Thanks Vadim, and the team at FP! This was really informative. CEARCH did a fairly shallow dive on education before (looking specifically at streaming/​TARL), and found that while it might be competitive with GiveWell, it didn’t match our fairly aggressive bar of 10x GiveWell cost-effectiveness (which typically only policy and mass media health interventions meet) - we’ll probably relook the issue eventually, and your research will be really useful!
The only other thing I would add is that income isn’t everything, and we probably should value the pure intelligence effects, independent of income. Presumably, even if education didn’t make us any richer, but still made us more cognitively capable, we would assign a non-trivial value to that! And of course, people do value avoiding relative cognitive incapability in and of itself—hence the GBD moral weights on intellectual disabilities ranging from 4% to 20% (for mild to profound), which may itself be an underestimate; compare the GHE moral weights of 13% to 44% for the same disabilities. (https://​​cdn.who.int/​​media/​​docs/​​default-source/​​gho-documents/​​global-health-estimates/​​ghe2019_daly-methods.pdf)
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I am a little torn about valuing pure intelligence effects. On one hand it seems silly to only focus on the income effect when we know that education likely increases intelligence, quality of democratic participation, socialization, wisdom, etc. but on the other hand, when I tried to find evidence for education increasing health or life satisfaction beyond what we would expect from the income effects, I did not find much (I mention this briefly towards the end of the post). I would want to be wiser and more intelligent partly because I would expect to be able to live a more satisfied life, and to be able to make better choices that would make me happier and healthier. If the additional intelligence doesn’t seem to be actually increasing heath or life satisfaction, it makes me more suspicious of the claim that it is really producing a valuable kind of intelligence or wisdom. On the other hand, I do believe that life satisfaction is only one of many morally valuable things. Maybe the (overly convenient) reconciliation of these intuitions is to say that health interventions likely have these other effects too, where a healthier person gains the ability to make more free decisions, and potentially live a more social and fuller life.
Thanks Vadim, and the team at FP! This was really informative. CEARCH did a fairly shallow dive on education before (looking specifically at streaming/​TARL), and found that while it might be competitive with GiveWell, it didn’t match our fairly aggressive bar of 10x GiveWell cost-effectiveness (which typically only policy and mass media health interventions meet) - we’ll probably relook the issue eventually, and your research will be really useful!
The only other thing I would add is that income isn’t everything, and we probably should value the pure intelligence effects, independent of income. Presumably, even if education didn’t make us any richer, but still made us more cognitively capable, we would assign a non-trivial value to that! And of course, people do value avoiding relative cognitive incapability in and of itself—hence the GBD moral weights on intellectual disabilities ranging from 4% to 20% (for mild to profound), which may itself be an underestimate; compare the GHE moral weights of 13% to 44% for the same disabilities. (https://​​cdn.who.int/​​media/​​docs/​​default-source/​​gho-documents/​​global-health-estimates/​​ghe2019_daly-methods.pdf)
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I am a little torn about valuing pure intelligence effects. On one hand it seems silly to only focus on the income effect when we know that education likely increases intelligence, quality of democratic participation, socialization, wisdom, etc. but on the other hand, when I tried to find evidence for education increasing health or life satisfaction beyond what we would expect from the income effects, I did not find much (I mention this briefly towards the end of the post). I would want to be wiser and more intelligent partly because I would expect to be able to live a more satisfied life, and to be able to make better choices that would make me happier and healthier. If the additional intelligence doesn’t seem to be actually increasing heath or life satisfaction, it makes me more suspicious of the claim that it is really producing a valuable kind of intelligence or wisdom. On the other hand, I do believe that life satisfaction is only one of many morally valuable things. Maybe the (overly convenient) reconciliation of these intuitions is to say that health interventions likely have these other effects too, where a healthier person gains the ability to make more free decisions, and potentially live a more social and fuller life.