Cool project! I haven’t dug into into the methodology, but one interesting (and very rough) implication: if the total set of donations ($393B) had had an average of $10,000/life saved (roughly half as good as Givewell, assuming you can’t get $5,000/life-saved due to diminishing marginal returns), then they would have saved ~39M lives. The actual total of lives saved according to this is ~30M.
So (assuming the methodology checks out and this calc is roughly right) getting these top philanthropists to be more cost-effective could have saved nine million lives.
If these 9 million lives were saved were over a 30 year time span (rough guess, some donations are older than this, but I think most are much more recent), that’s around 300,000 lives saved per year. Which is about equivalent to curing leukaemia.
Cool project! I haven’t dug into into the methodology, but one interesting (and very rough) implication: if the total set of donations ($393B) had had an average of $10,000/life saved (roughly half as good as Givewell, assuming you can’t get $5,000/life-saved due to diminishing marginal returns), then they would have saved ~39M lives. The actual total of lives saved according to this is ~30M.
So (assuming the methodology checks out and this calc is roughly right) getting these top philanthropists to be more cost-effective could have saved nine million lives.
If these 9 million lives were saved were over a 30 year time span (rough guess, some donations are older than this, but I think most are much more recent), that’s around 300,000 lives saved per year. Which is about equivalent to curing leukaemia.