For anyone reading this who doesn’t know about the crux here: GiveWell prioritise (because it’s cost-effective) saving the lives of people in poverty, whose subjective wellbeing is low (because they are in poverty, and will continue to be in poverty after they don’t die from malaria). Therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work.
FWIW, I was mostly referring to this article and the one it’s responding to. Given that StrongMinds’ cost per participant is now 75% lower, it should appear cost-effective with AMF under GiveWell’s assumptions. However, my understanding is that they simply don’t take a worldview that values wellbeing a priori, and existing DALY computations undercount WELLBYs for, say, mental health. So if they changed their worldview, it seems reasonable they could value mental health as a top cost-effective option, and a future EA Global Health Fund could try and hedge against these positions if it wanted to expand.
I agree that the value of many interventions is sensitive to specific moral weights, but I disagree with “therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work”.
The increase in subjective wellbeing from GiveWell-funded work seems really high, and it could be competitive with mental health types of work. (or not, as different kinds of wellbeing can be reasonably valued in very different ways)
Worth noting that besides HLI focusing on happiness, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship just incubated https://www.betterfuturesguide.org/ which seems to focus entirely on poverty reduction, and GiveWell is expanding their work on ”Livelihoods Programs”, which weigh income gains 2x higher than they normally would.
(I’m sure you know all the above, just writing it out for people with less context)
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.
This is a great point.
For anyone reading this who doesn’t know about the crux here: GiveWell prioritise (because it’s cost-effective) saving the lives of people in poverty, whose subjective wellbeing is low (because they are in poverty, and will continue to be in poverty after they don’t die from malaria). Therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work.
That’s not clear to me: all GiveWell interventions have lots of life-improving benefits besides life-saving.
E.g. for the AMF, 33% of the estimated value comes from long-term income increases, and for each life saved there’s ~200 malaria cases averted, which likely significantly increases subjective wellbeing
FWIW, I was mostly referring to this article and the one it’s responding to. Given that StrongMinds’ cost per participant is now 75% lower, it should appear cost-effective with AMF under GiveWell’s assumptions. However, my understanding is that they simply don’t take a worldview that values wellbeing a priori, and existing DALY computations undercount WELLBYs for, say, mental health. So if they changed their worldview, it seems reasonable they could value mental health as a top cost-effective option, and a future EA Global Health Fund could try and hedge against these positions if it wanted to expand.
Some great discussion in the original report here too, if you wanna deep dive
I agree that the value of many interventions is sensitive to specific moral weights, but I disagree with “therefore the increase in subjective wellbeing from life-saving work is nowhere near as high as it could be for e.g. mental health types of work”.
The increase in subjective wellbeing from GiveWell-funded work seems really high, and it could be competitive with mental health types of work. (or not, as different kinds of wellbeing can be reasonably valued in very different ways)
E.g. HLI “higher risk, higher reward” “Promising Charities” at https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/charities/ are both also funded/recommended by GiveWell.
Worth noting that besides HLI focusing on happiness, AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship just incubated https://www.betterfuturesguide.org/ which seems to focus entirely on poverty reduction, and GiveWell is expanding their work on ”Livelihoods Programs”, which weigh income gains 2x higher than they normally would.
(I’m sure you know all the above, just writing it out for people with less context)
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.