The cruel reality of trade-off decision-making - focusing on 98.7% rather than 1.3%

Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.  Page 126

The child mortality rate of Mozambique was then 26 percent. There was nothing special about Nacala district, so we could use that figure. The child mortality rate is calculated by taking the number of child deaths in a year and dividing it by the number of births in that year.

So if we knew the number of births in the district that year, we could estimate the number of child deaths, using the child mortality rate of 26 percent. The latest census gave us a number for births in the city: roughly 3,000 each year. The population of the district was five times the population of the city, so we estimated there had probably been five times as many births: 15,000. So 26 percent of that number told us that I was responsible for trying to prevent 3,900 child deaths every year, of which 52 happened in the hospital. I was seeing only 1.3 percent of my job.

Now I had a number that supported my gut feeling. Organizing, supporting, and supervising basic community-based health care that could treat diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria before they became life-threatening would save many more lives than putting drips on terminally ill children in the hospital. It would, I believed, be truly unethical to spend more resources in the hospital before the majority of the population—and the 98.7 percent of dying children who never reached the hospital—had some form of basic health care.

So we worked to train village health workers, to get as many children as possible vaccinated, and to treat the main child killers as early as possible in small health facilities that could be reached even by mothers who had to walk.

This is the cruel calculus of extreme poverty. It felt almost inhuman to look away from an individual dying child in front of me and toward hundreds of anonymous dying children I could not see.

I remember the words of Ingegerd Rooth, who had been working as a missionary nurse in Congo and Tanzania before she became my mentor. She always told me, “In the deepest poverty you should never do anything perfectly. If you do you are stealing resources from where they can be better used.”

Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives. This principle applies anywhere we are prioritizing scarce resources. It is hard for people to talk about resources when it comes to saving lives, or prolonging or improving them. Doing so is often taken for heartlessness. Yet so long as resources are not infinite—and they never are infinite—it is the most compassionate thing to do to use your brain and work out how to do the most good with what you have.