There’s also this article from Giving What We Can with some examples[1], which claims
Our research team believes that many of us can easily 100x our impact by giving to charities that achieve more per dollar spent.
Personally, having looked at some average charities, I think both articles downplay the difference in practice
Some quick reasons why I think so:
If I remember correctly, the 80k article compares the mean of the top 2.5% interventions with the mean of all interventions. This artificially caps the maximum possible difference at 50x. I think that GiveWell-recommended charities are in the top ~0.1% of charities, and so can have a much higher relative difference.
Training a guide dog costs at least €25,000[2] in Italy, and it’s not clear how much of it funges with public funds for the same program. A guide dog typically works for 6-8 years, so with €3.5k you can maybe cause a blind person to have a guide dog for one extra year. If you compare it to what the same donation to a GiveWell top charity achieves with the same amount, the difference is (at least to me) clearly much more than 10x. You could argue that these are different “cause areas”, but to me they are both “human health and wellbeing”
Personal anecdote: my parents are going to a concert for charity next week, and invited a friend of theirs. We looked up what the funds are going to, and it turns out they are raising €40,000 to purchase “two devices useful for preventing alopecia induced by chemotherapy”. Their friend is bald and was disappointed after knowing that, but none of them would have checked, and I imagine they would have assumed to be funding something within an order of magnitude of cost-effectiveness as any other donation to charity. I think this is representative of what the “average charity” in a wealthy country looks like, and I’m confident that an extra €40,000 to Remote Health Centers In Uganda would buy something that’s significantly more than 10x as useful as those alopecia-prevention devices.
Your comment relates to interventions that directly target improving patient health, and I think that Toby’s paper applies well to these examples. My difficulty is rather with using it to analyse charities outside of global health, or charities that create less measurable forms of change, as highlighted in the end of Cody’s paper.
There’s also this article from Giving What We Can with some examples[1], which claims
Personally, having looked at some average charities, I think both articles downplay the difference in practice
Some quick reasons why I think so:
If I remember correctly, the 80k article compares the mean of the top 2.5% interventions with the mean of all interventions. This artificially caps the maximum possible difference at 50x. I think that GiveWell-recommended charities are in the top ~0.1% of charities, and so can have a much higher relative difference.
Training a guide dog costs at least €25,000[2] in Italy, and it’s not clear how much of it funges with public funds for the same program. A guide dog typically works for 6-8 years, so with €3.5k you can maybe cause a blind person to have a guide dog for one extra year. If you compare it to what the same donation to a GiveWell top charity achieves with the same amount, the difference is (at least to me) clearly much more than 10x. You could argue that these are different “cause areas”, but to me they are both “human health and wellbeing”
Personal anecdote: my parents are going to a concert for charity next week, and invited a friend of theirs. We looked up what the funds are going to, and it turns out they are raising €40,000 to purchase “two devices useful for preventing alopecia induced by chemotherapy”. Their friend is bald and was disappointed after knowing that, but none of them would have checked, and I imagine they would have assumed to be funding something within an order of magnitude of cost-effectiveness as any other donation to charity.
I think this is representative of what the “average charity” in a wealthy country looks like, and I’m confident that an extra €40,000 to Remote Health Centers In Uganda would buy something that’s significantly more than 10x as useful as those alopecia-prevention devices.
According to Forbes, the biggest charity by revenue in the US is Feeding America at $5B/year. 6 of the top 10 also serve domestic needs. There are many reasons to believe that your dollar goes much further overseas. Taimaka claims that its average cost per malnutrition treatment is $100 per child. There is a lot of evidence to think that a marginal donation to Taimaka is much more than 10x more cost-effective than a marginal donation Feeding America for preventing hunger.
I write software at GWWC, but I didn’t contribute to this article in any way
About $28,000. For the rest of the comment you can approximate €1 ~ $1
Your comment relates to interventions that directly target improving patient health, and I think that Toby’s paper applies well to these examples. My difficulty is rather with using it to analyse charities outside of global health, or charities that create less measurable forms of change, as highlighted in the end of Cody’s paper.