Thanks for posting this.

“amounts matter” or “let’s actually do cost-benefit analysis” [...] To be clear, "amounts matter" is the usual EA stance already

I think EA is still overemphasizing high benefit-cost ratios, but it's now better to find high benefit minus cost interventions. In other words, it used to be the case that we wanted to find a way to fill a $1m funding gap to save 1000 lives, and save a life for $1k, but now even though these small funding gaps still exist it's quite hard to find them at scale, and we might rather want to find a billion dollar funding gap that saves lives at only $10k, but then save 100k lives which is better since amounts matter as you say.

In contrast to a movement trying to push high B/C interventions like EA, an 'amounts matter' / B-C movement would have much higher popular appeal as it would directly and personally affect many more people.

A few things that this movement might highlight (all 'big, if true'):

• Covid: As you say, global GDP losses from COVID are massive already $12T and  3 billion annual vaccine courses have a global benefit of $17T - a benefit of ~$576 to $989 per course. at a cost of $6 to $40 per course - and so the benefit cost ratios might not actually be as low as on the order of 10x, yet still then total benefits would be enormous.
• War on terror cost $6T
• Ukraine war might also cost the global economy $0.5T (or more)
• Syrian refugee crisis might cost Germany $0.5T
• 2008 financial crisis: $6-14T just  for the U.S. ($50k-$120k for every U.S. household) and caused  500,000 cancer deaths worldwide, so macroprudential and generally macroeconomic policy might have huge effects  

There are some public health things probably roughly on a similar level (smoking, obesity, etc.). 

On some level, politics is already doing this, but I think there's still a lot of scope insensitivity and not concrete focus on these issues.

Here's how I'd put your suggestion in my own words:

Currently, political debate weighs policy options by whether or not they "help" or "harm" certain reference classes. A reference class is any symbolic, social, or physical thing that we care about. 

Examples of a reference class could include "patriotism," "community health," "jobs," or even something as concrete and small-scale as the view from an individual person's deck.

Hence, political debate is currently about defining which reference classes we should care about, and how important they are, and then weighing the policy by whether it "helps" or "harms" each.

As such, current policy debate can take in the scale of the impact only according to how important the references classes are. The importance of the reference class is ambiguous, and lumps together both the physical consequences and the moral weight people attach to it.

The Amounts Matter movement would advocate that, instead of considering only the importance of the reference classes and whether or not the intervention "helps" or "harms" them, policy debate focus on how much the intervention "helps" or "harms" them. It would seek to make people have a genuine gut sense of missing some important information when policy debate does not include information on "how much" the intervention helps or harms.

In practice, it might cause debate to shift from this:

"We should make preschoolers wear masks because it helps protect our state from COVID-19."

"No, we shouldn't make preschoolers wear masks because it harms children's language development."

To this:

"We should make preschoolers wear masks because it helps protect our state from COVID-19 by preventing about 100 deaths per year."

"No, we shouldn't make preschoolers wear masks because it harms children's language development by delaying it by about 6 months."

The result is that debate can now take place not about whether or not the reference classes matter, or whether or not the policy "helps" or "harms" them, but in terms of how much the policy "helps" or "harms" each item.

I tend to think the reason this is not done is partly because adding more information expands the attack surface for a motivated opponent. In addition, it's inherently easier to claim that X "helps" or "harms" than it is to specify how much it "helps" or "harms."

The underlying problem here seems to be that anticipation of a hostile, non-truth-seeking response leads people to be less specific in their claims.

So you could do a few things:

• Incentivize the provision of scale information during political debate
• Disincentivize using scale information as a target for hostile criticism
• Disincentivize making claims about "help" and "harm" if scale information is not included

I could see some sensible ways for doing this. For example, a formal political debate could make it a rule that all claims about policies must include a piece of scale information. Or critiques of political agendas could be produced that drill into the absence of scale information and use this as an occasion for ridicule.

On the whole though, any such movement would be participating in the blood sport of politics, and I would expect it to get bloody.

Also see.

I've often heard the phrase "numbers matter" but not sure if I prefer it. The concept reminds me of (the inverse of) the quote attributed to Stalin that "the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic." In the EA for Christians community we have sometimes used the phrase "love thy statistic" as a slogan to counter this.