I’m really glad to see a post challenging what seems to be the status quo opinion of saving lives in cheapest countries is the best / ‘most effective’ thing to do. (Perhaps there are more posts challenging this—I’m still new to the forum and haven’t gone through the archives, but from what I’ve seen more generally, the saving lives most cheaply view seems to be fairly ubiquitous and I worry it’s an overly simplistic way to look at things)
I tend to agree that focusing on cost to save a life is not necessarily the best proxy for effectiveness, and that considering WELLBY type metrics seems a very sensible thing to take into account.
I also think there’s a bit of an under-consideration in common discourse of indirect effects. If you save a life in a rich country, does that sometimes have the potential to do more good overall because they might, post-intervention be in a better position to help others with donations/volunteering/high tax contribution? And if we only addressed what’s espoused to be “the most cost-effective”—only the malaria net charities etc. and we ignore dealing with more expensive issues, we could make the issues we neglect exponentially worse and do more harm than good. It’s not necessarily the case that the more expensive issues just say constant if we don’t fund interventions for them. The world is far more complex than that. Many problems have a tipping point where things get much worse beyond a set point, and if we just say ‘no funding for causes not on the effective charities lists’ there’s a strategic cost/implication to that. For example, child exploitation by criminal gangs—not something you find on the cause prioritisation lists, but if nothing is done to address issues like that, guess what—organised crime thrives without challenge and it becomes a much, much more complex, expensive problem to fix. (There are probably better examples, but I did find this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68615776 from the UK news today really interesting and it seems like an example where there is a problem getting worse and without attention it will become effectively an epidemic. Yet, the general EA wisdom would say funding charities that try to help children escape exploitation by criminal gangs is not cost-effective so don’t put it on your list—don’t we need a more nuanced view?)
Cause prioritisation is really important, considering effectiveness and cost-effectiveneness is really important, but it feels like the model needs to evolve to something a bit less simplistic than how many lives can you save with £X. To be clear, I do genuinely think charities like Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly are fantastic and should receive a high level of funding—but not to the exclusion of everything else. If we fund ONLY those causes described by EA community as cost-effective, there are huge repercussions to that. We need to think about addressing root causes of issues, including those that are complex and may be expensive to solve, not just individual lives saved per £100k (or if we go for lives/£ then at least factor in WELLBYs as suggested, and make some attempt to consider knock on impacts of funding or not , including the difference between low funding for a cause vs zero funding for a cause).
I’d love to see more posts like this one that ask bold questions challenging existing assumptions—strong upvote!
Thank you for this post, Vasco.
I’m really glad to see a post challenging what seems to be the status quo opinion of saving lives in cheapest countries is the best / ‘most effective’ thing to do. (Perhaps there are more posts challenging this—I’m still new to the forum and haven’t gone through the archives, but from what I’ve seen more generally, the saving lives most cheaply view seems to be fairly ubiquitous and I worry it’s an overly simplistic way to look at things)
I tend to agree that focusing on cost to save a life is not necessarily the best proxy for effectiveness, and that considering WELLBY type metrics seems a very sensible thing to take into account.
I also think there’s a bit of an under-consideration in common discourse of indirect effects. If you save a life in a rich country, does that sometimes have the potential to do more good overall because they might, post-intervention be in a better position to help others with donations/volunteering/high tax contribution? And if we only addressed what’s espoused to be “the most cost-effective”—only the malaria net charities etc. and we ignore dealing with more expensive issues, we could make the issues we neglect exponentially worse and do more harm than good. It’s not necessarily the case that the more expensive issues just say constant if we don’t fund interventions for them. The world is far more complex than that. Many problems have a tipping point where things get much worse beyond a set point, and if we just say ‘no funding for causes not on the effective charities lists’ there’s a strategic cost/implication to that. For example, child exploitation by criminal gangs—not something you find on the cause prioritisation lists, but if nothing is done to address issues like that, guess what—organised crime thrives without challenge and it becomes a much, much more complex, expensive problem to fix. (There are probably better examples, but I did find this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68615776 from the UK news today really interesting and it seems like an example where there is a problem getting worse and without attention it will become effectively an epidemic. Yet, the general EA wisdom would say funding charities that try to help children escape exploitation by criminal gangs is not cost-effective so don’t put it on your list—don’t we need a more nuanced view?)
Cause prioritisation is really important, considering effectiveness and cost-effectiveneness is really important, but it feels like the model needs to evolve to something a bit less simplistic than how many lives can you save with £X. To be clear, I do genuinely think charities like Against Malaria Foundation and GiveDirectly are fantastic and should receive a high level of funding—but not to the exclusion of everything else. If we fund ONLY those causes described by EA community as cost-effective, there are huge repercussions to that. We need to think about addressing root causes of issues, including those that are complex and may be expensive to solve, not just individual lives saved per £100k (or if we go for lives/£ then at least factor in WELLBYs as suggested, and make some attempt to consider knock on impacts of funding or not , including the difference between low funding for a cause vs zero funding for a cause).
I’d love to see more posts like this one that ask bold questions challenging existing assumptions—strong upvote!
Thanks for the support, RedTeam!