Good to see you thinking about this! A couple of things.
First, HLI doesn’t claim that funding research is worse than funding existing interventions. Leaving aside this would be a mad thing to believe a priori—clearly, there are empirical questions here—we do discuss that it would be promising to fund research in e.g. our cause report into global mental health (link to full report here).
HLI hasn’t investigated the cost-effectiveness of research because it’s been beyond our capacity to do so. We currently have a research team of 3 and have been focusing on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of global health and developing interventions directly in terms of wellbeing, e.g. bednets, deworming, cash transfers. Our plan was/is to start by doing ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons and then move on to less easily comparable things.
We are, as it happens, now hiring for a grant strategist role to look into other opportunities, which will include doing research, including very probably into the thing you flag—psychedelic-assisted mental health treatments, which I have long been interested in and spoke about back in 2017.
Obviously, I can’t comment on how other organisations think about this.
Second, I slightly struggled to follow your analysis. There is an existing literature on how to think about the value of information you didn’t mention. I wasn’t sure if you were doing a conventional VOI analysis or something else.
Hi Michael, thanks for your reply! I apologise I didn’t check with you before saying that you have ruled out research a priori. I will put a note to say that this is inaccurate. Prioritising based on self-reports of wellbeing does preclude funding research, but I’m glad to hear that you may be open to assessing research in the future.
Sorry to hear you struggled to follow my analysis. I think I may have over complicated things, but it did help me to work through things in my own head! I haven’t really looked at the literature into VOI.
In a nutshell my model implies that, the longer the time period you are willing to consider, the better further research is (all other things equal). This is because if you find a better intervention, you can fund it for the rest of time. So even a very slightly better intervention can deliver vastly more good than funding our best existing intervention. This effect is likely to dominate the opportunity cost of research (I.e. not improving mental health now), provided you’re considering a long enough time period.
My tentative view is that someone who doesn’t discount the future should almost definitely prefer funding research than existing interventions. So I personally would give to top research institutes over giving to StrongMinds. One might ask when one would ever want to stop giving to research. My model implies this might be the case when we’re very sceptical we can do better than our best intervention, when we think the likely improvement we can achieve is negligible, when for some reason we’re only interested in considering a short time period (e.g. perhaps we’re near heat death), or some constellation of these factors. I don’t think any of these are likely to be the case now, so I would fund research.
Hopefully that makes some sense! I doubt I’m saying anything ground-breaking here though…
Hello Jack,
Good to see you thinking about this! A couple of things.
First, HLI doesn’t claim that funding research is worse than funding existing interventions. Leaving aside this would be a mad thing to believe a priori—clearly, there are empirical questions here—we do discuss that it would be promising to fund research in e.g. our cause report into global mental health (link to full report here).
HLI hasn’t investigated the cost-effectiveness of research because it’s been beyond our capacity to do so. We currently have a research team of 3 and have been focusing on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of global health and developing interventions directly in terms of wellbeing, e.g. bednets, deworming, cash transfers. Our plan was/is to start by doing ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons and then move on to less easily comparable things.
We are, as it happens, now hiring for a grant strategist role to look into other opportunities, which will include doing research, including very probably into the thing you flag—psychedelic-assisted mental health treatments, which I have long been interested in and spoke about back in 2017.
Obviously, I can’t comment on how other organisations think about this.
Second, I slightly struggled to follow your analysis. There is an existing literature on how to think about the value of information you didn’t mention. I wasn’t sure if you were doing a conventional VOI analysis or something else.
Hi Michael, thanks for your reply! I apologise I didn’t check with you before saying that you have ruled out research a priori. I will put a note to say that this is inaccurate. Prioritising based on self-reports of wellbeing does preclude funding research, but I’m glad to hear that you may be open to assessing research in the future.
Sorry to hear you struggled to follow my analysis. I think I may have over complicated things, but it did help me to work through things in my own head! I haven’t really looked at the literature into VOI.
In a nutshell my model implies that, the longer the time period you are willing to consider, the better further research is (all other things equal). This is because if you find a better intervention, you can fund it for the rest of time. So even a very slightly better intervention can deliver vastly more good than funding our best existing intervention. This effect is likely to dominate the opportunity cost of research (I.e. not improving mental health now), provided you’re considering a long enough time period.
My tentative view is that someone who doesn’t discount the future should almost definitely prefer funding research than existing interventions. So I personally would give to top research institutes over giving to StrongMinds. One might ask when one would ever want to stop giving to research. My model implies this might be the case when we’re very sceptical we can do better than our best intervention, when we think the likely improvement we can achieve is negligible, when for some reason we’re only interested in considering a short time period (e.g. perhaps we’re near heat death), or some constellation of these factors. I don’t think any of these are likely to be the case now, so I would fund research.
Hopefully that makes some sense! I doubt I’m saying anything ground-breaking here though…