Differences in impact
Around 700 million people still live in poverty, mostly in low-income countries. Efforts to help them—by policy reform, cash transfers, or provision of health services—can be incredibly effective.
Alongside investigating this issue, we also discuss how much more effective some interventions are than others, and we introduce a simple tool for estimating important figures.
Key concepts from this session include:
Differences in impact: It appears that some of our options to help do many times more good than others. People generally don’t appreciate this, and so miss out on significant opportunities to help.
The importance, neglectedness, tractability framework: The most important problems generally affect a lot of people (importance or scale), are relatively under-invested in (neglectedness), and can be meaningfully improved with a reasonable amount of work (tractability).
Thinking on the margin: If you’re donating $1, you should give that extra $1 to the intervention that can most cost-effectively improve the world. There are many great initiatives with a very high average impact per dollar that will have a low marginal impact because they can’t get the same efficiency at scale (they display “diminishing marginal returns”).
Fermi estimates: When you’re trying to make a decision, it can be useful to make a rough calculation for which option is best. Even if there’s a lot of uncertainty, this can give you a rough answer, and can tell you which things are most important to estimate next.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The importance of charities cannot be overemphasized,as this also needs to be channeled on basis were priority,so that , maximum impact and value could be attained,as against engaging on options,which might not aid the attainment of a higher level of utility