Is there some kind of up-to-date dashboard or central source for GiveWell’s main “cost-per-expected-life” figure?
The Metaculus question mentioned in this post cites values like $890 in 2016, $823 in 2017, $617 in 2018 and $592 in 2019, and I can’t find the field they refer to in the resolve condition (?!)
This 80K article lists the value as $2300 in 2020.
This GiveWell summary sheet from 2016 has a minimum value of $901
GiveWell’s Top Charities page lists $3000-$5000 to save a life for Malaria Consortium, Against Malaria Foundation, New Incentives, and Hellen Keller International.
If such a thing does not exist, I’ll probably reach out to GiveWell and see what they think about implementing one. There are so many numbers floating around that are hard to verify and differ dramatically.
(1) The Metaculus question adjusts numbers for inflation to 2015 dollars, so they wouldn’t appear explicitly in GiveWell’s spreadsheets.
(2) Note that there’s a distinction between “outcome as good as saving a life” and “cost per life saved”. The $890 number is (GiveWell’s 2016 estimate of) the former while the $3,000 - $5,000 is the latter. The former includes good done by reducing the probability that people die as well as good done by raising peoples’ incomes, which at some point is equivalently good to averting a death.
Is there some kind of up-to-date dashboard or central source for GiveWell’s main “cost-per-expected-life” figure?
I haven’t been keeping up with GiveWell’s updates in the last year or two and am merely speculating, but perhaps GiveWell no longer employs the metric “outcome as good as a saving a life” (??). Hopefully someone else can answer this with confidence.
I assume your citation of GiveWell’s Top Charities page listing $3000-$5000 to save a life is the closest they have to a an up-to-date dashboard or central source number, and they’re just choosing to advertise that number (a number in terms of cost to save a life) rather than advertise a cost to produce an “outcome as good as saving a life.”
Is there some kind of up-to-date dashboard or central source for GiveWell’s main “cost-per-expected-life” figure?
The Metaculus question mentioned in this post cites values like $890 in 2016, $823 in 2017, $617 in 2018 and $592 in 2019, and I can’t find the field they refer to in the resolve condition (?!)
This 80K article lists the value as $2300 in 2020.
This GiveWell summary sheet from 2016 has a minimum value of $901
GiveWell’s Top Charities page lists $3000-$5000 to save a life for Malaria Consortium, Against Malaria Foundation, New Incentives, and Hellen Keller International.
If such a thing does not exist, I’ll probably reach out to GiveWell and see what they think about implementing one. There are so many numbers floating around that are hard to verify and differ dramatically.
(1) The Metaculus question adjusts numbers for inflation to 2015 dollars, so they wouldn’t appear explicitly in GiveWell’s spreadsheets.
(2) Note that there’s a distinction between “outcome as good as saving a life” and “cost per life saved”. The $890 number is (GiveWell’s 2016 estimate of) the former while the $3,000 - $5,000 is the latter. The former includes good done by reducing the probability that people die as well as good done by raising peoples’ incomes, which at some point is equivalently good to averting a death.
Pablo’s comment here says: “As far as I can tell, the 2020 version of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis no longer employs the category of “outcome as good as saving a life”.
I haven’t been keeping up with GiveWell’s updates in the last year or two and am merely speculating, but perhaps GiveWell no longer employs the metric “outcome as good as a saving a life” (??). Hopefully someone else can answer this with confidence.
I assume your citation of GiveWell’s Top Charities page listing $3000-$5000 to save a life is the closest they have to a an up-to-date dashboard or central source number, and they’re just choosing to advertise that number (a number in terms of cost to save a life) rather than advertise a cost to produce an “outcome as good as saving a life.”