Thank you for following our work; we’re happy to have been a part of your journey! Apologies for the delay in responding here.
I’m not sure if by “your recommendations,” you mean GiveWell’s top charities, or our advice in the above post on giving to the All Grants Fund. It’d be pretty challenging to answer your question if it’s about the All Grants Fund, since that money can go to any grant that meets our bar. We expect that a lot of All Grants Fund donations will support grants to top charities, but they could also support other programs, and there could be wide variation in how much of these programs’ impact will occur in the next five years.
In our cost-effectiveness analysis for each of our top charities (AMF, Helen Keller’s VAS program, Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, and New Incentives), we count both deaths averted and future expected earnings from development effects as benefits. Our discount rate of 4% in our cost-effectiveness analyses applies to future expected earnings—if we raised the discount rate to 10%, it would reduce our estimate of these benefits across all four top charities. We don’t expect that this would result in changes to our overall top charity recommendations, but it may have a greater impact on our estimated cost-effectiveness of some funding gaps than others, due to variance in the proportion of total benefits coming from development effects.
Steeply discounting future benefits would also make deworming look less cost-effective, since we expect the benefits of deworming to materialize only after treated children become adults.
Hi, kokotajlod,
Thank you for following our work; we’re happy to have been a part of your journey! Apologies for the delay in responding here.
I’m not sure if by “your recommendations,” you mean GiveWell’s top charities, or our advice in the above post on giving to the All Grants Fund. It’d be pretty challenging to answer your question if it’s about the All Grants Fund, since that money can go to any grant that meets our bar. We expect that a lot of All Grants Fund donations will support grants to top charities, but they could also support other programs, and there could be wide variation in how much of these programs’ impact will occur in the next five years.
In our cost-effectiveness analysis for each of our top charities (AMF, Helen Keller’s VAS program, Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, and New Incentives), we count both deaths averted and future expected earnings from development effects as benefits. Our discount rate of 4% in our cost-effectiveness analyses applies to future expected earnings—if we raised the discount rate to 10%, it would reduce our estimate of these benefits across all four top charities. We don’t expect that this would result in changes to our overall top charity recommendations, but it may have a greater impact on our estimated cost-effectiveness of some funding gaps than others, due to variance in the proportion of total benefits coming from development effects.
Steeply discounting future benefits would also make deworming look less cost-effective, since we expect the benefits of deworming to materialize only after treated children become adults.
I hope that’s somewhat helpful!
Best,
Miranda
Great, thank you!