We already include GiveWell’s adjustments, including their supplemental intervention adjustments in the lives saved and income-generated figures we use (and then adjust in the case of the income effects).
I guess I’m not quite sure what to make of your answer here. To take a concrete example, when computing AMF’s cost-effectiveness in an Epicurian framework, how many WELLBYs/$1k are you attributing to reduced morbidity?
This is implicitly 0.42 WELLBYs per $1k if we go with the HLI adjusted figures, or it’s 1.67 WELLBYs per $1k if you take GiveWell’s income figures at face value.
Again, GiveWell doesn’t explicitly model the morbidity effects other than by inflating the value of malaria prevention’s life-saving and income-increasing effect by 9%. We didn’t tinker with the supplemental charity-level adjustments, supplemental intervention-level adjustments or their leverage/funging adjustments because that is, I expect, a whole can of worms. Because we kept these adjustments that GiveWell uses to tweak the value of income and life -- the morbidity effects that GiveWell implicitly incorporates, we implicitly include it as well.
Basically, if you think that the morbidity effects should merit a different adjustment than 9%, we don’t account for that. If you’re satisfied with 9%, then it’s already accounted for, just in a weird opaque way as part of GiveWell’s suite of subjective adjustments.
Thanks for the response! If I’m understanding you right, then I’m not convinced I like your approach to this specific aspect of the model. But I do think any approach to handling the morbidity benefits is going to be very coarse without a lot of further research.
To try and illustrate my concern, let me just give a quick example for the DRC, working in GiveWell’s units of value rather than WELLBYs (because that’s what I’m more familiar with). If we take GiveWell’s estimate that the morbidity reduction is equal to a 9% of AMF’s pre-adjustment benefits, that means that per $100000, morbidity reduction generates 0.09*8570 = 771 units of value.
Based on how I think you’re doing it, when you go to calculate the non-life-extension benefits of AMF, you compute the benefits of morbidity reduction as 9% of (development benefits + avoided bereavement). If we just work with GiveWell’s numbers (which don’t include the bereavement effects), that would be 0.09*2582 = 232 units of value/$100000. Then when you go to calculate the life-extension benefits, you add in a 9% adjustment for morbidity reduction, which is 0.09*5987 = 539 units of value/$100000. But that bookkeeping doesn’t make any sense, as all the morbidity benefits should be accounted for in the non-life-extension category. Doing it the way I think you are, where you’re adding a factor of 0.09 to all benefits, ends up making AMF look worse in the Epicurean case, as well as in all cases with a higher neutral point for happiness.
This is actually even more important because you’re applying such a big downward adjustment to GiveWell’s numbers. If we divide GiveWell’s estimate of the development benefits by 4, then the development benefits are about 709 units of value/$100000 and the total morbidity reduction benefits under GiveWell’s assumptions are 9% of the new total, or 597 units of value/$100000. If you do the bookkeeping how I think you’re doing, only 58 units of value/$100000 of morbidity reduction would get attributed to the non-life-extension benefit category. Correctly attributing all 597 units of value/$100000 from morbidity reduction nearly doubles the estimated non-life-extension benefits of AMF.
I recognize that to some extent we’re working with made-up numbers here. But I think the general point that the supplemental adjustments need to be handled with care when doing this kind of component analysis is an important one. However, I do apologize in advance if I’m misunderstanding how you’re approaching this right now.
We already include GiveWell’s adjustments, including their supplemental intervention adjustments in the lives saved and income-generated figures we use (and then adjust in the case of the income effects).
I guess I’m not quite sure what to make of your answer here. To take a concrete example, when computing AMF’s cost-effectiveness in an Epicurian framework, how many WELLBYs/$1k are you attributing to reduced morbidity?
This is implicitly 0.42 WELLBYs per $1k if we go with the HLI adjusted figures, or it’s 1.67 WELLBYs per $1k if you take GiveWell’s income figures at face value.
Again, GiveWell doesn’t explicitly model the morbidity effects other than by inflating the value of malaria prevention’s life-saving and income-increasing effect by 9%. We didn’t tinker with the supplemental charity-level adjustments, supplemental intervention-level adjustments or their leverage/funging adjustments because that is, I expect, a whole can of worms. Because we kept these adjustments that GiveWell uses to tweak the value of income and life -- the morbidity effects that GiveWell implicitly incorporates, we implicitly include it as well.
Basically, if you think that the morbidity effects should merit a different adjustment than 9%, we don’t account for that. If you’re satisfied with 9%, then it’s already accounted for, just in a weird opaque way as part of GiveWell’s suite of subjective adjustments.
Thanks for the response! If I’m understanding you right, then I’m not convinced I like your approach to this specific aspect of the model. But I do think any approach to handling the morbidity benefits is going to be very coarse without a lot of further research.
To try and illustrate my concern, let me just give a quick example for the DRC, working in GiveWell’s units of value rather than WELLBYs (because that’s what I’m more familiar with). If we take GiveWell’s estimate that the morbidity reduction is equal to a 9% of AMF’s pre-adjustment benefits, that means that per $100000, morbidity reduction generates 0.09*8570 = 771 units of value.
Based on how I think you’re doing it, when you go to calculate the non-life-extension benefits of AMF, you compute the benefits of morbidity reduction as 9% of (development benefits + avoided bereavement). If we just work with GiveWell’s numbers (which don’t include the bereavement effects), that would be 0.09*2582 = 232 units of value/$100000. Then when you go to calculate the life-extension benefits, you add in a 9% adjustment for morbidity reduction, which is 0.09*5987 = 539 units of value/$100000. But that bookkeeping doesn’t make any sense, as all the morbidity benefits should be accounted for in the non-life-extension category. Doing it the way I think you are, where you’re adding a factor of 0.09 to all benefits, ends up making AMF look worse in the Epicurean case, as well as in all cases with a higher neutral point for happiness.
This is actually even more important because you’re applying such a big downward adjustment to GiveWell’s numbers. If we divide GiveWell’s estimate of the development benefits by 4, then the development benefits are about 709 units of value/$100000 and the total morbidity reduction benefits under GiveWell’s assumptions are 9% of the new total, or 597 units of value/$100000. If you do the bookkeeping how I think you’re doing, only 58 units of value/$100000 of morbidity reduction would get attributed to the non-life-extension benefit category. Correctly attributing all 597 units of value/$100000 from morbidity reduction nearly doubles the estimated non-life-extension benefits of AMF.
I recognize that to some extent we’re working with made-up numbers here. But I think the general point that the supplemental adjustments need to be handled with care when doing this kind of component analysis is an important one. However, I do apologize in advance if I’m misunderstanding how you’re approaching this right now.