You are assuming there is a net utility gain to society from all imprisonments.
No, I’m just mocking your grossly naive calculation which assumes that keeping people in jail has only costs and disregards the obvious benefits which are the whole point of having jails in the first place.
I think you could have made that clearer when making the point in the first place.
So, anyway, the suggestion is that it might be very high-impact to be a judge who keeps people who shouldn’t be in jail but would be jailed by many other judges out of jail. It might … but I wonder how many such cases a typical judge actually encounters (I think casualties of the War On Drugs don’t make up that large a fraction of the prison population) and how much power they have to keep those people out of jail (aren’t there mandatory sentences in many cases?). Do you have the relevant information?
The point is that if N is, say, 0.2 then our hypothetical 6-figure earner could easily be giving more than that in charitable donations.
One other really important point. Altruistic impact is not measured in dollars but in utility. Giving N(X+Y)10k to the government may do much less good than giving it to an effective charity.
No, I’m just mocking your grossly naive calculation which assumes that keeping people in jail has only costs and disregards the obvious benefits which are the whole point of having jails in the first place.
Except that I was making an “exists such that” point, not a “forall” point.
I think you could have made that clearer when making the point in the first place.
So, anyway, the suggestion is that it might be very high-impact to be a judge who keeps people who shouldn’t be in jail but would be jailed by many other judges out of jail. It might … but I wonder how many such cases a typical judge actually encounters (I think casualties of the War On Drugs don’t make up that large a fraction of the prison population) and how much power they have to keep those people out of jail (aren’t there mandatory sentences in many cases?). Do you have the relevant information?
The point is that if N is, say, 0.2 then our hypothetical 6-figure earner could easily be giving more than that in charitable donations.
One other really important point. Altruistic impact is not measured in dollars but in utility. Giving N(X+Y)10k to the government may do much less good than giving it to an effective charity.