Measuring the causal impact of malaria net distributions is hard. Your first post pointing that out was informative and valuable.
In contrast, it’s easier and there’s concrete methods to measure industry and ideas like substitution/elasticity, that exactly allow us to look at displacement and market externalities.
I think the statements like “[economies are a] complex web. Whether that disruption is overall good or bad is a matter of debate” don’t reflect the availability of those methods or thought.
I think global health is different from the other major EA cause areas. I think there’s decades of work and thought from very talented people, and a graveyard of thoughts and projects of almost the same size.
From this, I expect there’s knowledge or sophistication about the displacement issue you raise, as well as sophistication on a lot of other issues in general.
Because of this knowledge, I think it would have good to hear more substantive content about how nets displace and damage indigenous industry, like even basic stats or a set of anecdotes.
I think bringing up issues in a general or theoretical sense is not informative, and pointing them at AMF or any other charity isn’t compelling, in the context above.
I agree that in theory you can measure such economic impacts. In practice I don’t believe anybody is.
If a body of practical knowledge on this point exists, then it would be straightforward to quantify the economic downsides of bednet distibutions and include it in the GiveWell calculation. I am confident GiveWell are intellectually honest enough to do such a thing. I believe the reason they haven’t done this is that the information isn’t out there.
When the information isn’t out there, all you can do is make general/theoretical points and share anecdotes like the one I linked to above. There must be a risk of doing harm when we ignore such general points and anecdotes with the only justification being “the evidence must be out there”, even though nobody has pointed to where the evidence actually is.
Measuring the causal impact of malaria net distributions is hard. Your first post pointing that out was informative and valuable.
In contrast, it’s easier and there’s concrete methods to measure industry and ideas like substitution/elasticity, that exactly allow us to look at displacement and market externalities.
I think the statements like “[economies are a] complex web. Whether that disruption is overall good or bad is a matter of debate” don’t reflect the availability of those methods or thought.
I think global health is different from the other major EA cause areas. I think there’s decades of work and thought from very talented people, and a graveyard of thoughts and projects of almost the same size.
From this, I expect there’s knowledge or sophistication about the displacement issue you raise, as well as sophistication on a lot of other issues in general.
Because of this knowledge, I think it would have good to hear more substantive content about how nets displace and damage indigenous industry, like even basic stats or a set of anecdotes.
I think bringing up issues in a general or theoretical sense is not informative, and pointing them at AMF or any other charity isn’t compelling, in the context above.
I agree that in theory you can measure such economic impacts. In practice I don’t believe anybody is.
If a body of practical knowledge on this point exists, then it would be straightforward to quantify the economic downsides of bednet distibutions and include it in the GiveWell calculation. I am confident GiveWell are intellectually honest enough to do such a thing. I believe the reason they haven’t done this is that the information isn’t out there.
When the information isn’t out there, all you can do is make general/theoretical points and share anecdotes like the one I linked to above. There must be a risk of doing harm when we ignore such general points and anecdotes with the only justification being “the evidence must be out there”, even though nobody has pointed to where the evidence actually is.