Thanks for getting this done so quickly! Do you have any internal estimates (even order of magnitude ones) of the margin by which this exceeds Givewell’s top recommended charities? I’m intending to donate, but my decision would be significantly different if, for example, you thought GiveIndia Oxygen fundraiser was currently ~1-1.5 times better than Givewell’s top recommended charities, versus ~20 times better.
Thanks for the comment! We are honestly quite unsure about the margin, especially because the cost-effectiveness analyses we have access to are about the cause area and not a model for the specific charitable donations.
Our guess is that donations to oxygen likely beat GiveWell top charities – here are Jeff Coleman’s calculations for the GiveIndia’s various programs for magnitudes. It’s hard to give a precise estimate partly because each oxygen concentrator or cylinder, for instance, is a fixed cost which can be used for a while (and we‘re unclear what demand will be like over the next few months) – so the best Coleman can do is an estimate of days of use it takes to beat GiveWell top charities.
Our current guess is that the direct cash transfer program in our second recommendation is competitive with GiveDirectly but most other GiveWell-recommended charities beat it on pure cost-effectiveness terms, and we are much more uncertain about our third recommendation.
Thanks for getting back to me—I took Jeff’s calculations and did some guesstimating to try and figure out what demand might look like over the next few weeks. The only covid forecast I was able to find for India (let me know if you’ve seen another!) is this by IHME. Their ‘hospital resource use’ forecast shows that they expect a demand of 2 million beds, roughly what was the case in the week before Jeff produced his estimate of the value of oxygen-based interventions (last week of April), to be exceeded until the start of June, which is 30 days from when the estimate was produced. I’m assuming that his estimate was based on what the demand looked like over the previous week.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in this figure, but around 3-8 weeks is a reasonable range for how many weeks demand for oxygen will be at or above what it was in the last week of April, given that the IHME forecast is 4 weeks.
Taking the mean of the estimates, excluding ventilators (since they’re an outlier), gives us 31 days of use to equal givewell’s top charities, i.e. 4 weeks, and we can expect 3-8 weeks of demand being that high. So depending on how the epidemic pans out, it seems like, very roughly, three quarters to twice as good as Givewell’s top charities is a reasonable range of uncertainty.
EDIT: what I said should be taken as a lower limit, as it assumes that the value of oxygen is exactly what Jeff calculated when demand is greater than or equal to 2 Million, and zero below then, when in reality the value is real but smaller if demand is under 2M. I tried to account for this by skewing my guess, so 0.75 to 2x as good, where IHMEs demand numbers would suggest 1x as good.
Thanks for getting this done so quickly! Do you have any internal estimates (even order of magnitude ones) of the margin by which this exceeds Givewell’s top recommended charities? I’m intending to donate, but my decision would be significantly different if, for example, you thought GiveIndia Oxygen fundraiser was currently ~1-1.5 times better than Givewell’s top recommended charities, versus ~20 times better.
Thanks for the comment! We are honestly quite unsure about the margin, especially because the cost-effectiveness analyses we have access to are about the cause area and not a model for the specific charitable donations.
Our guess is that donations to oxygen likely beat GiveWell top charities – here are Jeff Coleman’s calculations for the GiveIndia’s various programs for magnitudes. It’s hard to give a precise estimate partly because each oxygen concentrator or cylinder, for instance, is a fixed cost which can be used for a while (and we‘re unclear what demand will be like over the next few months) – so the best Coleman can do is an estimate of days of use it takes to beat GiveWell top charities.
Our current guess is that the direct cash transfer program in our second recommendation is competitive with GiveDirectly but most other GiveWell-recommended charities beat it on pure cost-effectiveness terms, and we are much more uncertain about our third recommendation.
Thanks for getting back to me—I took Jeff’s calculations and did some guesstimating to try and figure out what demand might look like over the next few weeks. The only covid forecast I was able to find for India (let me know if you’ve seen another!) is this by IHME. Their ‘hospital resource use’ forecast shows that they expect a demand of 2 million beds, roughly what was the case in the week before Jeff produced his estimate of the value of oxygen-based interventions (last week of April), to be exceeded until the start of June, which is 30 days from when the estimate was produced. I’m assuming that his estimate was based on what the demand looked like over the previous week.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in this figure, but around 3-8 weeks is a reasonable range for how many weeks demand for oxygen will be at or above what it was in the last week of April, given that the IHME forecast is 4 weeks.
Taking the mean of the estimates, excluding ventilators (since they’re an outlier), gives us 31 days of use to equal givewell’s top charities, i.e. 4 weeks, and we can expect 3-8 weeks of demand being that high. So depending on how the epidemic pans out, it seems like, very roughly, three quarters to twice as good as Givewell’s top charities is a reasonable range of uncertainty.
EDIT: what I said should be taken as a lower limit, as it assumes that the value of oxygen is exactly what Jeff calculated when demand is greater than or equal to 2 Million, and zero below then, when in reality the value is real but smaller if demand is under 2M. I tried to account for this by skewing my guess, so 0.75 to 2x as good, where IHMEs demand numbers would suggest 1x as good.
Thanks a lot for this estimate! I will link your comment on our post.