Congratulations! Great job by CE and all these founders.
I’m impressed by the “sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity” cited in the Centre for exploratory altruism research site.
To be fair, estimated cost-effectiveness will go down (and potentially drastically) as we do deeper research (as we plan to!). Empirically, shallower research almost always overstates the case—and theoretically, it’s simply because the cost-effectiveness estimates that happen (by random chance) to be overestimates, will also tend to survive to later stages of the research process.
To the extent that we should be optimistic about the hypertension results, it’s because (a) 300x is a big cushion, and a long way to fall while still being cost-competitive or better than AMF et al, and (b) this is in line with our priors about the high cost-effectiveness of various health policy advocacy interventions (e.g. alcohol/tobacco taxation, road traffic safety, lead regulation etc).
When we believe that policy advocacy interventions are highly cost-effective, are we considering the end-to-end costs or only the first link in the chain?
As an example, for road-safety, are we counting A or B?:
Salary costs of a group of people spending their time to convince the authorities to pass a law limiting speed
Costs in “A” + costs of writing and publishing the law + costs of communicating about the new law in the media + costs of changing the speed limit signals, etc.
If this is the case, then advocacy will allways be the most cost-effective option. As long as you have a small probability to convince the government, it will allways be cheaper to convince someone else to fix an issue with their money than spending your money to fix the issue.
Congratulations! Great job by CE and all these founders.
I’m impressed by the “sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity” cited in the Centre for exploratory altruism research site.
To be fair, estimated cost-effectiveness will go down (and potentially drastically) as we do deeper research (as we plan to!). Empirically, shallower research almost always overstates the case—and theoretically, it’s simply because the cost-effectiveness estimates that happen (by random chance) to be overestimates, will also tend to survive to later stages of the research process.
To the extent that we should be optimistic about the hypertension results, it’s because (a) 300x is a big cushion, and a long way to fall while still being cost-competitive or better than AMF et al, and (b) this is in line with our priors about the high cost-effectiveness of various health policy advocacy interventions (e.g. alcohol/tobacco taxation, road traffic safety, lead regulation etc).
When we believe that policy advocacy interventions are highly cost-effective, are we considering the end-to-end costs or only the first link in the chain?
As an example, for road-safety, are we counting A or B?:
Salary costs of a group of people spending their time to convince the authorities to pass a law limiting speed
Costs in “A” + costs of writing and publishing the law + costs of communicating about the new law in the media + costs of changing the speed limit signals, etc.
If this is the case, then advocacy will allways be the most cost-effective option. As long as you have a small probability to convince the government, it will allways be cheaper to convince someone else to fix an issue with their money than spending your money to fix the issue.