GiveWell estimates a cost of $1965 for a gain of ~8 DALY-equivalents, or $437.50 per DALY, from giving malaria-preventing mosquito nets to children in developing countries.
Just flagging that GiveWell’s view about mosquito net DALYs has changed a lot:
In 2016, they modeled each under-age-5 life saved by mosquito nets as being equivalent to 7 DALYs (presumably following an intuition that young infants don’t yet have a fully formed personhood & thus have less moral patienthood than people above the age of 5)
In 2017, they stopped using DALYs altogether, noting “We felt that using the DALY framework in an unconventional way could lead to confusion, while strictly adhering to the conventional version of the framework would prevent some individuals from adequately accounting for their views within our CEA.”
Yes, I’m aware, and thanks for explicitly flagging that.
DALY estimates are obviously fraught, and I understand that they’re not exact for any particular charity, but they seem seem relevant to back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit thinking about cause areas.
Just flagging that GiveWell’s view about mosquito net DALYs has changed a lot:
In 2015, I believe they were modeling each life saved by mosquito nets as being equivalent to 36.53 DALYs, following Lopez et al. 2006, Table 5.1 p. 402
In 2016, they modeled each under-age-5 life saved by mosquito nets as being equivalent to 7 DALYs (presumably following an intuition that young infants don’t yet have a fully formed personhood & thus have less moral patienthood than people above the age of 5)
In 2017, they stopped using DALYs altogether, noting “We felt that using the DALY framework in an unconventional way could lead to confusion, while strictly adhering to the conventional version of the framework would prevent some individuals from adequately accounting for their views within our CEA.”
Yes, I’m aware, and thanks for explicitly flagging that.
DALY estimates are obviously fraught, and I understand that they’re not exact for any particular charity, but they seem seem relevant to back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit thinking about cause areas.