Alex Epstein
speaker
366 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 28 Apr
Alex Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So even that should be suspicious because the average person maybe has $1 million of productivity throughout their life. So you're basically taking away the livelihood, like a 10x livelihood takeaway, if only it were that good. Because how is a value of statistical life calculated? It is calculated by literally any delay of death, even a day.
So if you delay, if you can claim via speculation, well, you know, I'll just use myself. Like myself, I'm 44 now. Let's say when I'm 88. Like, I have something that says Alex will die on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, then I consider that a $10 million benefit. and therefore I'm gonna take away $10 million from everyone else, which is what they're doing in terms of things.
So it just leaves this insane looting of the economy in favor of these just totally, they're both speculative and then tiny things that no one would ever accept for themselves. That's the thing. You have to think of it as what would you accept for yourself in terms of water?
Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, so you need two elements. So one is you need statistical life years. You can't do life, because what life does is it doesn't differentiate between a day and 100 years, right? Which, of course, as humans, And ultimately, you have to think about it like we would think of as individuals rationally.
And then if you have some sort of aggregate policy, then you need to think of it that way. So one is you think of it—this happened with COVID, right? Where people are like, oh, we saved a life. You know, somebody was about to die, but they can't see their grandchild because they might die a day earlier or something like that. I want to see my grandchild.
Or even a lot of older people said—this is a perfect example, right? Like, I'm willing to take the risk because it's worth it to me to be around my family. Like, I'm willing—people are willing to take—
Yeah, well, yeah. But here they're acting like nobody's willing to take the risk of inhaling like a tiny minuscule percentage of what like, you know, like a couple cigarettes worth of PM, like over, you know, a decade or two or something like this. It's just- It's just crazy.
So what you need is you need to measure in terms of life years, and then you need a value that's based on typical human productivity. Because that's actually how we make decisions. Like if I'm deciding how much do I spend on medical care, it's based on my productivity.
I don't get to say, you know what, I really value my own life, so I'm going to allocate $50 million to keep myself alive for six extra months in the ICU. Right. You don't get to say that because those resources don't exist. Resources are potentially unlimited over time, but at any given moment, they are finite.
And so to take them from one person, to just allow people to have these irresponsible, tiny delays of death that they don't even ask for, and then wreck the economy and wreck the young... That's what's happening. So that's an example of you go from death, $10 million per death delayed, to whatever the lifetime productivity is for like a full life of life years.
And that already will just dramatically reduce the benefit calculation.
Yeah, that's a different thing.
Yeah, and so there are questions of do you always use this in every situation? Are there alternative ways to use it? Because you don't even need to do that. I mean, you could also do other things like, hey, tell people what the general science is and then have them vote on, like, hey, what do you think is a good standard?
So insofar as you are—so I'm not saying this kind of economic calculation applies to every situation.
using it it needs to be like your productivity is your life sustaining and saving ability right right right and so for every individual that's how we rationally make decisions about delays right so that's what we can afford to spend on a life typically speaking yeah which is not the same thing as what it's not even it's really like how much are you willing to take away from people's life sustaining ability in order to limit this risk right yes yes and that's
What people need to realize is that the number one thing you need to... Like, the number one... The biggest risk is depriving people of potential productive ability. And one reason is that you're not only depriving them of, like... of what you know they can do, but you're depriving them of innovation.
And this, by the way, relates to the whole externalities fraud, where people are like, oh, fossil fuels have so many negative externalities, and they're talking about positive. But everything that frees up human time, and that's really what energy does, right? It frees up human time. One of the things it frees up time for is innovation.
And innovation has an incalculably large positive externality to it because you don't know when it's going to lead to the internet, when it's going to lead to a cure for cancer.
Yeah, well, there's a question of is it ever zero-sum? I mean, the key thing to the Malthusians is they don't understand. They think resources are taken from nature, not created from nature.
And then innovation is basically you're expanding your resource. You're expanding and amplifying your resource creation ability through the discovery of new knowledge. I call this in Fossil Future, what do I call this? The...
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