Hi Vasco, quickly responding to a few of your points here
Let its donors know that donating to GHDF in its current form has a similar effect to donating to AGF (if that is in fact the case), instead of just describing GHDF as a “higher-risk” “higher-reward” alternative (to TCF). “Donating to this fund [GHDF] is valuable because it helps demonstrate to GiveWell that there is donor demand for higher-risk, higher-reward global health and development giving opportunities”.
I do think that the GHDF is more committed to doing something like maximising the impartial good for currently alive people more than GiveWell (in principle), though it also has less capacity to do so. I think GiveWell is a pretty confusing organisation in some ways (e.g. on their site I think they claim to care about things that aren’t just cost-effectiveness -, but to me, it clearly seems like you should just care about cost-effectiveness and whilst some of the things that GiveWell says they care about might be good proxies/signals they really are (imo) only to be used as proxies or signals of cost-effectiveness and not additional factors.
To be clear, I am not advocating for narrow cost-effectiveness estimates that ignore important nth-order effects (e.g. I think that it’s plausible that the Gates Foundation decreased their spending on bed nets due to GiveWell/OP moving a lot of money into the space, and this funging effect would ideally be accounted for in the cost-effectiveness estimate.
When I speak to GiveWell/OP GHW employees, it seems like they agree with me—but I don’t know how to reconcile this with their site + stuff like supporting GiveDirectly for a long time despite thinking there were things more than 5x as good as cash transfers. I also suspect that I am substantially more excited about things like deworming than they are (though probably less than the mean dev economist).
(I’m also a little surprised that you think the GWWC GHW fund is a more reasonable option than the GHDF, it seems to me to have a much shorter track record and I’m pretty confused about the HLI rec (and fwiw the THL rec on the animal side)
Consider appointing additional fund managers independent from GiveWell. I do not recall seeing a public call for fund managers, and I guess it would have attracted more people than a private one. I also assume a short post on eventual attempts to find fund managers would have been useful.
writing a post sounds like a good idea, appointing additional fund managers is definitely something I have considered several times.
If people are interested in being a fund manager feel free to ping me on the forum with a list of your qualifications for the role (or other evidence for why you might be a good fit)
Consider accepting applications. Jason suggested it could “start taking applications that would previously have been within EAIF’s scope, so that there is a relatively seamless transition for potential and established grantees” (see EA Infrastructure Fund’s Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA).
seems reasonable but this mostly hinges on are there people that we trust to evaluate the applications and tbh I haven’t come across many people who I think would do an excellent job relative to GiveWell recs—if you think there are lots of excellent people I am very interested in hearing names.
I do think that my bar for funding something is higher than other GHW donors—e.g. I think lots of successful GHW CE charities (some of which are run by people I really admire and are personal friends of mine) are very unlikely to beat the very best other donation options I am aware of—and imo the main purpose of funding these kinds of narrow GHW charities it almost entirely for the value of discovering that it beats the very best GHW charities we are already aware of + have room for funding.
I think GiveWell is a pretty confusing organisation in some ways (e.g. on their site I think they claim to care about things that aren’t just cost-effectiveness -, but to me, it clearly seems like you should just care about cost-effectiveness and whilst some of the things that GiveWell says that care about might be good proxies/signals they really are (imo) only to be used as proxies or signals of cost-effectiveness.
I very much agree cost-effectiveness is all that matters, in the sense that one would ideally maximise the benefits for a given amount of resources. Of course, as you point out, this does not mean the cost-effectiveness number outputted by the spreadsheet is all that matters! It is often hard to formalise all factors which influence cost-effectiveness, and so the actual cost-effectiveness estimates one obtains are not everything. Nevertheless, my impression is that GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates are pretty close to encompassing all their thinking. Elie mentioned on the Clearer Thinking podcast that:
GiveWell cost- effectiveness estimates are not the only input into our decisions to fund malaria programs and deworming programs, there are some other factors, but they’re certainly 80% plus of the case.
This is in line with what you said about Open Phil and GiveWell agreeing with you.
I’m also a little surprised that you think the GWWC GHW fund is a more reasonable option than the GHDF, it seems to me to have a much shorter track record and I’m pretty confused about the HLI rec
Welcomes further evaluation of the process behind the recommendations of GiveWell and other evaluators in the global health and wellbeing space (e.g. Happier Lives Institute), trusts GWWC’s research team to identify evaluators to rely on, and wants the evaluations to be published, as in GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators. These would be my main reasons for donating to GHWF instead of GHDF, which has not produced public evaluations of GiveWell’s recommendations.
From your comment, it sounds like you have some concerns about GiveWell’s recommendation process, which I think would be worth expanding on more publicly.
[“accepting applications”] seems reasonable but this mostly hinges on are there people that we trust to evaluate the applications and tbh I haven’t come across many people who I think would do an excellent job relative to GiveWell recs—if you think there are lots of excellent people I am very interested in hearing names.
I guess a public call might be helpful to find such people. Rethink Priorities might be open to doing some evaluations? They have been commisioned by GiveWell, and have experience incubating new projects.
I do think that my bar for funding something is higher than other GHW donors
Do you have a cost-effectiveness bar as a fraction of the cost-effectiveness of GiveDirectly? It may be better to be explicit about it. GiveWell’s is 10, and I believe Open Phil’s is 20.
I think lots of successful GHW CE charities (some of which are run by people I really admire and are personal friends of mine) are very unlikely to beat the very best other donation options I am aware of—and imo the main purpose of funding these kinds of narrow GHW charities it almost entirely for the value of discovering that it beats the very best GHW charities we are already aware of + have room for funding.
Fair points. Maybe such charities will eventually (not initially) go on to use funds which would otherwise have gone to less effective charities?
Nevertheless, my impression is that GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates are pretty close to encompassing all their thinking. Elie mentioned on the Clearer Thinking podcast that:
Fwiw I feel quite confused about how different GiveWell’s recommendations would be if they were solely optimising for cost-effectiveness, I have heard different versions of how much they are optimising for this already based on different people that I speak to (and my impression is that most public materials do not say they are solely optimising for this).
Do you have a cost-effectiveness bar as a fraction of the cost-effectiveness of GiveDirectly? It may be better to be explicit about it. GiveWell’s is 10, and I believe Open Phil’s is 20.
I think the bar for the first dollar should be better than the best charity I’m aware of that has room for funding (which is probably at least 20x cash—I’d guess higher). The bar for the last dollar is a bit confusing because of funding effects.
Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it’s a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We’re also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.
In the meantime, here are some notes on our grantmaking and how donations to the fund are currently used.
We expect the impact of giving to the Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) is about the same as giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund: both go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve identified (across programs and organizations), and are a good fit for donors who’d like to support the full range of our grantmaking, including higher-risk grants and research. The online description of GHDF was written before the All Grants Fund existed (it launched in 2022), and the two funds are now filling a very similar niche. Caleb, we’d love to collaborate on updating the GHDF webpage to both reflect the existence of the All Grants Fund and include more recent grant payout reports.
In the broadest sense, GiveWell aims to maximize impact per dollar. Cost-effectiveness is the primary driver of our grantmaking decisions. But, “overall estimated cost-effectiveness of a grant” isn’t the same thing as “output of cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet.” (This blog post is old and not entirely reflective of our current approach, but it covers a similar topic.)
The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
We don’t have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie’s take of “80% plus” definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.
To add something to our top charities list (vs. make a grant from the All Grants Fund / GHDF), we want a high degree of confidence in the program. See our list of additional criteria for top charities here; some of those criteria aren’t proxies for cost-effectiveness, but are instead capturing whether a program provides the confidence and direct case for impact that donors expect from that product.
Also, we recognize it was confusing to have GiveDirectly on our top charity list when we believed our other top charities were substantially more cost-effective. Now, our list of top charities is limited to the programs that we think can most cost-effectively use marginal funding (currently, programs we believe to have room for more funding that is at least 10x unconditional cash transfers); see the fourth bullet point here.
. . . . I think lots of successful GHW CE charities (some of which are run by people I really admire and are personal friends of mine) are very unlikely to beat the very best other donation options I am aware of . . . .
This implies a crux to me. Presumably the people running these charities seek funding from EA sources, despite knowing that counterfactually the bulk of that money would otherwise go to AGF/GHDF/et al. Do you think they disagree with your assessment of their effectiveness, perhaps due to different moral weights?
I’m not suggesting your assessment is wrong—my own tentative view is that there aren’t (m)any places with room for large amounts of funding that would beat GiveWell AGF or similar on pure QUALYs (or equivalent).
main purpose of funding these kinds of narrow GHW charities it almost entirely for the value of discovering that it beats the very best GHW charities we are already aware of + have room for funding
That’s a second crux, I think. While that is an important purpose, it is not as predominant a purpose in my view. There are lots of monies out there that are practically restricted in a way that precludes AGF et al. from competing for them. This could be due to pre-defined government/foundation grant areas, or due to an individual donor’s personal preferences, or a non-EA donor’s desire for some higher quantum of warm fuzzies than organizations like AMF can provide. If we don’t have anything to offer in those areas, we are conceding them to less effective charities.
All funding niches have low-hanging fruit and monies that are harder to acquire. For instance, speaking from personal experience, there are a lot of US evangelical Christians who won’t donate to an organization unless it is Christian-flavored enough. As you might guess, I do not share that view—but it is what it is, and some people with these views are wealthy. Kaleem’s recent quick take on zakat provides another possible example. Other donors really want to donate to mental-health causes, etc. Meanwhile, most GiveWell-recommended charities are significantly operating in a specific zone of fundraising (i.e., donors open to all sorts of charities without any self-imposed limitations). Thus, while it likely isn’t cost-effective to fund organizations that operate in niches merely for the QUALYs they produce, it may be beneficial to support them in their earlier stages until they are developed enough to mine their niche for non-EA resources effectively.
Another consideration is that it is unlikely that the current top GHW charities will be as effective in ~20-30 years. It’s plausible, albeit unlikely, that we will see PEPFAR levels of funding for malaria vaccines in the next decade or so. (Who would have predicted PEPFAR would have happened, and under Bush II at that?) Infectious disease and malnutrition generally become less overwhelming of a problem as a society develops economically. So an effective GHW field that doesn’t grow and develop is unlikely to remain particularly effective in the long run.
That being said: while more cost-effective GHW meta opportunities may well exist, it may be rather difficult to find and evaluate many of them (outside of charity evaluators and effective-giving group support where the causal chain to impact is easier to determine). I’m curious, though, whether/why that would be so much harder in GHW than in longtermism or animal welfare (which do have EA Funds that will consider requests formerly fielded by EAIF). Is it primarily inherent to GHW meta work, or is it more a function of who is skilled up & available to do that evaluation?
Presumably the people running these charities seek funding from EA sources, despite knowing that counterfactually the bulk of that money would otherwise go to AGF/GHDF/et al.
This presumption isn’t always true. In 2019, at CSH we made a deliberate decision not to continue seeking funding from sources that would counterfactually donate to GiveWell top charities.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Jason! I noticed it was downvoted. Excluding my strong upvote and your vote, it would have −7 karma for 2 votes. Caleb’s strong downvote is worth −7, so he (or other person) might have strongly downvoted your comment anticipating it would be significantly upvoted by others, which in this case did not happen. I think it makes sense to strongly downvote comments which are only a few words, and have already tens of karma, but I believe substantive comments with not much karma like yours should only be strongly downvoted if they are offensive or have major factual errors. In addition, to the extent this is case, I think downvoters would ideally point out the errors.
Hi Vasco, quickly responding to a few of your points here
Let its donors know that donating to GHDF in its current form has a similar effect to donating to AGF (if that is in fact the case), instead of just describing GHDF as a “higher-risk” “higher-reward” alternative (to TCF). “Donating to this fund [GHDF] is valuable because it helps demonstrate to GiveWell that there is donor demand for higher-risk, higher-reward global health and development giving opportunities”.
I do think that the GHDF is more committed to doing something like maximising the impartial good for currently alive people more than GiveWell (in principle), though it also has less capacity to do so. I think GiveWell is a pretty confusing organisation in some ways (e.g. on their site I think they claim to care about things that aren’t just cost-effectiveness -, but to me, it clearly seems like you should just care about cost-effectiveness and whilst some of the things that GiveWell says they care about might be good proxies/signals they really are (imo) only to be used as proxies or signals of cost-effectiveness and not additional factors.
To be clear, I am not advocating for narrow cost-effectiveness estimates that ignore important nth-order effects (e.g. I think that it’s plausible that the Gates Foundation decreased their spending on bed nets due to GiveWell/OP moving a lot of money into the space, and this funging effect would ideally be accounted for in the cost-effectiveness estimate.
When I speak to GiveWell/OP GHW employees, it seems like they agree with me—but I don’t know how to reconcile this with their site + stuff like supporting GiveDirectly for a long time despite thinking there were things more than 5x as good as cash transfers. I also suspect that I am substantially more excited about things like deworming than they are (though probably less than the mean dev economist).
(I’m also a little surprised that you think the GWWC GHW fund is a more reasonable option than the GHDF, it seems to me to have a much shorter track record and I’m pretty confused about the HLI rec (and fwiw the THL rec on the animal side)
Consider appointing additional fund managers independent from GiveWell. I do not recall seeing a public call for fund managers, and I guess it would have attracted more people than a private one. I also assume a short post on eventual attempts to find fund managers would have been useful.
writing a post sounds like a good idea, appointing additional fund managers is definitely something I have considered several times.
If people are interested in being a fund manager feel free to ping me on the forum with a list of your qualifications for the role (or other evidence for why you might be a good fit)
Consider accepting applications. Jason suggested it could “start taking applications that would previously have been within EAIF’s scope, so that there is a relatively seamless transition for potential and established grantees” (see EA Infrastructure Fund’s Plan to Focus on Principles-First EA).
seems reasonable but this mostly hinges on are there people that we trust to evaluate the applications and tbh I haven’t come across many people who I think would do an excellent job relative to GiveWell recs—if you think there are lots of excellent people I am very interested in hearing names.
I do think that my bar for funding something is higher than other GHW donors—e.g. I think lots of successful GHW CE charities (some of which are run by people I really admire and are personal friends of mine) are very unlikely to beat the very best other donation options I am aware of—and imo the main purpose of funding these kinds of narrow GHW charities it almost entirely for the value of discovering that it beats the very best GHW charities we are already aware of + have room for funding.
Thanks for the clarifying comments, Caleb!
I very much agree cost-effectiveness is all that matters, in the sense that one would ideally maximise the benefits for a given amount of resources. Of course, as you point out, this does not mean the cost-effectiveness number outputted by the spreadsheet is all that matters! It is often hard to formalise all factors which influence cost-effectiveness, and so the actual cost-effectiveness estimates one obtains are not everything. Nevertheless, my impression is that GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness estimates are pretty close to encompassing all their thinking. Elie mentioned on the Clearer Thinking podcast that:
This is in line with what you said about Open Phil and GiveWell agreeing with you.
Thanks for questioning! I have clarified my reasons a little more updating the 1st 2 bullets of the section Case for donating to Giving What We Can’s Global Health and Wellbeing Fund to:
From your comment, it sounds like you have some concerns about GiveWell’s recommendation process, which I think would be worth expanding on more publicly.
I guess a public call might be helpful to find such people. Rethink Priorities might be open to doing some evaluations? They have been commisioned by GiveWell, and have experience incubating new projects.
Do you have a cost-effectiveness bar as a fraction of the cost-effectiveness of GiveDirectly? It may be better to be explicit about it. GiveWell’s is 10, and I believe Open Phil’s is 20.
Fair points. Maybe such charities will eventually (not initially) go on to use funds which would otherwise have gone to less effective charities?
Fwiw I feel quite confused about how different GiveWell’s recommendations would be if they were solely optimising for cost-effectiveness, I have heard different versions of how much they are optimising for this already based on different people that I speak to (and my impression is that most public materials do not say they are solely optimising for this).
I think the bar for the first dollar should be better than the best charity I’m aware of that has room for funding (which is probably at least 20x cash—I’d guess higher). The bar for the last dollar is a bit confusing because of funding effects.
Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it’s a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We’re also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.
In the meantime, here are some notes on our grantmaking and how donations to the fund are currently used.
We expect the impact of giving to the Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) is about the same as giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund: both go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve identified (across programs and organizations), and are a good fit for donors who’d like to support the full range of our grantmaking, including higher-risk grants and research. The online description of GHDF was written before the All Grants Fund existed (it launched in 2022), and the two funds are now filling a very similar niche. Caleb, we’d love to collaborate on updating the GHDF webpage to both reflect the existence of the All Grants Fund and include more recent grant payout reports.
In the broadest sense, GiveWell aims to maximize impact per dollar. Cost-effectiveness is the primary driver of our grantmaking decisions. But, “overall estimated cost-effectiveness of a grant” isn’t the same thing as “output of cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet.” (This blog post is old and not entirely reflective of our current approach, but it covers a similar topic.)
The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
We don’t have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie’s take of “80% plus” definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.
To add something to our top charities list (vs. make a grant from the All Grants Fund / GHDF), we want a high degree of confidence in the program. See our list of additional criteria for top charities here; some of those criteria aren’t proxies for cost-effectiveness, but are instead capturing whether a program provides the confidence and direct case for impact that donors expect from that product.
Also, we recognize it was confusing to have GiveDirectly on our top charity list when we believed our other top charities were substantially more cost-effective. Now, our list of top charities is limited to the programs that we think can most cost-effectively use marginal funding (currently, programs we believe to have room for more funding that is at least 10x unconditional cash transfers); see the fourth bullet point here.
This implies a crux to me. Presumably the people running these charities seek funding from EA sources, despite knowing that counterfactually the bulk of that money would otherwise go to AGF/GHDF/et al. Do you think they disagree with your assessment of their effectiveness, perhaps due to different moral weights?
I’m not suggesting your assessment is wrong—my own tentative view is that there aren’t (m)any places with room for large amounts of funding that would beat GiveWell AGF or similar on pure QUALYs (or equivalent).
That’s a second crux, I think. While that is an important purpose, it is not as predominant a purpose in my view. There are lots of monies out there that are practically restricted in a way that precludes AGF et al. from competing for them. This could be due to pre-defined government/foundation grant areas, or due to an individual donor’s personal preferences, or a non-EA donor’s desire for some higher quantum of warm fuzzies than organizations like AMF can provide. If we don’t have anything to offer in those areas, we are conceding them to less effective charities.
All funding niches have low-hanging fruit and monies that are harder to acquire. For instance, speaking from personal experience, there are a lot of US evangelical Christians who won’t donate to an organization unless it is Christian-flavored enough. As you might guess, I do not share that view—but it is what it is, and some people with these views are wealthy. Kaleem’s recent quick take on zakat provides another possible example. Other donors really want to donate to mental-health causes, etc. Meanwhile, most GiveWell-recommended charities are significantly operating in a specific zone of fundraising (i.e., donors open to all sorts of charities without any self-imposed limitations). Thus, while it likely isn’t cost-effective to fund organizations that operate in niches merely for the QUALYs they produce, it may be beneficial to support them in their earlier stages until they are developed enough to mine their niche for non-EA resources effectively.
Another consideration is that it is unlikely that the current top GHW charities will be as effective in ~20-30 years. It’s plausible, albeit unlikely, that we will see PEPFAR levels of funding for malaria vaccines in the next decade or so. (Who would have predicted PEPFAR would have happened, and under Bush II at that?) Infectious disease and malnutrition generally become less overwhelming of a problem as a society develops economically. So an effective GHW field that doesn’t grow and develop is unlikely to remain particularly effective in the long run.
That being said: while more cost-effective GHW meta opportunities may well exist, it may be rather difficult to find and evaluate many of them (outside of charity evaluators and effective-giving group support where the causal chain to impact is easier to determine). I’m curious, though, whether/why that would be so much harder in GHW than in longtermism or animal welfare (which do have EA Funds that will consider requests formerly fielded by EAIF). Is it primarily inherent to GHW meta work, or is it more a function of who is skilled up & available to do that evaluation?
This presumption isn’t always true. In 2019, at CSH we made a deliberate decision not to continue seeking funding from sources that would counterfactually donate to GiveWell top charities.
Thanks for clarifying, Katriel. For readers reference, CSH stands for Charity Science Health.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Jason! I noticed it was downvoted. Excluding my strong upvote and your vote, it would have −7 karma for 2 votes. Caleb’s strong downvote is worth −7, so he (or other person) might have strongly downvoted your comment anticipating it would be significantly upvoted by others, which in this case did not happen. I think it makes sense to strongly downvote comments which are only a few words, and have already tens of karma, but I believe substantive comments with not much karma like yours should only be strongly downvoted if they are offensive or have major factual errors. In addition, to the extent this is case, I think downvoters would ideally point out the errors.