Executive summary: GiveWell estimates that accounting for “repetitive saving” of the same children’s lives each year likely only leads to a ~10% overestimate of the total impact of their top charity programs, much less than a potential worst-case scenario of 80% overestimation.
Key points:
GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness models for top charity programs like seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) currently assume different children’s lives are saved each year, but it’s possible the same high-risk children are saved repeatedly.
Under-5 mortality risk is heavily concentrated in the first 1-2 years of life, so saving children in this window provides most of the impact with less scope for repetitive saving in later years.
There appears to be some year-to-year randomness in which children are at highest risk (e.g. due to shifting malaria hotspots), reducing the likely overlap in lives saved across years.
Modeling these factors, GiveWell’s best guess is that repetitive saving leads to only a ~10% overestimate of total lives saved by their top charities’ programs.
Empirical evidence from long-term follow-ups of other childhood interventions like bed nets suggests survival benefits persist into adulthood.
However, the moral implications of weighting lives saved by future life expectancy raise difficult questions GiveWell has not fully resolved.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: GiveWell estimates that accounting for “repetitive saving” of the same children’s lives each year likely only leads to a ~10% overestimate of the total impact of their top charity programs, much less than a potential worst-case scenario of 80% overestimation.
Key points:
GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness models for top charity programs like seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) currently assume different children’s lives are saved each year, but it’s possible the same high-risk children are saved repeatedly.
Under-5 mortality risk is heavily concentrated in the first 1-2 years of life, so saving children in this window provides most of the impact with less scope for repetitive saving in later years.
There appears to be some year-to-year randomness in which children are at highest risk (e.g. due to shifting malaria hotspots), reducing the likely overlap in lives saved across years.
Modeling these factors, GiveWell’s best guess is that repetitive saving leads to only a ~10% overestimate of total lives saved by their top charities’ programs.
Empirical evidence from long-term follow-ups of other childhood interventions like bed nets suggests survival benefits persist into adulthood.
However, the moral implications of weighting lives saved by future life expectancy raise difficult questions GiveWell has not fully resolved.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.