A not-so-weird thing I’m considering to fund – except this is not EA at all.
I’ve recently read this piece (in Portuguese – from a very respected magazine) about this Haitian refugee who has a crowdfunding campaign to bring her children to Brazil. I also checked her bio in other media outlets.
She still needs around U$ 3,000 – roughly what AMF would need to save an additional life, in some calculations[1]. But life expectancy in Haiti is 64y, and its HDI is .51 – against 75.8y and HDI of .74 in Brazil; besides, it’s particularly higher in Porto Alegre (where she lives), I have to take into account the additional welfare of reuniting a family (kids without a mother probably don’t fare well in Haiti[2]), so I think that moving her kids would entail no less than 30 additional expected QALY, which I consider roughly equivalent to what people mean when they say “AMF saves a life for $3k.” Thus, helping this woman seems to be, according to this back of the envelope calculation, as worthy as donating to AMF in the long run.
Except that I found many other similar crowdfunding pages (e.g., here, here, here, here…) with similar projects which stalled before filling 30% of their budget. What drove my attention to J., instead of the others, is that the magazine made her case salient and confirmed it’s legit—if not for that, I’d be indifferent between helping her or any other Haitian in a similar situation. But it turns out that none of these immigrants will achieve their goals this way: they are competing for scarce resources, but would be better-off if they could coordinate, pool their donations and establish a procedure (maybe a lottery) to decide who is going to get their kids back.
Donating to J. is not scalable; I’d prefer to help solve this coordination problem. I am still thinking about how. On the other hand, I estimate I spent about three additional hours thinking about this problem – which I wouldn’t have done if I’d just donated to an EA charity.
[2] On the other hand, they’ve already survived earlyinfancy, so this difference in life expectancy shouldn’t be that large. But I am not going to compare mortality tables after all this.
A not-so-weird thing I’m considering to fund – except this is not EA at all.
I’ve recently read this piece (in Portuguese – from a very respected magazine) about this Haitian refugee who has a crowdfunding campaign to bring her children to Brazil. I also checked her bio in other media outlets.
She still needs around U$ 3,000 – roughly what AMF would need to save an additional life, in some calculations[1]. But life expectancy in Haiti is 64y, and its HDI is .51 – against 75.8y and HDI of .74 in Brazil; besides, it’s particularly higher in Porto Alegre (where she lives), I have to take into account the additional welfare of reuniting a family (kids without a mother probably don’t fare well in Haiti[2]), so I think that moving her kids would entail no less than 30 additional expected QALY, which I consider roughly equivalent to what people mean when they say “AMF saves a life for $3k.” Thus, helping this woman seems to be, according to this back of the envelope calculation, as worthy as donating to AMF in the long run.
Except that I found many other similar crowdfunding pages (e.g., here, here, here, here…) with similar projects which stalled before filling 30% of their budget. What drove my attention to J., instead of the others, is that the magazine made her case salient and confirmed it’s legit—if not for that, I’d be indifferent between helping her or any other Haitian in a similar situation. But it turns out that none of these immigrants will achieve their goals this way: they are competing for scarce resources, but would be better-off if they could coordinate, pool their donations and establish a procedure (maybe a lottery) to decide who is going to get their kids back.
Donating to J. is not scalable; I’d prefer to help solve this coordination problem. I am still thinking about how. On the other hand, I estimate I spent about three additional hours thinking about this problem – which I wouldn’t have done if I’d just donated to an EA charity.
[1] I am using a very old and not super high quality source, but I am not pretending this is an accurate CBA.
[2] On the other hand, they’ve already survived earlyinfancy, so this difference in life expectancy shouldn’t be that large. But I am not going to compare mortality tables after all this.