Take a survey and ...

... help an environmental economics grad student (Please ...):

I am a graduate student conducting a survey for a research project. The questions in this survey will be used to explore how people evaluate events happening now differently than events happening in the future. This research will help policy analysts make better choices about environmental policy options. If you are at least 18 years old and interested in participating, click on the link below. The survey should take about 10 minutes.

The survey is located here

Comments

[justakim]

Aww thank you! I was going to hit you guys up Monday since it was pretty late in Friday that we finally got set.

[Jack Schieffer]

justakim, assuming that you are conencted to the survey, I have a few comments about it, in case you still have time to consider changes.

1. I didn't realize at first glance that there were two programs at issue. Perhaps you could distinguish them with names? E.g. "In order to keep program A, are you willing to cancel program B, resulting in..."

2. The "...up to X lives..." description for the second program is ambiguous. Is X the expected mean loss of life, or upper end of the range? If one is comparing 100 lives now vs. a lottery of 0-120 lives in the future, one might think that you would generally lose fewer than 100 lives in the future, which I doubt is the tradeoff you're going for.

If you're still in a pre-test stage, those would be my suggestions for clarifying the questions. Overall, it seems like an interesting angle: the difference between valuing lives and monetized damages.

[skiddie]

The other comment I had from the survey is that it's a bit ambiguous as to what the sacrifice actually entails. In all the questions (ie: "... resulting in the loss of up to 1,000 lives two decades from now?") it's not clear whether those lives are lost over the course of 20 years (which is the real-life scenario) or if 1,000 people die 20 years from now-- in 2028 (which seems to be what the question is saying).

These would lead to quite different answers, as if they are to all die in 2028 (but not before), I would hope for some technological innovation that could save their lives. However, if they are to die incrementally over the course of 20 years, technological innovations potentially wouldn't save many of them.

Anyway, interesting survey, and good luck with the work!

[justakim]

Good points, both. I can see the benefit of labeling the specific programs.

It was meant to refer to deaths at the specified time but it's hard to build a scenario that would capture that succinctly. It would be similar to saying 'climate change is not going to hurt until (vaguely later)' The vague part is easy, convincing someone you know when it'll happen is not.