After I plugged the raw numbers into guesstimate I started to look into the data a bit more and came out a bit more confused.
I was not sure how much the numbers were influenced by 2015, which had more refugees combined than all following years until now (’15: 1M, ’16: 360k, ’17: 170k, ’18: 140k, ’19: 125k) but also fewer deaths than the following years (’15: 3.7k total, following years: ~2–5k total, so way higher fraction). I also found little data on the fraction of refugees being saved by NGOs (data for 2015 and 2016 is 14 % and 20 % respectively).
So many of Sea-Watch’s lives could’ve been saved during peak migration 2015 when empathy on the Mediterranean sea was still higher and the counterfactual impact is less clear. To check that I updated the Guesstimate to try to model a post-2015 year with refugee numbers and deaths more similar to 2016/17/18 and yielded similar numbers of saved refugees as Sea-Watch claims, so 2015 was likely not an extraordinary year for Sea-Watch (They also only operated in the second half of 2015 with just one ship).
It really hinges on the question of whether the removal of an NGO would result in the refugees they would’ve interacted with dying or being saved by other ships. I tried to bound this “counterfactual death rate” by calculating how high the total death rate would be without NGOs operating and how big Sea-Watch’s share of total NGO-activity plausibly is. Again, see the model. Under these assumptions, cost-effectiveness for a 2016/18-like year would be around 5000€. Which is still very surprising IMHO! But data is spotty and I made the Guesstimate at 1 am, so I apologise for potential errors.
After I plugged the raw numbers into guesstimate I started to look into the data a bit more and came out a bit more confused.
I was not sure how much the numbers were influenced by 2015, which had more refugees combined than all following years until now (’15: 1M, ’16: 360k, ’17: 170k, ’18: 140k, ’19: 125k) but also fewer deaths than the following years (’15: 3.7k total, following years: ~2–5k total, so way higher fraction). I also found little data on the fraction of refugees being saved by NGOs (data for 2015 and 2016 is 14 % and 20 % respectively).
So many of Sea-Watch’s lives could’ve been saved during peak migration 2015 when empathy on the Mediterranean sea was still higher and the counterfactual impact is less clear. To check that I updated the Guesstimate to try to model a post-2015 year with refugee numbers and deaths more similar to 2016/17/18 and yielded similar numbers of saved refugees as Sea-Watch claims, so 2015 was likely not an extraordinary year for Sea-Watch (They also only operated in the second half of 2015 with just one ship).
It really hinges on the question of whether the removal of an NGO would result in the refugees they would’ve interacted with dying or being saved by other ships. I tried to bound this “counterfactual death rate” by calculating how high the total death rate would be without NGOs operating and how big Sea-Watch’s share of total NGO-activity plausibly is. Again, see the model. Under these assumptions, cost-effectiveness for a 2016/18-like year would be around 5000€. Which is still very surprising IMHO! But data is spotty and I made the Guesstimate at 1 am, so I apologise for potential errors.