This is great work, and I think it’s super valuable to everyone thinking about the best ways to go about improving global health and wellbeing. I wanted to share a couple comments on it as well as a couple specific questions.
First, I think it’s really good you’re looking at these questions in so much detail despite the fact that they can feel unpleasant or difficult. I personally think that there’s something pretty screwed up about the world when a random upper-middle class person in the United States can choose whether someone in Sub-Saharan Africa lives or dies depending on the choice of how much and where to donate. But given that’s the world we live in, I think it’s really important to do our best to try and figure out answers to these kinds of moral questions you’re looking at. (Note: I also think it’s worth trying to bring about systemic changes to remove the need for aid, but systemic change isn’t something that we can snap our fingers and bring about. It’s a complex process that carries its own costs and benefits, and the potential for systemic change doesn’t remove the need to think carefully about options for improving wellbeing immediately).
In light of my more general feelings, I’m pretty strongly in favor of efforts that try and ask aid recipients what they want and value, rather than trying to make these tradeoffs based on our own moral reasoning. For that reason, I’ve been very pleased that GiveWell has incorporated surveys in its computation of moral weights, and I’ll be very excited to see the results from HLI’s survey on the neutral point. I would love to see more survey work that tries to tease out views on deprivationism vs. TRIA vs. Epicurianism among individuals actually impacted by aid. However, these might be complicated enough questions that focus groups and other more in-depth approaches would work better than surveys.
With those comments out of the way, I also wanted to ask a couple specific questions:
When you computed your 4 WELLBY/$1,000 cost-effectiveness estimate for AMF’s development effects, is that after correcting for the previous arithmetic error from the Dozen Doubts post? (Edit: I tried to check this myself, but the Google sheet link didn’t seem to work for me).
Does anyone use a simple total utilitarian framework when doing this kind of cost-benefit accounting? I would think that such a framework might look sort of in between deprivationism and Epicurianism, depending on how interventions impacted fertility. I don’t want to come across as endorsing the total utilitarian framework as a uniquely desirable one to use, but it seems worth at least thinking about in this context.
I find myself still trying to form a view on how much we can and should outsource our moral reasoning by surveying people in general and beneficiaries in particular. I think this is a tricky question, as there are many technical questions we don’t and probably shouldn’t survey the affected people to decide on the best course of action (i.e., setting interest rates). That being said, I would welcome more work understanding people’s views on these tough philosophical questions. I think this could be a promising line of research[1].
Answering your specific comments.
Yes, this is after correcting the previous error.
I would hesitate to ever put “simple” next to “total utilitarian”! But more seriously, we considered adding this perspective, but we found it difficult to implement and more difficult to communicate. The difficulty with incorporating fertility is when to stop counting. Take the immediate “replacement” effect. Roodman (2014) estimates for every 4 children who die, this leads to between 1 and 2 extra children being born. So if we just stop there, adding fertility in a totalist perspective makes AMF look relatively worse. But why stop there? Why not count the next generation? If we save 4 people, but only 2 are counterfactually created, then there are still 2 people who could have 3 children of their own. So instead of just saving 4 people (which would have been the result in the non-totalist analysis), you’ve actually saved 8! Double the value! But would it make sense to add the generation after that? What about the 4th, 5th or 6th generations? At what point are we just making up numbers? A further issue is that this whole discussion doesn’t incorporate a whole lot of more speculative effects that could potentially swamp the totalists calculus. These are infamously tough problems like: is it better or worse for the rest of the population for more people to exist? AKA is the world under or overpopulated? Does adding new people increase or decrease existential risk? I don’t have good, confident answers to these questions, and I’d be sceptical of anyone who claims to! My hunch is that if you’re a totalist, your view on saving lives will probably not be driven by crunching the numbers about fertility but about your speculation on how adding people affects the wellbeing of the population and existential security.
But the IDinsight report on this topic (2019) made me think this type of work may be more difficult to do in very low-income settings than I might have hoped.
Thanks so much for your answer. I generally think what you’re saying here makes sense, but I wanted to dig into one specific point. You say:
My hunch is that if you’re a totalist, your view on saving lives will probably not be driven by crunching the numbers about fertility but about your speculation on how adding people affects the wellbeing of the population and existential security.
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns. Even under a TRIA framework, wouldn’t you still care about the population-level wellbeing impacts of any intervention (at least on the portion of the population that exists in both the world where the intervention happens and does not happen)? It feels like a little bit of a selective demand for rigor to say that this makes the total utilitarian calculus intractable, but not that it makes any of the other calculi intractable.
Still, I do recognize that total utilitarianism sometimes leads to galaxy-brained worries about higher-order effects.
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns.
Right, I should have clarified that the gnarly thing with totalism is considering the effect on all future 14k+ generations and the likelihood they exist, not just the higher-order effects on the presently existing population.
However, I’m not the philosopher, so Michael may disagree with my sketch of the situation.
Pointing out an issue with the links to sheets that are referenced. Remove everything after ”/edit” to make them work (as per below), and the latter one regardless is not publicly accessible:
Regarding the content, as explained in Joel’s comment above the immediate expected replacement effects are not included, and if they were to be you need to ask why stop after the first generation. Is there a legitimate argument however to count the first generation and stop there? Because:
first generation replacement effect is relevant immediately, or at least within the next few years. Second generation is relevant in ~20 years, when the state of the world is much less predictable. Hopefully subjective wellbeing of people in these regions will be noticeably better in 20 years, and any replacement effect/rate might also be noticeably different.
it is similar in immediacy and measurability (I think) to developmental, morbidity and grievance impacts that are included.
Thanks very much for flagging the issues with the spreadsheet links. I believe I’ve fixed them all now but do let me know if you encounter any further issues.
This is great work, and I think it’s super valuable to everyone thinking about the best ways to go about improving global health and wellbeing. I wanted to share a couple comments on it as well as a couple specific questions.
First, I think it’s really good you’re looking at these questions in so much detail despite the fact that they can feel unpleasant or difficult. I personally think that there’s something pretty screwed up about the world when a random upper-middle class person in the United States can choose whether someone in Sub-Saharan Africa lives or dies depending on the choice of how much and where to donate. But given that’s the world we live in, I think it’s really important to do our best to try and figure out answers to these kinds of moral questions you’re looking at. (Note: I also think it’s worth trying to bring about systemic changes to remove the need for aid, but systemic change isn’t something that we can snap our fingers and bring about. It’s a complex process that carries its own costs and benefits, and the potential for systemic change doesn’t remove the need to think carefully about options for improving wellbeing immediately).
In light of my more general feelings, I’m pretty strongly in favor of efforts that try and ask aid recipients what they want and value, rather than trying to make these tradeoffs based on our own moral reasoning. For that reason, I’ve been very pleased that GiveWell has incorporated surveys in its computation of moral weights, and I’ll be very excited to see the results from HLI’s survey on the neutral point. I would love to see more survey work that tries to tease out views on deprivationism vs. TRIA vs. Epicurianism among individuals actually impacted by aid. However, these might be complicated enough questions that focus groups and other more in-depth approaches would work better than surveys.
With those comments out of the way, I also wanted to ask a couple specific questions:
When you computed your 4 WELLBY/$1,000 cost-effectiveness estimate for AMF’s development effects, is that after correcting for the previous arithmetic error from the Dozen Doubts post? (Edit: I tried to check this myself, but the Google sheet link didn’t seem to work for me).
Does anyone use a simple total utilitarian framework when doing this kind of cost-benefit accounting? I would think that such a framework might look sort of in between deprivationism and Epicurianism, depending on how interventions impacted fertility. I don’t want to come across as endorsing the total utilitarian framework as a uniquely desirable one to use, but it seems worth at least thinking about in this context.
Hi MHR,
I also wish that these choices need not be made.
I find myself still trying to form a view on how much we can and should outsource our moral reasoning by surveying people in general and beneficiaries in particular. I think this is a tricky question, as there are many technical questions we don’t and probably shouldn’t survey the affected people to decide on the best course of action (i.e., setting interest rates). That being said, I would welcome more work understanding people’s views on these tough philosophical questions. I think this could be a promising line of research[1].
Answering your specific comments.
Yes, this is after correcting the previous error.
I would hesitate to ever put “simple” next to “total utilitarian”! But more seriously, we considered adding this perspective, but we found it difficult to implement and more difficult to communicate. The difficulty with incorporating fertility is when to stop counting. Take the immediate “replacement” effect. Roodman (2014) estimates for every 4 children who die, this leads to between 1 and 2 extra children being born. So if we just stop there, adding fertility in a totalist perspective makes AMF look relatively worse. But why stop there? Why not count the next generation? If we save 4 people, but only 2 are counterfactually created, then there are still 2 people who could have 3 children of their own. So instead of just saving 4 people (which would have been the result in the non-totalist analysis), you’ve actually saved 8! Double the value! But would it make sense to add the generation after that? What about the 4th, 5th or 6th generations? At what point are we just making up numbers? A further issue is that this whole discussion doesn’t incorporate a whole lot of more speculative effects that could potentially swamp the totalists calculus. These are infamously tough problems like: is it better or worse for the rest of the population for more people to exist? AKA is the world under or overpopulated? Does adding new people increase or decrease existential risk? I don’t have good, confident answers to these questions, and I’d be sceptical of anyone who claims to! My hunch is that if you’re a totalist, your view on saving lives will probably not be driven by crunching the numbers about fertility but about your speculation on how adding people affects the wellbeing of the population and existential security.
But the IDinsight report on this topic (2019) made me think this type of work may be more difficult to do in very low-income settings than I might have hoped.
Thanks so much for your answer. I generally think what you’re saying here makes sense, but I wanted to dig into one specific point. You say:
What worries me here is that you don’t need to be a totalist to have these concerns. Even under a TRIA framework, wouldn’t you still care about the population-level wellbeing impacts of any intervention (at least on the portion of the population that exists in both the world where the intervention happens and does not happen)? It feels like a little bit of a selective demand for rigor to say that this makes the total utilitarian calculus intractable, but not that it makes any of the other calculi intractable.
Still, I do recognize that total utilitarianism sometimes leads to galaxy-brained worries about higher-order effects.
Right, I should have clarified that the gnarly thing with totalism is considering the effect on all future 14k+ generations and the likelihood they exist, not just the higher-order effects on the presently existing population.
However, I’m not the philosopher, so Michael may disagree with my sketch of the situation.
Thanks HLI. I really like the post.
Pointing out an issue with the links to sheets that are referenced. Remove everything after ”/edit” to make them work (as per below), and the latter one regardless is not publicly accessible:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NMAU-a1X4vqjodjI6kf8KnUyCJaK9uyNvXWj5VetDZw
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RrBuiPVgL-t8hlr6EqkqABiaqdHMGkpvfeiqiiX49LU
---
Regarding the content, as explained in Joel’s comment above the immediate expected replacement effects are not included, and if they were to be you need to ask why stop after the first generation. Is there a legitimate argument however to count the first generation and stop there? Because:
first generation replacement effect is relevant immediately, or at least within the next few years. Second generation is relevant in ~20 years, when the state of the world is much less predictable. Hopefully subjective wellbeing of people in these regions will be noticeably better in 20 years, and any replacement effect/rate might also be noticeably different.
it is similar in immediacy and measurability (I think) to developmental, morbidity and grievance impacts that are included.
Thanks.
Thanks very much for flagging the issues with the spreadsheet links. I believe I’ve fixed them all now but do let me know if you encounter any further issues.
Yep that makes sense to me