The evidence base behind EA’s preferred global health interventions (e.g. malaria nets) is much stronger than the evidence base behind virtually any global development intervention. There are more papers and more high-quality evidence (RCTs)
Health interventions are cheap because they focus on delivering commodities (nets, pills). Development interventions (that work) tend to have higher cost-per-person because they’re more high-touch and tailored (e.g. graduation programs)
But if you want the descriptive story of why it ended up this way, it goes more like this:
GiveWell focused on global health because they were searching for the cheapest and most evidence-backed interventions; other people followed suit
Early EA philosophers used global health interventions as evocative examples of how stark cost-effectiveness differences could be, and how that created a moral imperative (e.g. Toby Ord)
Global health had a much more established culture of considering cost-effectiveness than global development (which has since caught up somewhat), so it was much easier to find evidence of cost-effectiveness for health interventions
To add to the 1st bullet, in this 2013 Q&A with Holden he talked about how GiveWell focused on “proven” interventions like bednets over “speculative” ones like biomedical research because they were easier to evaluate (“easier” being relative, even bednets were pretty hard); even back then he was saying the speculative interventions were better and that the partnership with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz that created GiveWell Labs (which turned into OP/CG) enabled this pivot.
Here is an argument for why that might be better:
The evidence base behind EA’s preferred global health interventions (e.g. malaria nets) is much stronger than the evidence base behind virtually any global development intervention. There are more papers and more high-quality evidence (RCTs)
Health interventions are cheap because they focus on delivering commodities (nets, pills). Development interventions (that work) tend to have higher cost-per-person because they’re more high-touch and tailored (e.g. graduation programs)
But if you want the descriptive story of why it ended up this way, it goes more like this:
GiveWell focused on global health because they were searching for the cheapest and most evidence-backed interventions; other people followed suit
Early EA philosophers used global health interventions as evocative examples of how stark cost-effectiveness differences could be, and how that created a moral imperative (e.g. Toby Ord)
Global health had a much more established culture of considering cost-effectiveness than global development (which has since caught up somewhat), so it was much easier to find evidence of cost-effectiveness for health interventions
To add to the 1st bullet, in this 2013 Q&A with Holden he talked about how GiveWell focused on “proven” interventions like bednets over “speculative” ones like biomedical research because they were easier to evaluate (“easier” being relative, even bednets were pretty hard); even back then he was saying the speculative interventions were better and that the partnership with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz that created GiveWell Labs (which turned into OP/CG) enabled this pivot.