I was inspired by my ties with the EA movement to go do a degree in public health, and while I did not specialize in global health, I did take several classes in global health while getting my master’s. One thing I want to say is that the division between global development and global health is much, much stronger within EA than it is in more mainstream global health. At least as taught at the UW, the intro global health class is just as much about international monetary policy and its effects, as it is about implementing specific scalable health interventions. And, income is one of the three most important social determinants of health globally (along with nutrition and education). This division is stronger in EA imo because it is easy to sell donors in our community on very specific, measurable, high-impact interventions, rather than engage with the politics that end up inherent in the development space. (And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing, if it moves money counterfactually). But, global health as viewed by EAs is not the whole of global health—and (controversial!) I think it’s good that we haven’t upended the entire global health space to the relatively narrow set of GiveWell-approved interventions.
I was inspired by my ties with the EA movement to go do a degree in public health, and while I did not specialize in global health, I did take several classes in global health while getting my master’s. One thing I want to say is that the division between global development and global health is much, much stronger within EA than it is in more mainstream global health. At least as taught at the UW, the intro global health class is just as much about international monetary policy and its effects, as it is about implementing specific scalable health interventions. And, income is one of the three most important social determinants of health globally (along with nutrition and education). This division is stronger in EA imo because it is easy to sell donors in our community on very specific, measurable, high-impact interventions, rather than engage with the politics that end up inherent in the development space. (And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing, if it moves money counterfactually). But, global health as viewed by EAs is not the whole of global health—and (controversial!) I think it’s good that we haven’t upended the entire global health space to the relatively narrow set of GiveWell-approved interventions.