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.
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.