Great to see this here. Thanks Konstantin and Lovisa. A couple of thoughts.
It would be good if you’d put your headline results in the post and what, if anything, you think further flows from your conclusions (i.e. you now consider StrongMinds is more/less effective than something else, such as AMF).
Can you provide a link to the 0.658 DALY rating for depression? I can never remember how much of that is “years of life lost” and how much is “years lived with disability”. There are two parts that make up DALYS and I think people should present them seperately; there are different views you can take on the badness of deaths. This is helpful to those of an Epicurean persuasion such as myself who are more concerned with making people happy than just keeping people alive (to riff off Narveson 1967).
Peter, do you have any figures Give Directly? Also, what is the measure of cost-effectiveness you’re thinking of? Here’s GiveWell’s spreadsheet which, AFAICT, is in terms of “cost per life saved equivalent” which I’m not sure how to compare to DALYs or anything else (in fact, even after some searching, I’m still not sure what “cost per life saved equivalent” even is).
On the results tab, if you hover over the “cost per life saved equivalent” box, it says “A life saved equivalent is based on the “DALYs per death of a young child averted” input each individual uses. What a life saved equivalent represents will therefore vary from person to person. ”
I agree this is too hard to find and it would be good if this were fixed. I’d also like to see the assumptions made about this figure more clearly spelled out
I had been assuming “cost per life saved equivalent” meant somewhere in the range of 50-100 QALYs, the rough length of a human life.
(The “equivalent” thing would be about it being spread over many people—it’s not the case that you literally gave one person a whole life, but you caused an equivalent amount of “good living” to happen.)
Yeah, that seems plausible, but I’d like GW to set it out and argue for it, rather than for me/us to have to try and guess to work it out. I’ve searched
Well I don’t understand that at all, and it seems to contradict my guess.
I thought DALYs had a more rigorous conversion than “we took our median estimate” and I thought a life was a full life, not just preventing death one time. Strike me wrong on this count.
DALYs do use a more defensible analysis; GiveWell aren’t using DALYs. This has some good and some bad aspects (related to the discussion in this post, although in this case the downside of defensibility is more that it doesn’t let you incorporate considerations that aren’t fully grounded).
The problem with just using DALYs is that on many views they overweigh infant mortality (here’s my view on some of the issues, but the position that they overweigh infant mortality is far from original). With an internal agreement that they significantly overweigh infant mortality, it becomes untenable to just continue using DALYs, even absent a fully rigorous alternative. Hence falling back on more ad hoc but somewhat robust methods like asking people to consider it and using a median.
[I’m just interpreting GW decision-making from publicly available information; this might easily turn out to be a misrepresentation.]
I agree on your second point that you’d want to adjust all the models, I was just hoping you could give me a reference. My thought is that depression removing 0.65 of someone’s happiness for a year (i.e. going from 8⁄10 to a 2.5/10) seems about right on the life satisfaction scores. This means that everything else should have a much lower comparative weight, rather than making depression worse than death. For instance, maybe blindness really has a weight of 0.1 rather than 0.5 as I believe it does at present.
Great to see this here. Thanks Konstantin and Lovisa. A couple of thoughts.
It would be good if you’d put your headline results in the post and what, if anything, you think further flows from your conclusions (i.e. you now consider StrongMinds is more/less effective than something else, such as AMF).
Can you provide a link to the 0.658 DALY rating for depression? I can never remember how much of that is “years of life lost” and how much is “years lived with disability”. There are two parts that make up DALYS and I think people should present them seperately; there are different views you can take on the badness of deaths. This is helpful to those of an Epicurean persuasion such as myself who are more concerned with making people happy than just keeping people alive (to riff off Narveson 1967).
Wouldn’t ~$660/DALY be likely, approximately less cost-effective than GiveDirectly?
Peter, do you have any figures Give Directly? Also, what is the measure of cost-effectiveness you’re thinking of? Here’s GiveWell’s spreadsheet which, AFAICT, is in terms of “cost per life saved equivalent” which I’m not sure how to compare to DALYs or anything else (in fact, even after some searching, I’m still not sure what “cost per life saved equivalent” even is).
Michael, the definition is here—https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KiWfiAGX_QZhRbC9xkzf3I8IqsXC5kkr-nwY_feVlcM/edit#gid=1034883018
On the results tab, if you hover over the “cost per life saved equivalent” box, it says “A life saved equivalent is based on the “DALYs per death of a young child averted” input each individual uses. What a life saved equivalent represents will therefore vary from person to person. ”
I agree this is too hard to find and it would be good if this were fixed. I’d also like to see the assumptions made about this figure more clearly spelled out
I had been assuming “cost per life saved equivalent” meant somewhere in the range of 50-100 QALYs, the rough length of a human life.
(The “equivalent” thing would be about it being spread over many people—it’s not the case that you literally gave one person a whole life, but you caused an equivalent amount of “good living” to happen.)
Yeah, that seems plausible, but I’d like GW to set it out and argue for it, rather than for me/us to have to try and guess to work it out. I’ve searched
http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness and http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/cost-effectiveness-models
And still can’t find it.
From http://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/12/amf-population-ethics/
“According to the median GiveWell staff member, averting the death of a child under 5 averts about 8 DALYs (“Bed Nets”, B57)”
“each 5-or-over death prevented gets a weight of 4 “young life equivalent” units (“Bed Nets”, B62)”
“averting 1 DALY is equivalent to increasing ln(consumption) by one unit for three years (“Bed Nets”, B72)”
I think this “young life equivalent” is the same as what GiveWell calls in other places the “life equivalent.”
Well I don’t understand that at all, and it seems to contradict my guess.
I thought DALYs had a more rigorous conversion than “we took our median estimate” and I thought a life was a full life, not just preventing death one time. Strike me wrong on this count.
DALYs do use a more defensible analysis; GiveWell aren’t using DALYs. This has some good and some bad aspects (related to the discussion in this post, although in this case the downside of defensibility is more that it doesn’t let you incorporate considerations that aren’t fully grounded).
The problem with just using DALYs is that on many views they overweigh infant mortality (here’s my view on some of the issues, but the position that they overweigh infant mortality is far from original). With an internal agreement that they significantly overweigh infant mortality, it becomes untenable to just continue using DALYs, even absent a fully rigorous alternative. Hence falling back on more ad hoc but somewhat robust methods like asking people to consider it and using a median.
[I’m just interpreting GW decision-making from publicly available information; this might easily turn out to be a misrepresentation.]
Back in 2007, GiveWell approximately defined a life saved as saving someone who had a 50% chance of reaching age 60, which would very roughly imply ~30 DALYs per life saved. This analysis is also likely out of date with GiveWell’s modern views.
I agree I’d like to see more discussion of this issue.
I agree on your second point that you’d want to adjust all the models, I was just hoping you could give me a reference. My thought is that depression removing 0.65 of someone’s happiness for a year (i.e. going from 8⁄10 to a 2.5/10) seems about right on the life satisfaction scores. This means that everything else should have a much lower comparative weight, rather than making depression worse than death. For instance, maybe blindness really has a weight of 0.1 rather than 0.5 as I believe it does at present.