Replaceability

Suppose I am trying to evaluate the consequences of taking job X. Here is a sequence of (hopefully decreasingly) naive ways to think about the impact of my decision.

(I don’t know if the later analyses are actually reasonable, but I’d really like to see more intellectually serious discussion of this issue by people who understand the world, and particularly economics, better than I do. I wouldn’t be surprised if more sophisticated versions of this analysis are already well-understood amongst economists, and simply haven’t been noticed by altruists trying to understand this issue. In that case, hopefully someone can point that out to me. Some of these analyses, and more sophisticated elaborations on them, appear in Ben Todd’s masters thesis.) Read the rest of this entry »