my sense is that they’ve found interventions with average cost-effectiveness better than $4,500 per child saved and that scale without much cost increase.
Seems plausible, but on the other hand GiveWell decided to hold on to money instead of spending it immediately, apparently because of local scaling limits:
In 2021, we may need to direct as much as $560 million. While we have an excellent team of 22 researchers working on this full time, we haven’t been able to hire quickly enough to match our incredible growth in funds raised.
This year, we expect to identify $400 million in 8x or better opportunities. If our fundraising projections hold, we may have $160 million (or more) that we’re unable to spend at our current bar.
FWIW: GiveWell actually already had some opportunities in the pipeline that they were still working on (e.g. Dispensers for Safe Water). Given the funding needs of their top charities right now it’s looking very likely they’ll have more room for funding than they can fill this year (unless there’s unprecedented growth which seems unlikely given current projected economic conditions). At the GiveDirectly bar of funding (10%-30% as cost effective) there’s nowhere near enough funding for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, I don’t know much about this; if someone has a good justification for the marginal cost-effectiveness of global health & development interventions, I’d love to see it.
Update: GiveWell funds some interventions at more like $10K/life, which naively suggests that marginal cost per life is about $10K, but maybe those interventions had side effects of gaining information or enabling other interventions in the future and so had greater all-things considered effectiveness.
Seems plausible, but on the other hand GiveWell decided to hold on to money instead of spending it immediately, apparently because of local scaling limits:
FWIW: GiveWell actually already had some opportunities in the pipeline that they were still working on (e.g. Dispensers for Safe Water). Given the funding needs of their top charities right now it’s looking very likely they’ll have more room for funding than they can fill this year (unless there’s unprecedented growth which seems unlikely given current projected economic conditions). At the GiveDirectly bar of funding (10%-30% as cost effective) there’s nowhere near enough funding for the foreseeable future.
(Update: yup)
Yeah, I don’t know much about this; if someone has a good justification for the marginal cost-effectiveness of global health & development interventions, I’d love to see it.
Update: GiveWell funds some interventions at more like $10K/life, which naively suggests that marginal cost per life is about $10K, but maybe those interventions had side effects of gaining information or enabling other interventions in the future and so had greater all-things considered effectiveness.