Agreed that it probably makes sense to be closer to 60 years, or maybe even a bit lower (though if there are major advances in life-extension over the coming decades, then it could be much higher for young children who will have the most chance to benefit).
I’d note that health-related quality of life is likely to be less than 1 per year, perhaps 0.7 or 0.8.
Regarding counterfactual mortality, wouldn’t this largely be taken into account of in the overall estimate of life expectancy? Though this overall estimate probably doesn’t include things like major catastrophes (devastating pandemics, x-risks)
I am not clear on if that number is meant to be interpreted in terms of years or just as a unitless “moral weight” for comparison purposes. I am hesitant to compare it with QALYs or other metrics without knowing the units.
Yes close enough—in reality it would be YLL + Other DALYs (suffering but not death caused by malaria) which would be equivalent to QALYs, but YLL would be close enough I think!
Yep that works too @NunoSempere there are different arguments for between about 35 and 80 years, the argument for the higher end e.g. 80 (made interestingly by the WHO) is that we should ascribe everyone their full future potential life expectancy with each year valued at or close to 1.0, no matter where they are in the world. This value every human life the same and recognises that much of what stops people reaching this potential are modifiable factors
The argument for lower-mid end (perhaps more in line with effective altruism thinking) is that we should use the real world situation as of right now to estimate the likely QALYS someone would have experienced in average life in that country. In this case you might get more like 35-40 for somewhere like Uganda like Givewell did
Or you can hedge your bets and go somewhere in between
Either way It makes about a 2x order of magnitude difference which is managable.
Note that we shouldn’t be considering total health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), but rather the HALE of the average person saved—hence you probably want to half that as a typical rule of thumb (not fully accurate, since disease burden is higher for old people, even as the average person saved is probably younger than the midpoint given global age distributions; evens out to some extent, but not clear how much so)
I would go with this, though using more like 60 years
I would also discount a bit for counterfactual mortality.
Agreed that it probably makes sense to be closer to 60 years, or maybe even a bit lower (though if there are major advances in life-extension over the coming decades, then it could be much higher for young children who will have the most chance to benefit).
I’d note that health-related quality of life is likely to be less than 1 per year, perhaps 0.7 or 0.8.
Regarding counterfactual mortality, wouldn’t this largely be taken into account of in the overall estimate of life expectancy? Though this overall estimate probably doesn’t include things like major catastrophes (devastating pandemics, x-risks)
GiveWell’s spreadsheet says that the conventional value would be 37 based on discounting and age-weighting
I am not clear on if that number is meant to be interpreted in terms of years or just as a unitless “moral weight” for comparison purposes. I am hesitant to compare it with QALYs or other metrics without knowing the units.
The spreadsheet in the second link says YLL (years of life lost) which I think can be considered equivalent to QALYs in this case.
It’s also consistent with the comment on the 0.40 on the conventional value of increasing income in the first spreadsheet
Yes close enough—in reality it would be YLL + Other DALYs (suffering but not death caused by malaria) which would be equivalent to QALYs, but YLL would be close enough I think!
Thanks for finding that!
Yep that works too @NunoSempere there are different arguments for between about 35 and 80 years, the argument for the higher end e.g. 80 (made interestingly by the WHO) is that we should ascribe everyone their full future potential life expectancy with each year valued at or close to 1.0, no matter where they are in the world. This value every human life the same and recognises that much of what stops people reaching this potential are modifiable factors
The argument for lower-mid end (perhaps more in line with effective altruism thinking) is that we should use the real world situation as of right now to estimate the likely QALYS someone would have experienced in average life in that country. In this case you might get more like 35-40 for somewhere like Uganda like Givewell did
Or you can hedge your bets and go somewhere in between
Either way It makes about a 2x order of magnitude difference which is managable.
Note that we shouldn’t be considering total health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), but rather the HALE of the average person saved—hence you probably want to half that as a typical rule of thumb (not fully accurate, since disease burden is higher for old people, even as the average person saved is probably younger than the midpoint given global age distributions; evens out to some extent, but not clear how much so)