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I’ve been surprised that this topic hasn’t gotten more attention in EA before, and I’m happy to see this work launch!
Thanks so much Julia!
Thanks for this Jack! Sounds like an interesting area to look into.
I am curious about the literature suggesting that lead paint causes negative health / psychological effects. After an admittedly cursory glance, many of the studies you cite seem to indicate an association between lead exposure and some negative outcome, but don’t necessarily imply a causal link from lead exposure to these negative outcomes. This is important: if the correlation is actually due to some other factor (e.g. living in worse conditions more generally), then we may overestimate how bad lead exposure is, and end up misdirecting funds.
Can you point us towards the best causal studies on lead exposure? E.g. ones that evaluate an RCT reducing lead exposure, or some other kind of “natural experiment”? (Apologies if you’ve referred to it and I just missed something)
Hi, thanks for the comment! Yes, most of the studies are longitudinal cohort studies. I think this is one of the best examples of a well-designed interventional study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160056
This sounds like an awesome project and I’m very excited for your plans! I’ve been interested for quite a while in things in the general category of cognitive/disease burden costs of pollution, and excited to see an EA project working on them!
Definitely don’t spend a lot of time on it, but I’m interested if you have thoughts on the probabilities of your next steps here? Specifically
What probability will you assign to having enough internal validity to know of next plans in 2 months?
What’s your probability of piloting your advocacy campaign in Malawi to introduce lead paint regulation (as opposed to another promising country)?
(Again, feel free to not answer) what probability will you put on being a Givewell Top or Standout charity by the end of 2025?
Hi Linch, Great question. Probability estimates about the future are always difficult—we can give you some loose indications of what we expect, though these should be taken with a grain of salt.
1. A two month timeline may be hard to estimate, as things can often run more slowly when starting in a new country. However, we can give more confident estimates on a three month timeline (which offers some buffer room).
We’d attach a reasonably high probability to having enough information to make these decisions within the next 3 months (~80%). Our decision-relevant data gaps at the moment are a) about the level of lead paint use in Malawi, and b) about the tractability of meeting with Malawian politicians. However, we have ways to test both of these things, and identify whether they should be a disqualifying factor, and have strong leads on the connections required to get this information.
2. Our probability of piloting in Malawi is also quite high, as the early indicators of burden and tractability seem quite strong. We’ve managed to find a 2017 study on the level of lead in paint in Malawi which indicates that this country would be highly promising to target. The study found that 56% of paint tested in Malawi had more than 90ppm, and 37.5% had more than 600ppm - this makes us think that it is quite likely that lead is a significant contributor to the overall burden of lead poisoning in Malawi. On the tractability side, making contacts within Malawi has also been much easier than expected. This makes us think that our probability of piloting in Malawi is better than even, around 60%.
3. Good question. This intervention has the potential to have very large-scale benefits, and very high cost-effectiveness, but I don’t think I could attach a reasonable probability estimate that I’d trust this far out.
In super simple terms, how does lobbying work for one of these countries? Is it as simple as getting the phone with a local politician and going from there?
I am curious about which other countries you identified as promising?
Listing them might be beneficial, as I can imagine that finding an experienced and well-connected candidate for a target location can change the outcome of cost-effectiveness calculation by increasing tractability. On other hand, good candidates might not be hard to find or be especially likely discovered via the EA network.
Hi Misha! I totally agree. Tractability could make a significant difference on the expected cost-effectiveness of a particular country. In the coming weeks we’ll be having a full blog post on our site unpacking our country selection in detail, but I can give you a quick summary here.
To identify the most viable target countries we’ve assessed every country worldwide (with more than 300,000 births in the last 5 years), and ranked them on a number of factors. These factors included size of lead burden, absence of lead paint regulation, stability (which works as a loose indicator of tractability—or at least of intractability in extreme cases), and neglectedness by other actors.
Based on this, our other top tier countries included Madagascar, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Niger, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
Congratulation on your launch! Very impressed so far on how much progress you’re making in a short amount of time. Good luck in Malawi!
Thanks so much Ula!
This looks great and thanks for posting! One question: how come those other organizations working in this space, who as you note have a track record of success in other countries, haven’t expanded to countries like Malawi? In other words, why is lead exposure reduction in Malawi neglected by other actors?
Thanks for writing this! Do you know a resource or link that lists which countries still do not have lead paint regulation? And is there a ranking of which countries is it most promising to work on lead poisoning reduction? I am from the Philippines and I think we have lead paint regulation, but I have heard it’s not yet well-implemented. I’d like to know where we fare if there is a ranking of which countries is it most promising to work on this problem on.
Hi Brian! Thanks for commenting. Here is a link which lists countries which do not currently have lead paint regulation. We didn’t come across any ranking of most promising countries to target, but we have collated this information ourselves. We’ll be publicly releasing our country selection spreadsheet in the coming weeks and this will likely provide you with the information that you need.
Until then, I can pass on some relevant information about our findings. From our research, we found that the Philippines does currently have legislation (as you mentioned), and is not currently neglected by other actors (EcoWaste Coalition and IPEN are active there).
We found that there are still significant levels of lead poisoning in the Philippines (see annex), but we are not confident that this necessarily indicates that the current legislation is not well enforced. It could be an indicator that there is significant exposure to lead from other sources, or it could just be that the effects have been delayed because legislation takes time to have impact. Paint bans need to be in effect for a few years before health impacts can be noticed.
On the other hand, it could well be an enforcement issue. Controls were introduced in 2015 to ensure that paint has lead levels below 90ppm, but in 2017 it was found that the Philippines still had 23% of their paint with lead levels exceeding 90ppm, 16% of their paint with lead levels exceeding 600ppm, and 12% of their paint with lead levels exceeding 10,000ppm. That might imply that the controls aren’t being followed perfectly. However, it’s also been three years since that study was done, so things may have changed.
Hope this was useful!
Yup, this was useful Jack! We are wondering though if EcoWaste Coalition would still be a cost-effective and/or evidence-based charity that we should recommend donors who want to give to local Philippine charities.
I am assuming that we can still recommend them, but we are finding it hard to model their cost-effectiveness given that it’s a policy charity, so we may have to rely on other types of rationale or argumentation. I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have on how we might be able to still assess whether or not it’s still cost-effective (or effective in general) for local donors to donate to the EcoWaste Coalition. Thanks!
I’m really excited to see this!
I understand that, lead abatement itself aside, the alkalinity of the water supply seems to have an impact on lead absorption in the human body and its attendant health effects. I’m curious whether (1) this impact is significant (2) whether interventions to change the pH of water are competitive in terms of cost-effectiveness with other types of interventions and (3) whether this has been tried.
Hi Matt, thanks for your comment! We haven’t looked into this, but if we do we’ll let you know. As yet, we have not focused on water as a source of lead exposure because it is less of a contributor in lower-income countries where lead burdens are highest.
Congrats on the launch! This may be a stretch, but if you’d find it helpful to connect with any of these folks: https://youtu.be/DbplLXRQquI or the Data Science for Social Good team at U of Chicago to see if they have additional contacts, let me know and I can connect you.
Hi Sky, thank you for directing us to this and offerening to connect! We’ll take a closer look a what they’re working on and let you know if/when a connection would be helpful.
Great work Jack! Really excited to see this!
Thanks very much Pete!
Very cool, and if you eventually reach a scale where you are seeking dedicated operations staff, you’ll probably be getting a résumé from me!
In your FAQ on the website, I would suggest clarifying the language of the claim you make that “the relationship between lead exposure and neurotoxic effects is greater at lower blood lead levels.” It is correct as written, but I had to follow the link and find the graph in the original paper to understand it. My initial reading was that you were claiming some sort of J-shaped dose–response curve, which fortunately struck me as nonsensical enough to click through and verify. I might suggest “stronger”or “more pronounced” rather than “greater,” or some other way to make it clearer that you are talking about the slope rather than the value.
Ah! I can definitely see how that might have been confusing, thanks for letting us know. I’ll make sure that this is reworded to be as clear as possible. Good catch!
And that sounds fantastic. It’s likely we’ll seek to hire a dedicated operations staff member as we scale, perhaps in our second or third year. In case you’d like to keep an eye out for when such positions crop up, all future job postings for LEEP will be announced on our website, in our newsletter, and on the 80,000 Hours Jobs board.
Great work Jack and Lucia!
Thank you very much for such well-written introduction to your project. May all sentient beings be directly or indirectly benefited! :-)