I think way more time has been invested into GiveWell’s recommendations of AMF and Malaria Consortium than the time dedicated to producing the best investment paper on malaria:
A typical paper is written in a few months.
GiveWell has been doing doing cost-effectiveness analyses of AMF’s interventions since 2012, and Malaria Consortium’s since 2016.
From what I have seen, GiveWell often “goes beyond the papers” in order to really get at the best guess of the cost-effectiveness intervention, often adjusting the results found in the literature.
GiveWell understands well the limitations of naive cost-effectiveness estimates.
I should also note I meant more accurate conditional on a given set of values (namely, value of saving lives as a function of age and country, and value of income compared to health):
GiveWell has spent much more time studying the interventions than figuring out their moral weights.
I tend to think economic growth is a better proxy for contributing to a better world than GiveWell’s moral weights, which I suspect put too much weight on health, and do not account for saving lives in low income countries contributing less to the global economy.
Thanks for the question, Joshua. Briefly:
I think way more time has been invested into GiveWell’s recommendations of AMF and Malaria Consortium than the time dedicated to producing the best investment paper on malaria:
A typical paper is written in a few months.
GiveWell has been doing doing cost-effectiveness analyses of AMF’s interventions since 2012, and Malaria Consortium’s since 2016.
GiveWell spends 51.1 kh/year (= 0.75*40*46*37) doing research.
From what I have seen, GiveWell often “goes beyond the papers” in order to really get at the best guess of the cost-effectiveness intervention, often adjusting the results found in the literature.
GiveWell understands well the limitations of naive cost-effectiveness estimates.
I should also note I meant more accurate conditional on a given set of values (namely, value of saving lives as a function of age and country, and value of income compared to health):
GiveWell has spent much more time studying the interventions than figuring out their moral weights.
I tend to think economic growth is a better proxy for contributing to a better world than GiveWell’s moral weights, which I suspect put too much weight on health, and do not account for saving lives in low income countries contributing less to the global economy.