The problem here is that mental health is just unbelievably neglected and cheap. You can plausibly provide a WELLBY (a tenth of a year of full wellbeing) for $20 or so. Saving lives or reducing disease is often substantially more expensive, to the point where it washes out, even if the per unit gains are massive. If you naïvely valued WELLBYs 1:1 with life years, you could spend around $200 per DALY, but that assumes people saved by GiveWell interventions live 10⁄10 lives, which they don’t.
There are some promising NCD interventions, usually around nutritional deficiencies or poisonings, that could be better than that (see HLI for more). Livelihoods may also fall into this category as a way of systematically preventing some diseases of despair.
Anyhow, the crux of my point was more that an evaluator with different moral weights could produce different results from GiveWell, which is the thesis (and to my understanding, the conclusion) of GWWC’s Evaluations of Evaluators project, which I think we broadly agree on.
Adding to this—people with mental illnesses in developing countries are often stigmatised and shunned by their families, and at worst imprisoned. They are imprisoned due to (1) public order offences (ie being disruptive in public) and (2) a lack of other facilities to accommodate them long term (ie hospital facilities or mental health programmes).
There is a lot that could be done relatively cheaply if this was taken up as a priority.
The problem here is that mental health is just unbelievably neglected and cheap. You can plausibly provide a WELLBY (a tenth of a year of full wellbeing) for $20 or so. Saving lives or reducing disease is often substantially more expensive, to the point where it washes out, even if the per unit gains are massive. If you naïvely valued WELLBYs 1:1 with life years, you could spend around $200 per DALY, but that assumes people saved by GiveWell interventions live 10⁄10 lives, which they don’t.
There are some promising NCD interventions, usually around nutritional deficiencies or poisonings, that could be better than that (see HLI for more). Livelihoods may also fall into this category as a way of systematically preventing some diseases of despair.
Anyhow, the crux of my point was more that an evaluator with different moral weights could produce different results from GiveWell, which is the thesis (and to my understanding, the conclusion) of GWWC’s Evaluations of Evaluators project, which I think we broadly agree on.
Adding to this—people with mental illnesses in developing countries are often stigmatised and shunned by their families, and at worst imprisoned. They are imprisoned due to (1) public order offences (ie being disruptive in public) and (2) a lack of other facilities to accommodate them long term (ie hospital facilities or mental health programmes).
There is a lot that could be done relatively cheaply if this was taken up as a priority.