Catherine from GiveWell here. We appreciate the dialogue this piece has generated. We agree that economic growth is an important area to consider evaluating, due to its potential for significant and positive impacts on well-being.
Today, our top charities list comprises charities implementing programs that have been studied via randomized controlled trials (RCTs). By pointing to these trials (and the monitoring conducted by our charities), we can serve our donors by making a public, vettable case for our recommendations and demonstrating their likely impact. We believe these are excellent, cost-effective opportunities for donors to help people alive today.
As John and Hauke note, GiveWell is not just focused on RCTs. We’ve expanded GiveWell’s focus to include new areas that may be more challenging to measure than the programs our current top charities implement,and we will therefore consider potential top charities that don’t have RCTs of their work. Our goal in expanding our focus is to identify programs that are more cost-effective than our current top charities (which we believe are highly cost-effective and difficult to beat). We wrote a blog post in February 2019 outlining our early plans for this work: https://blog.givewell.org/2019/02/07/how-givewells-research-is-evolving/.
We plan to expand our focus gradually, starting with areas in which we think we can make significant progress. We’re looking into health policy interventions—like alcohol control, ambient air pollution, micronutrient fortification in India, pesticide regulation, and lead paint regulation—based on our understanding of the existing research within these areas and our experience evaluating health interventions. From an institutional and research perspective, we think this is the right starting point for our expansion.
That doesn’t mean we’ll stop there. In that February 2019 blog post, one of the areas we listed as under consideration for future research was “Increasing economic growth and redistribution.” We hope to be able to deepen our understanding of this topic soon, although we don’t expect to do so in the very near future, so unfortunately don’t have substantive additions to the above discussion at this time.
Preliminarily, we guess that it might be particularly difficult to analyze giving opportunities in “economic growth” broadly because we perceive that growth is the result of a complex interplay between many different areas one could make grants in. These areas include infrastructure development, fiscal policy, monetary policy, industrial policy, peace and stability, individually-targeted programs, health, and so on. We haven’t yet done substantial work to map this space, but we expect that considering the more granular cause areas within the broad economic growth space will help us make progress on prioritizing further research.
We look forward to following the research that is done in this space and we are excited that other researchers are focusing on international development, as we think this will improve our research and recommendations in the long term.
Hi Peter,
Catherine from GiveWell here. We appreciate the dialogue this piece has generated. We agree that economic growth is an important area to consider evaluating, due to its potential for significant and positive impacts on well-being.
Today, our top charities list comprises charities implementing programs that have been studied via randomized controlled trials (RCTs). By pointing to these trials (and the monitoring conducted by our charities), we can serve our donors by making a public, vettable case for our recommendations and demonstrating their likely impact. We believe these are excellent, cost-effective opportunities for donors to help people alive today.
As John and Hauke note, GiveWell is not just focused on RCTs. We’ve expanded GiveWell’s focus to include new areas that may be more challenging to measure than the programs our current top charities implement,and we will therefore consider potential top charities that don’t have RCTs of their work. Our goal in expanding our focus is to identify programs that are more cost-effective than our current top charities (which we believe are highly cost-effective and difficult to beat). We wrote a blog post in February 2019 outlining our early plans for this work: https://blog.givewell.org/2019/02/07/how-givewells-research-is-evolving/.
We plan to expand our focus gradually, starting with areas in which we think we can make significant progress. We’re looking into health policy interventions—like alcohol control, ambient air pollution, micronutrient fortification in India, pesticide regulation, and lead paint regulation—based on our understanding of the existing research within these areas and our experience evaluating health interventions. From an institutional and research perspective, we think this is the right starting point for our expansion.
That doesn’t mean we’ll stop there. In that February 2019 blog post, one of the areas we listed as under consideration for future research was “Increasing economic growth and redistribution.” We hope to be able to deepen our understanding of this topic soon, although we don’t expect to do so in the very near future, so unfortunately don’t have substantive additions to the above discussion at this time.
Preliminarily, we guess that it might be particularly difficult to analyze giving opportunities in “economic growth” broadly because we perceive that growth is the result of a complex interplay between many different areas one could make grants in. These areas include infrastructure development, fiscal policy, monetary policy, industrial policy, peace and stability, individually-targeted programs, health, and so on. We haven’t yet done substantial work to map this space, but we expect that considering the more granular cause areas within the broad economic growth space will help us make progress on prioritizing further research.
We look forward to following the research that is done in this space and we are excited that other researchers are focusing on international development, as we think this will improve our research and recommendations in the long term.