(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.”
(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.”