The above says nothing about the UN’s cost, or the expected cost of fixing it (including, most of all, the careers it would consume). As such the post doesn’t bear on our decisions at all.
In 2020, the UN spent $62,581,351,665.73.[1] This is actually only ~one and a halforders of magnitude above EA spending. It seems pretty clear to me they don’t produce 40x the impact.
Envelope time: We should expect the UNDP and the WFP to be the highest-impact programmes. (COVAX did good things, but it wasn’t “a UN project”, it was a CEPI and GAVI project with institutional cover from the WHO and distribution help from UNICEF.[2]) Roughly how cost-effective are they?
In 2018, two years before it won a Peace Prize,[3] the World Food Programme was ranked worst of 40 largest aid agencies on the QuODA scale (decent proxies for aid quality). A 2008 study found that UN agencies were by far the least efficient agencies, with the WFP disbursing just $30,000 per employee, where the average was $1,000,000.
“Aha!” you reply. “But that inefficiency, combined with their massive spend, just makes it more important for us to fix!”
To put it lightly, this seems prohibitively hard. Anecdata: Two idealistic friends of friends joined the UN straight out of college, joining different agencies. Both quit a couple years later, shocked at the sheer size of the hospitality budgets and the rigidity of the bureaucracy. You can see this as removing their naivete, but I prefer to say that the UN burns an extremely scarce resource: idealistic agency.
There is no steering such a huge and multipolar organisation. Even having a thousand bright people climb the ranks might have little effect, because the UN is the way it is because of powerful national incentives and organisational cruft, and because there are already 44,000 former idealists in it. The UN is so large, it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on coordinating between different parts of itself (the 2011 number was $237m). Smaller organisations outmanoeuvre them all the time.
I take the point about the Gates Foundation’s UN programme and wish them luck. But GF has a different option set from EA (: they ignore lots of the most high-impact things), and so their best option is unlikely to be the same as ours even if they are best allocating their resources.
The above is only a sketch of a real cost-benefit analysis, but it’s enough for me.
It’s always good to look at precedents, and as we grow and exhaust better opportunities, there may come a day when it makes sense to reform the ancient giants. But please notice the skulls.
For an INGO project, COVAX moved fast and was cheap. And it cost $16bn, all on logistics and admin (~all of the vaccines were donated from national governments). They distributed half of the doses they were donated.
$16 per dose is a good deal (though if I was doing a proper impact analysis I would have to count the ~$40 dose unit cost somewhere, or else share COVAX’s impact with the donor countries).
A friend points out that UN peacekeepers seem very cost-effective (and not easy to replace anyway). This then is probably where a real cost-effectiveness analysis should focus.
In 2018, two years before it won a Peace Prize,[3] the World Food Programme was ranked worst of 40 largest aid agencies on the QuODA scale (decent proxies for aid quality).
Quoting form the linked page (from the website of The Center for Global Development):
QuODA’s 24 aid effectiveness indicators are listed below and we’ve published a detailed methodology along with the data.
I suppose that the claim in the parent comment that the WFP “was ranked worst of 40 largest aid agencies” is based on that “data” spreadsheet. But notice that 27 of those 40 “aid agencies” are not aid agencies but rather countries (e.g. Australia, United States). So this is already a big red flag. For each agency/country, the spreadsheet provides 7 indicators that are grouped under the title “Maximising Efficiency”. One of those indicators is called “ME4” according to which the WFP performed 3rd worst among all 40 agencies/countries. Quoting from the “detailed methodology” PDF (removing footnote references):
Indicator ME4: High Country Programmable Aid Share
[...] The [OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC)], recognizing the need for a metric that reflects the amount of aid that is received and recorded by partner country governments, constructed a measure called country programmable aid. CPA is a measure of development assistance that excludes funding that does not flow to partner countries (e.g. donor administrative costs and imputed student costs), unpredictable flows (e.g. humanitarian assistance), and transfers that are not discussed between donors and partner countries (e.g. food assistance). [...]
So if I understand correctly, the the QuODA scale seems to “punish” agencies that spend money on food assistance directly (rather than giving the money to the host state), and therefore does not seem like a good scale for evaluating the World Food Programme. (To be clear, I’m not overall familiar with QuODA scale; I’m just reporting what seems to me like a very big red flag).
A 2008 study found that UN agencies were by far the least efficient agencies, with the WFP disbursing just $30,000 per employee, where the average was $1,000,000.
Maybe the WFP employs many locals in low-GPD-per-capita states as part of their efforts to distribute food and the salaries are not a large % of WFP’s budget? (I don’t know whether that is the case; I’m just pointing out that that metric does not seem useful here.)
The second metric is aid per employee I think, so salaries don’t come into it(?) Distributing food is labour intensive, but so is UNICEF’s work and parts of WHO.
The rest of my evidence is informal (various development economists I’ve spoken to with horror stories) and I’d be pleased to be wrong.
I feel like this comments misses the point a bit. I think the UN is relevant not because it is such an amazing funding opportunity or because it spends its money effective, but because it is an important policy forum, for everything ranging from peacekeeping to the global health, the UN plays an important role in shaping the policy agenda and has an important coordinating role, increasing its effectiveness and making it more longtermist is potentially highly impactful, and does not have to mean “taking on a giant”, the UN-system has 100s of subsystems and policies we might be interested in tackling.
I have to say that I also not appreciate the snarky tone which I read in this comment.
I would love to see your estimates. As I say below, I overlooked peacekeeping and it is probably the diamond in the rough.
I am negative because of the lack of estimates, and because it really does seem relatively low importance and tractability. (Every UN insider I’ve spoken to (now 4) is extremely negative about it.)
The above says nothing about the UN’s cost, or the expected cost of fixing it (including, most of all, the careers it would consume). As such the post doesn’t bear on our decisions at all.
In 2020, the UN spent $62,581,351,665.73.[1] This is actually only ~one and a halforders of magnitude above EA spending. It seems pretty clear to me they don’t produce 40x the impact.
Envelope time: We should expect the UNDP and the WFP to be the highest-impact programmes. (COVAX did good things, but it wasn’t “a UN project”, it was a CEPI and GAVI project with institutional cover from the WHO and distribution help from UNICEF.[2]) Roughly how cost-effective are they?
In 2018, two years before it won a Peace Prize,[3] the World Food Programme was ranked worst of 40 largest aid agencies on the QuODA scale (decent proxies for aid quality). A 2008 study found that UN agencies were by far the least efficient agencies, with the WFP disbursing just $30,000 per employee, where the average was $1,000,000.
“Aha!” you reply. “But that inefficiency, combined with their massive spend, just makes it more important for us to fix!”
To put it lightly, this seems prohibitively hard. Anecdata: Two idealistic friends of friends joined the UN straight out of college, joining different agencies. Both quit a couple years later, shocked at the sheer size of the hospitality budgets and the rigidity of the bureaucracy. You can see this as removing their naivete, but I prefer to say that the UN burns an extremely scarce resource: idealistic agency.
There is no steering such a huge and multipolar organisation. Even having a thousand bright people climb the ranks might have little effect, because the UN is the way it is because of powerful national incentives and organisational cruft, and because there are already 44,000 former idealists in it. The UN is so large, it spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on coordinating between different parts of itself (the 2011 number was $237m). Smaller organisations outmanoeuvre them all the time.
I take the point about the Gates Foundation’s UN programme and wish them luck. But GF has a different option set from EA (: they ignore lots of the most high-impact things), and so their best option is unlikely to be the same as ours even if they are best allocating their resources.
The above is only a sketch of a real cost-benefit analysis, but it’s enough for me.
It’s always good to look at precedents, and as we grow and exhaust better opportunities, there may come a day when it makes sense to reform the ancient giants. But please notice the skulls.
I got this by naively summing this data, and am probably doublecounting something.
For an INGO project, COVAX moved fast and was cheap. And it cost $16bn, all on logistics and admin (~all of the vaccines were donated from national governments). They distributed half of the doses they were donated.
$16 per dose is a good deal (though if I was doing a proper impact analysis I would have to count the ~$40 dose unit cost somewhere, or else share COVAX’s impact with the donor countries).
This tells you something about the Peace Prize.
A friend points out that UN peacekeepers seem very cost-effective (and not easy to replace anyway). This then is probably where a real cost-effectiveness analysis should focus.
Quoting form the linked page (from the website of The Center for Global Development):
I suppose that the claim in the parent comment that the WFP “was ranked worst of 40 largest aid agencies” is based on that “data” spreadsheet. But notice that 27 of those 40 “aid agencies” are not aid agencies but rather countries (e.g. Australia, United States). So this is already a big red flag. For each agency/country, the spreadsheet provides 7 indicators that are grouped under the title “Maximising Efficiency”. One of those indicators is called “ME4” according to which the WFP performed 3rd worst among all 40 agencies/countries. Quoting from the “detailed methodology” PDF (removing footnote references):
So if I understand correctly, the the QuODA scale seems to “punish” agencies that spend money on food assistance directly (rather than giving the money to the host state), and therefore does not seem like a good scale for evaluating the World Food Programme. (To be clear, I’m not overall familiar with QuODA scale; I’m just reporting what seems to me like a very big red flag).
Maybe the WFP employs many locals in low-GPD-per-capita states as part of their efforts to distribute food and the salaries are not a large % of WFP’s budget? (I don’t know whether that is the case; I’m just pointing out that that metric does not seem useful here.)
Appreciate this.
The second metric is aid per employee I think, so salaries don’t come into it(?) Distributing food is labour intensive, but so is UNICEF’s work and parts of WHO.
The rest of my evidence is informal (various development economists I’ve spoken to with horror stories) and I’d be pleased to be wrong.
I feel like this comments misses the point a bit. I think the UN is relevant not because it is such an amazing funding opportunity or because it spends its money effective, but because it is an important policy forum, for everything ranging from peacekeeping to the global health, the UN plays an important role in shaping the policy agenda and has an important coordinating role, increasing its effectiveness and making it more longtermist is potentially highly impactful, and does not have to mean “taking on a giant”, the UN-system has 100s of subsystems and policies we might be interested in tackling.
I have to say that I also not appreciate the snarky tone which I read in this comment.
I would love to see your estimates. As I say below, I overlooked peacekeeping and it is probably the diamond in the rough.
I am negative because of the lack of estimates, and because it really does seem relatively low importance and tractability. (Every UN insider I’ve spoken to (now 4) is extremely negative about it.)
I would love to be wrong.