I’m not familiar with the Global Burden of Disease report, but if Open Phil and GiveWell are using it to inform health/income tradeoffs it seems like it would play a pretty big role in their grantmaking (since the bar for funding is set by being a certain multiple more effective than GiveDirectly!) [edit: also, I just realized that my comment above looked like I was saying “mostly yes” to the question of “is this true, as an empirical matter?” I agree this is misleading. I meant that Linch’s second sentence was mostly true; edited to reflect that.]
Again, it informs only how they trade off health and income. The main point of DALY/QALYs is to measure health effects. And in that regard, EA grantmakers use off-the-shelf estimates of QALYs rather than calculating them. Even if they were to calculate them, the IDinsight study does not have anything in it that would be used to calculate QALYs, it focuses solely on income vs health tradeoffs.
I’m not familiar with the Global Burden of Disease report, but if Open Phil and GiveWell are using it to inform health/income tradeoffs it seems like it would play a pretty big role in their grantmaking (since the bar for funding is set by being a certain multiple more effective than GiveDirectly!) [edit: also, I just realized that my comment above looked like I was saying “mostly yes” to the question of “is this true, as an empirical matter?” I agree this is misleading. I meant that Linch’s second sentence was mostly true; edited to reflect that.]
Again, it informs only how they trade off health and income. The main point of DALY/QALYs is to measure health effects. And in that regard, EA grantmakers use off-the-shelf estimates of QALYs rather than calculating them. Even if they were to calculate them, the IDinsight study does not have anything in it that would be used to calculate QALYs, it focuses solely on income vs health tradeoffs.
Right, I’m just pointing out that the health/income tradeoff is a very important input that affects all of their funding recommendations.