With a bunch of unrealistic assumptions (like constant cost-effectiveness), the counterfactual impact should be (impact/resource - opportunitycost/resource) * resource.
If impact/resource is much bigger than opportunitycost/resource (so that the latter is negligible) this is roughly equal to impact/resource * resource, which is one reading of cost-effectiveness * scale.
If so, assuming that resource=$ in this case, this roughly translates to the heuristic “if the opportunity cost of money isn’t that high (compared to your project), you should optimise for total impact without thinking much about the monetary costs”.
We could also read “impact/resource - opportunitycost/resource” as a cost-effectiveness estimate that takes opportunity costs into account. I think Charity Entrepreneurship has been optimizing for this (at least sometimes, based on the work I’ve seen in the animal space) and they refer to it as a cost-effectiveness estimate, but I think this is not typical in EA.
If impact/resource is much bigger than opportunitycost/resource (so that the latter is negligible) this is roughly equal to impact/resource * resource, which is one reading of cost-effectiveness * scale.
Also, this is looking more like cost-benefit analysis than cost-effectiveness analysis.
With a bunch of unrealistic assumptions (like constant cost-effectiveness), the counterfactual impact should be (impact/resource - opportunitycost/resource) * resource.
If impact/resource is much bigger than opportunitycost/resource (so that the latter is negligible) this is roughly equal to impact/resource * resource, which is one reading of cost-effectiveness * scale.
If so, assuming that resource=$ in this case, this roughly translates to the heuristic “if the opportunity cost of money isn’t that high (compared to your project), you should optimise for total impact without thinking much about the monetary costs”.
Good point.
We could also read “impact/resource - opportunitycost/resource” as a cost-effectiveness estimate that takes opportunity costs into account. I think Charity Entrepreneurship has been optimizing for this (at least sometimes, based on the work I’ve seen in the animal space) and they refer to it as a cost-effectiveness estimate, but I think this is not typical in EA.
Also, this is looking more like cost-benefit analysis than cost-effectiveness analysis.