Another possible benefit is that doing cost-benefit analyses might make you better at doing other cost -benefit analyses, or give you other transferrable skills or knowledge that are helpful for top-priority causes. I think that for all our enthusiasm about these kinds of assessments, we don’t actually as a community produce that many of them. Scaling up the analysis industry might lead to all sorts of improvements in how quickly and accurately we can do them.
Though the flipside of this is I think we probably don’t have a bunch of people sitting around like “ah, I would do a cost-benefit analysis, but none of the things to analyse are worth my time”, so reading this post probably doesn’t generate LICAs unless we also figure out what people are missing to be able to do more of this stuff.
I expect partly it’s just that doing Real, Important Research is more intimidating than it deserves to be, and it would be useful to try to “demystify” some of this work a bit.
Yeah this is a really good point! Something I was kind of aware of while writing this is that I’m a hypocrite—I’ve never done this. It’s probably really hard to do, and probably one reason why people don’t do it that much is just ‘it will take me ages and ages, no-one is paying me to do, and I have a day job/studies/life to deal with’.
I would definitely sign up for, like, a ‘cost-effectiveness analysis 101 fellowship’.
Another possible benefit is that doing cost-benefit analyses might make you better at doing other cost -benefit analyses, or give you other transferrable skills or knowledge that are helpful for top-priority causes. I think that for all our enthusiasm about these kinds of assessments, we don’t actually as a community produce that many of them. Scaling up the analysis industry might lead to all sorts of improvements in how quickly and accurately we can do them.
Though the flipside of this is I think we probably don’t have a bunch of people sitting around like “ah, I would do a cost-benefit analysis, but none of the things to analyse are worth my time”, so reading this post probably doesn’t generate LICAs unless we also figure out what people are missing to be able to do more of this stuff.
I expect partly it’s just that doing Real, Important Research is more intimidating than it deserves to be, and it would be useful to try to “demystify” some of this work a bit.
Yeah this is a really good point! Something I was kind of aware of while writing this is that I’m a hypocrite—I’ve never done this. It’s probably really hard to do, and probably one reason why people don’t do it that much is just ‘it will take me ages and ages, no-one is paying me to do, and I have a day job/studies/life to deal with’.
I would definitely sign up for, like, a ‘cost-effectiveness analysis 101 fellowship’.