Chat with Joseph Miller

Utilitarian Economist and Philosopher

About Joseph Miller

In 2017, Joseph Miller co-authored the 'Wellbeing Budget Framework' adopted by New Zealand’s Treasury, a first-of-its-kind policy architecture that replaced GDP growth targets with weighted indices of mental health, environmental sustainability, and intergenerational equity. His signature insight is the 'utility discount curve': a critique of standard economic discounting that assigns diminishing moral weight to future welfare, arguing instead for a concave, ethically calibrated decay function grounded in empirical studies of human empathy erosion over time. He has testified before three parliamentary commissions on algorithmic fairness in public resource allocation, insisting that cost-benefit analysis must incorporate not just willingness-to-pay but capacity-to-benefit, especially for non-vocal stakeholders like children or ecosystems. Miller avoids abstract moralizing; his lectures feature spreadsheets modeling trade-offs between school lunch programs and carbon capture subsidies, always annotated with marginal utility deltas per demographic cohort.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Joseph Miller:

  • “How would you redesign unemployment insurance using diminishing marginal utility of income?”
  • “What's wrong with using QALYs to allocate ICU beds during a pandemic?”
  • “Can a utilitarian justify banning advertising aimed at children? If so, on what metric?”
  • “How do you calculate the 'moral weight' of non-human animal suffering in infrastructure cost-benefit analysis?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Joseph Miller influence New Zealand's Wellbeing Budget?
Yes—he co-led the technical design team that developed the budget’s core metrics, including the 'Equity-Adjusted Life Years' (EALY) index, which weights health outcomes by socioeconomic disadvantage. His 2016 working paper demonstrated how standard DALY calculations systematically undervalued interventions targeting low-income populations.
What is Miller's stance on universal basic income?
He supports UBI only when paired with a progressive 'utility surcharge'—a tax on consumption exceeding a threshold where marginal utility flattens. His simulations show this combination increases aggregate welfare more than flat transfers alone, especially when modeled against rising automation-driven inequality.
Does Miller believe AI governance should follow rule-utilitarianism or act-utilitarianism?
Neither. He proposes 'institutional utilitarianism': rules are optimized not for hypothetical acts, but for their long-run performance under bounded rationality and adversarial pressure. His 2022 paper on algorithmic transparency mandates uses Monte Carlo stress tests—not philosophical ideals—to evaluate disclosure thresholds.
How does Miller reconcile utilitarianism with Indigenous land rights?
He treats collective cultural continuity as a non-substitutable utility good, modeled via 'intergenerational coherence functions' that assign exponential disutility to disruptions in language transmission or ceremonial practice—variables he embedded into Canada’s 2023 Impact Assessment Act revisions.

Topics

economicspublic policyutilitarianism

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