Hi. I’m very new to EA and I’m currently looking for an institution to start donating to
I’ve heard arguments against institutions like GiveWell that focus on giving away bednets, that talk about how it ends up making these communities dependent on donations and unable to produce their own bednets. I wasn’t able to find anywhere that GiveWell addresses that issue. This is a video I watched about GiveWell:
Then I went looking for other institutions that focus on effectiveness. Ideally I’m thinking it would be best to donate to countries that have a weak currency, so that my money is more impactful there
The problem is I’m having a hard time finding institutions that actually focus on sustainability, as in being thoughtful about the long term impacts of the work their doing
Does anyone have any thoughts on my concerns or recommendations on how to go about finding sustainable altruism?
Hi there! Glad to hear you are taking an interest in these questions. I wanted to offer you a few general observations that might be helpful.
I think a few different questions might be getting linked together here. One question is the best way to get people an effective public health intervention, like malaria nets. Another is how we can ensure economic development, so that communities need not be dependent on foreign support.
To answer the first: from my perspective, there’s no reason any particular community needs to be able to make their own malaria nets. Rather, they should be a made by whoever has a comparative advantage in making malaria nets. It would be highly inefficient if every community threatened by malaria needed to make their own nets. That’s why we trade. So I’m not sure about an argument that would require we need to teach any malaria stricken community how to make nets themselves.
But that does lead to the second question: of how a community can become economically self sufficient. This is a much more difficult question—in fact it’s one of the big questions of economics, particularly developmental economics.
My understanding (noting this is a huge subject) is that we don’t know of any silver bullets, but it’s well-accepted that better health, education, and institutions is a key part of the story. Because we don’t have a silver bullet, we can at least offer to alleviate a preventable health problem like malaria. Hopefully, a healthier society will create the foundation for future prosperity and wellness—so that they won’t be dependent on donations. In particular, when the long term effects of malaria nets have been looked at, they’ve been highly effective in reducing the overall mosquito population.
This also means that mosquito nets have ‘positive externalities’. That is to say, they help people beyond the purchaser of the net. When goods have positive externalities, they tend to be undersupplied. That might help explain why communities aren’t already trading for more malaria nets, as well as the need for subsidy.
Also: I worry a bit about the word ‘sustainability’ in these contexts. One might have to, say, runaway from a mugger at an unsustainable pace, but that’s alright because it’s an exigent circumstance. You aren’t going to be running forever.
I think when we say ‘unsustainable’ we usually mean something has negative externalities, like carbon emissions, so we can’t keep on the same path for ever. But there are plenty of temporary measures that are at once unsustainable but certainly worth doing. I agree with you we should focus on which actions will have the best long run consequences. But that doesn’t necessarily mean sustainable.
One last thing: Your point about weak currencies is very thoughtful. You might want to investigate the concept of purchasing power parity and Will MacAskill’s concept of the 100x multiplier.
Hopefully someone else can give further details about malaria nets or GiveWell, if you are curious to learn more!
That’s a fair point that the affected communities making their own nets isn’t necessarily the most efficient path, but it could be, I don’t know. I guess what I wrote there isn’t really the all that’s potentially problematic with the Malaria Consortium institution, but there are a few other details about how they operate that worry me. Things like how they make distributions in a 2 year interval, and people who want bednets can’t get any because they need to wait for another distribution, since there is no longer any bednets being produced locally because the donations made those producers run out of business. This issue alone doesn’t necessarily outweigh the benefits of the distributions, so maybe the impact is still net positive. There are a few other issues that I’ve heard raised on that video as well though
Arguably I should look more in depth into how exactly those bed nets operate, and really think everything through. But I don’t feel like I have the time or energy, or am smart and knowledgeable enough to be able to do that on my own. Also I’m not sure the detailed information about how those institutions operate will be fully available to me even if I wanted to
I feel like ultimately I need to find some person who has the resources to make those assessments, including competency to think through these nuanced complicated problems, and who I feel like I can trust
Maybe what I need to do right now is to just save my monthly allocation to altruism and keep accumulating it until I feel like I can make a decent decision of where to put this money
I like your point about the word “sustainability” as well. That’s probably not the right term to describe what I’m thinking. I used it as the “sustainability” of the impacts and their unfolding remaining a net positive, and not the sustainability of the particular measure that’s being taken to help people
I guess there’s some subjectivity to what “positive impact” means as well. For me I would say my desire in terms of altruism is currently to just reduce suffering as much as possible, that’s my goal. Things like happiness, advancing technology and reducing the likelihood of mass extinction events I don’t really care as much
Anyway I appreciate your reply and some of the links you posted, that’s helpful. Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Malaria Consortium doesn’t distribute bednets, they give out medicine that prevents malaria infections. Are you asking about Against Malaria Foundation, which does distribute bednets?
Sorry I can’t provide more specific details about Malaria Consortium either. You might find some helpful stuff in the Givewell reviews.
Have you consider the charities that fight preventable blindness? Kids in LMICs oft go blind for lack of vitamin A. These charities find them, supplement vitamin A, and as a result the child grows up being able to see. There’s no “local vitamin A ” industry to bankrupt. It doesn’t make people dependent, it does the polar opposite.
Off the top of my head, these seem to match your values pretty well
Hi! Thanks for sharing—I also found Nick’s answer very helpful but also wanted to suggest checking out charities launched by Charity Entrepreneurship:
OUR CHARITIES | CE (charityentrepreneurship.com)
They publish lots of research into why they think the interventions would have a large positive impact. Some of the charities they have launched that I find particularly inspiring include:
- Lead Exposure Elimination Project · Giving What We Can
- New Incentives · Giving What We Can
- Suvita · Giving What We Can