I will try to get into those studies when I have better time to digest that knowledge but I thank you for sharing them.
That’s an interesting idea, I suppose it’s possible if you have one or more databases with these statistics and then link them together and see. My instincts tell me that it’d be very impractical to implement though!
Mostly because corporate will do everything and anything to obfuscate this kind of data.
Presumably yeah, if everyone could see the death / suffering count of various big companies we probably wouldn’t be using them nearly as much.
