Two crazy-ish charitable global poverty project ideas

[MathiasKB🔸]

I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I’d be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!

Vulture preservation as a global health intervention

Since the mid 1990′s the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.

A paper by two University of Chicago economists came to the surprising conclusion that the decline of vultures increased human mortality by 4% (!!) leading to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. That number peaked my attention.

After reading it, I reached out to the authors of the paper as well as some people working on vulture preservation in India to learn more.

My takeaway (this was almost two years ago, so my memory is fuzzy) was that the chemicals responsible for the decline of vultures (particularly diclofenac) had cheap alternatives and that lethargy alongside regulation imposing minor switching costs to industry has kept regulation from being taken up and enforced.

By doing LEEP style policy advocacy to adopt and enforce bans on the chemicals responsible for the die-out, one might be able to save many lives. The project would be to find out what regulation is needed, lobby to get it passed, and then lobby to ensure it is enforced.

It’s likely also possible to raise money for this project from conservationists who usually spend their money on things I don’t value much, therefore vastly increasing the counterfactual impact (insofar as you as you share my ethics).

Further research that is needed:

1. Learning exactly what chemicals are responsible for the vulture die out, which alternatives exist, switching costs, and so forth

2. Regulatory hurdles. Would a ban instituted at a state or national level? Do such bans already exist? If so are they enforced? If not, why? Any low hanging fruit?

3. CEA with BOTECs of the value of vulture restoration, campaign costs, chance of campaign success, costs to industry and government, time discounts, and so forth.

4. A critical read of the study to decide if the excess death estimate holds water, and a projection of how this number extrapolates into the future. My expectation is that widespread improvements to sanitation in India over the last decade would make the effect size much smaller going forward.

Radio infotainment on responsible income planning in developing countries

A recent RCT by Stefan Dercon et al. found that showing people in rural Ethiopia a video of people in similar circumstances to themselves making clever financial and life choices massively increased future-oriented investments down the line compared to people not shown the documentary.

It’s exactly the type of social science study that pattern matches to my “doesn’t replicate” neuron, but the authors of the study are far from idiots and the RCT is well done, and it’s well.. an RCT.

Even with that in mind I think people would be right to feel skeptical of this result. Beware of the man of one study! But there’s another similar result which leads me to believe the RCT really is onto something.

Family Empowerment Media, an AIM incubated charity, creates radio infotainment to encourage contraceptive uptake. Their effect sizes are also totally nutty.

Ever since seeing FEMs results, I’ve wondered:

1. Is knowledge of contraceptive options /​ dispelling stigmas & myths highly conducive to behavioral change?

2. Is infotainment in general just a really really powerful tool to induce behavior change?

This new RCT pushes me over to thinking that it’s probably the case that infotainment is severely neglected as a way to cause behavioral change.

Radio outreach in developing countries is way cheaper than it has any right to be. When people have no money the value of advertising coca-cola is far lower and a juicy arbitrage emerges.

I think there’s a possible charity which develops compelling infotainment on responsible economic planning, which plausibly could become the world’s most cost-effective charity aimed at improving economic conditions.

One possible counterargument is that people have limited attention spans and different infotainment interventions will crowd each other out. Perhaps if you run infotainment about family planning AND financial planning, they start cannibalizing each other’s effect sizes.

Whatever gains you see in family planning comes at the expense of financial planning and whatever else you’re informing people about.

IIRC when this was studied in Denmark, it did look like awareness campaigns for eg. driving safely would cause a reduction in traffic accidents, but correspondingly drive up all other causes of mortality.

Nevertheless even if this effect proves significant, there’s a case for pushing down the salience of coca-cola and up the salience of investing in one’s future.

Research questions:

1. Find an AIM botec of radio interventions and see how they structure their CEAs of radio planning. Estimate effect sizes of radio programming from Stephen Dercon’s RCT and from that create a BOTEC.

2. Similarly to the vulture intervention, this idea heavily relies on a single study’s results. Beware the man of one study! Do a skeptical evaluation of the whole idea and look for any questionable assumptions.

3. Speak to FEM’s leadership, ask simple questions like: “what infotainment has FEM found to work best?”, “Do you have one with subtitles I can watch?”.

Side note: I found this post sitting in my drafts and realized I never got around to completing it. I’m now posting it despite it being much below the quality of writing I usually feel good putting out. If you found this write up worthwhile to read, that’s useful feedback for me to lower my bar for what I post.

[huw]

Sorry, could you clarify what the mechanism is for vulture deaths causing humans to die is? That’s really counterintuitive. Do you just mean that the chemicals killing vultures also kill humans?

[Mo Putera]

To lazily quote myself in case helpful:

vultures are extraordinarily efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it, and farmers in India historically relied on them to quickly remove livestock carcasses, so they functioned as a natural sanitation system in helping to control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume. In 1994, farmers began using diclofenac to treat their livestock, due to the expiry of a patent long held by Novartis leading to the entry of cheap generic brands made by Indian companies. Diclofenac is a common painkiller, harmless to humans, but vultures develop kidney failure and die within weeks of digesting carrion with even small residues of it. …

When the vultures died out, far more dead animals lay around rotting, transmitting pathogens to other scavengers like dogs and rats and entering the water supply. Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from carcasses, leading to a higher incidence of human contact with infected remains, and they’re also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Sudarshan and Frank estimate that this led to ~100,000(!) additional deaths each year from 2000-05 due to a +4.2%(!) increase in all-cause mortality among the 430 million people living in districts that once had a lot of vultures, which is staggering; this is e.g. more than the death toll in 2001 from HIV/​AIDS (92,000), malaria (53,000), and alcohol use disorders (14,000).

[Devon Fritz 🔸]

Thanks Mathias—very happy you posted this in this state and would encourage you and others to do more of this!

[Alex Novikau]

I like the vulture idea. A bit more sceptical about infotainment as you predicted. Awaremess interventions is a well trodden field. I wonder if the Ethiopia result is evidence for infotainment generally, or for something quite a bit narrower. The intervention was not really mass media in the usual sense, it was people watching stories about individuals from backgrounds deliberately made similar to their own, and if I understand the study correctly there were also peer effects depending on how many people in the village saw it.
That makes me a little unsure about the jump to cheap radio broadcasting. It may work, but perhaps the important part is actually identification with a very locally credible role model, plus people around you having seen the same thing, rather than the medium itself. If so the scalable version might need much more localisation than just producing a good programme and buying airtime.