In 2022, everyone knows about the trolley problem. Literally

In 2022, everyone knows about the trolley problem. Literally.

But in one of the chats, they sent me such a design. And I would not share the link with you if this game did not contain three cases that can be called economic. Briefly, the very essence of the trolley story (if anyone suddenly does not know).

This is a thought experiment in ethics, first formulated in 1967 by the English philosopher Philippa Foote. Original wording:

Let us suppose that a judge or magistrate is confronted by an angry mob demanding that the culprit be found guilty of some crime and otherwise threatening bloody vengeance against a certain part of society. The true culprit is unknown, the judge considers himself capable of preventing bloodshed only by framing an innocent person and executing him.

Along with this example, let's take another one in which a pilot whose plane is about to crash decides whether he should steer from a more populated area into a less populated one.

To draw the parallel as closely as possible, it can be assumed as soon as possible that he is driving a moving tram, which can only turn from one track to another; five people work on one track and one on the other; anyone who gets on the track he rides will be killed. In the event of a riot, the crowd has five hostages, so in both examples the exchange is assumed to mean the life of one person for the life of five.

In general: you need to choose: pull the lever or do nothing. I was interested in 3 dilemmas.

• 1. If you do nothing, then 2 people will die with a 50% chance, if you pull the lever and move the arrow, 10 people will die with a 10% chance. In fact, purely mathematically, both solutions are equivalent and give an expectation of 1. But this only works fine if we have an infinite number of trials. I would pull the lever in case of a single test. Think for yourself what you would be more willing to play: toss or toss a ten-sided die, if tails and 10 are death (you and your friend and you and 9 of your friends, respectively), the rest are life, and the test is once.

• 2. If you do nothing, you will shorten the life of one person by 50 years, if you pull the lever, then five by 10 years. This is very similar to the history of the policy of disinflation (lowering the rate of inflation by reducing the rate of growth of the nominal money supply) and excess unemployment points. If we do not go into details and proceed from the hypothesis of naive inflationary expectations (inflation this year will be the same as last year), then you can reduce inflation quickly or slowly, and excess unemployment points (exceeding the optimal level) will be the same. Conditionally: you will get a 10% increase in unemployment at the moment, but in the same year you will drop inflation, or within 5 years unemployment will be above the optimum by 2 percentage points, and inflation will reach the desired level in 5 years. In fact, under such prerequisites, there is a difference - the depth of the crisis. In the first case, the recession will be so massive that it may become difficult to return economic growth. In the second, you can even get by with just a slowdown in economic growth and entering the trend level from the second year.

• 3. If you do nothing, 5 people will die now, if you pull the lever, 5 people will die in 100 years. This is very reminiscent of the story about the budget deficit and debt crises. You may not notice debt problems for a long time, they will accumulate and sooner or later a debt crisis will come. In fact, this means that future generations will pay for the well-fed life of the current one. A similar situation is observed in the case of solidarity pension systems (when current employees pay pensions to current pensioners). If you do not have a growing population, the burden on workers will increase. If you do nothing, sooner or later you will have to make a decision: raise the retirement age or cut pensions. True, in a trolley case the price is 1 to 1, but in real life everything can be worse.

In short, all the absurd trolleys. As they say, welcome!

Grigory Bazhenov 2022-07-07