Given that Open Philanthropy seems to believe that typical GiveWell recommendations are dominated by more leveraged ones (e.g.using advocacy, induced technological change) at least for risk-neutral donors, I am a bit confused by the anchoring on GiveWell charities.
Even if GD were closer to AMF than GiveWell thinks, this would not put GD close to the best thing one can do to improve human welfare unless one applies a very narrow frame (risk-aversion, highly scalable based on existing charities right now).
Or, put a bit differently:
(1) We live in a world that has lots of mechanisms in it that make it quite unlikely that something like marginal consumption changes is close to the best use of money—stuff like public good provision, negative and positive externalities, other market failures, policies, technologies etc. with global ramifications etc.
(2) Obviously, it is much harder and uncertain to positively shape the trajectory of, say, rapid malaria vaccines, or trade policy, or to positively influence development aid at large, which is why GD is a good fallback for risk-averse donors and a great baseline to exist.
(3) But it seems extremely unlikely that GiveDirectly is anywhere close to the best thing and it also seems far from clear that pushing the narrative more in the direction of “let’s do more cash transfers” is good on net, unless one is quite sure that the benefits in explainability and scaleability outweigh the impact differential on a per dollar basis on finding and funding interventions with higher EV.
E.g. I would not be surprised if we could find 100 GD interventions in the leveraged GHD space and it is not super clear that we could get less than 1/10th of the funding for them as for GD / a cash transfer centric approach.
Love this and I mostly agree with your points. I do think though that GiveWell is the easiest thing to compare to in this case, and that’s probably fair enough. Comparing to very different and harder-to-measure policy and tech work is less easy to understand and feels a bit disparate.
My only tiiiiiiny nicpick would be your point 2 - I don’t think its that hard to positively shape the trajectory of malaria vaccines (although yes trade policy and influencing development aid is hard-ish). The uncertainties are high yes, but especially with malaria vaccines I would hazard a guess that even the lower end of the effect range might compete with GiveDirectly. Can’t be bothered trying to calculate that right now though :D :D :D
I think even for something that seems quite certain on the intervention level (if you think that is true for malaria vaccine) then one needs to account for funding and activity additionality which make this more uncertain and, relatively speaking, lowers the estimate to GD where the large size of the funding gap ensures funding and activity additionality to be near 1 (i.e. no discount).
Given that Open Philanthropy seems to believe that typical GiveWell recommendations are dominated by more leveraged ones (e.g.using advocacy, induced technological change) at least for risk-neutral donors, I am a bit confused by the anchoring on GiveWell charities.
Even if GD were closer to AMF than GiveWell thinks, this would not put GD close to the best thing one can do to improve human welfare unless one applies a very narrow frame (risk-aversion, highly scalable based on existing charities right now).
Or, put a bit differently:
(1) We live in a world that has lots of mechanisms in it that make it quite unlikely that something like marginal consumption changes is close to the best use of money—stuff like public good provision, negative and positive externalities, other market failures, policies, technologies etc. with global ramifications etc.
(2) Obviously, it is much harder and uncertain to positively shape the trajectory of, say, rapid malaria vaccines, or trade policy, or to positively influence development aid at large, which is why GD is a good fallback for risk-averse donors and a great baseline to exist.
(3) But it seems extremely unlikely that GiveDirectly is anywhere close to the best thing and it also seems far from clear that pushing the narrative more in the direction of “let’s do more cash transfers” is good on net, unless one is quite sure that the benefits in explainability and scaleability outweigh the impact differential on a per dollar basis on finding and funding interventions with higher EV.
E.g. I would not be surprised if we could find 100 GD interventions in the leveraged GHD space and it is not super clear that we could get less than 1/10th of the funding for them as for GD / a cash transfer centric approach.
Love this and I mostly agree with your points. I do think though that GiveWell is the easiest thing to compare to in this case, and that’s probably fair enough. Comparing to very different and harder-to-measure policy and tech work is less easy to understand and feels a bit disparate.
My only tiiiiiiny nicpick would be your point 2 - I don’t think its that hard to positively shape the trajectory of malaria vaccines (although yes trade policy and influencing development aid is hard-ish). The uncertainties are high yes, but especially with malaria vaccines I would hazard a guess that even the lower end of the effect range might compete with GiveDirectly. Can’t be bothered trying to calculate that right now though :D :D :D
I think even for something that seems quite certain on the intervention level (if you think that is true for malaria vaccine) then one needs to account for funding and activity additionality which make this more uncertain and, relatively speaking, lowers the estimate to GD where the large size of the funding gap ensures funding and activity additionality to be near 1 (i.e. no discount).