that the fact about “per DALY lost, spending on HIV is 150x higher than spending on mental health” is not necessarily a sign of irrational priorities
I agree! At the start of section 4, on neglectedness—the one which later compares HIV to mental health spending—we make the same point (emphasis added):
In terms of national spending, in every country the proportion of the health budget spent on mental healthcare and research is disproportionate to the burden of mental disorders (see figure 4) (Patel et al., 2018). To be clear, this by itself does not show more should be spent on mental health, if the aim is to have the biggest impact using scarce resources: if interventions in other areas were more cost-effective, then this allocation would be justified. However, as we go on to argue, it seems likely mental health has been unduly neglected due to reasons such as stigma.
Sort of aside: there is this ongoing confusion inside the EA community about the importance of ‘scale’, ‘neglectedness’ and ‘tractability’, something that’s been discussed on this forum before—see e.g. this summary of two chapters from my PhD thesis. I recommend that people think of scale (size of a problem) and neglectedness (resources going to a problem) as background information that might later be relevant to the cost-effectiveness of a problem, but that they don’t by themselves tell you anything about cost-effectiveness.
No problem. It’s always a challenge that you want to put the attention-grabbing stuff at the top whilst knowing that you can’t properly caveat it and many won’t read anything else!
I agree! At the start of section 4, on neglectedness—the one which later compares HIV to mental health spending—we make the same point (emphasis added):
Sort of aside: there is this ongoing confusion inside the EA community about the importance of ‘scale’, ‘neglectedness’ and ‘tractability’, something that’s been discussed on this forum before—see e.g. this summary of two chapters from my PhD thesis. I recommend that people think of scale (size of a problem) and neglectedness (resources going to a problem) as background information that might later be relevant to the cost-effectiveness of a problem, but that they don’t by themselves tell you anything about cost-effectiveness.
Nice. Foolish of me to nitpick an executive summary—it’s a summary!
No problem. It’s always a challenge that you want to put the attention-grabbing stuff at the top whilst knowing that you can’t properly caveat it and many won’t read anything else!