Either charities like the Gates Foundation and Good Ventures are hoarding money at the price of millions of preventable deaths, or the low cost-per-life-saved numbers are wildly exaggerated.
Isn’t there option 3?
Option 3: a funder reasons that by partially filling a funding gap, it will draw in money from other funders that would counterfactually not go towards the cause area. By drawing in money from other sources, the funder leverages their grant-making spend.
Apologies if you’ve already addressed this somewhere; I haven’t read your full series on the topic.
The series is long and boring precisely because it tried to address pretty much every claim like that at once. In this case GiveWell’s on record as not wanting their cost per life saved numbers to be held to the standard of “literally true” (one side of that disjunction) so I don’t see the point in going through that whole argument again.
Isn’t there option 3?
Option 3: a funder reasons that by partially filling a funding gap, it will draw in money from other funders that would counterfactually not go towards the cause area. By drawing in money from other sources, the funder leverages their grant-making spend.
Apologies if you’ve already addressed this somewhere; I haven’t read your full series on the topic.
The series is long and boring precisely because it tried to address pretty much every claim like that at once. In this case GiveWell’s on record as not wanting their cost per life saved numbers to be held to the standard of “literally true” (one side of that disjunction) so I don’t see the point in going through that whole argument again.
For reference, the landing page for Ben’s series.