This would reduce the large width of our cost-effectiveness estimate, which currently lies between 0.1 and 1,311 welfare points per dollar, with a geometric mean of 12 welfare points per dollar.
Given the maximum welfare of 100 welfare points per year, my understanding is that 1 QALY could roughly be interpreted as 100 welfare points. So I think your range is 0.001 to 13.11 QALY/$, whose geometric mean is 0.12 QALY/$. GiveWell’s top charities create 50 QALY, saving one life, for around 5 k$, i.e. they have a cost-effectiveness of around 0.01 QALY/$. So I believe your preliminary range could be parsed as 10 % to 1.311 k times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities in terms of direct effects.
We did not make the comparison to QALYs since the program looked at global health/development and animal interventions separately. So we only compared animal interventions to other animal interventions. My personal perspective is that animal interventions indeed tend do be much more cost-effective, which is why I focus on that area.
It might also be interesting to note that CE’s own previous research (which we did not really look at when we conducted our own research) estimates ~20-30 welfare points per dollar, which is somewhat higher than our best guess of 12 WP/$.
Thanks for sharing, Zuzana and Moritz!
Given the maximum welfare of 100 welfare points per year, my understanding is that 1 QALY could roughly be interpreted as 100 welfare points. So I think your range is 0.001 to 13.11 QALY/$, whose geometric mean is 0.12 QALY/$. GiveWell’s top charities create 50 QALY, saving one life, for around 5 k$, i.e. they have a cost-effectiveness of around 0.01 QALY/$. So I believe your preliminary range could be parsed as 10 % to 1.311 k times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities in terms of direct effects.
Thanks for adding that helpful perspective!
We did not make the comparison to QALYs since the program looked at global health/development and animal interventions separately. So we only compared animal interventions to other animal interventions. My personal perspective is that animal interventions indeed tend do be much more cost-effective, which is why I focus on that area.
It might also be interesting to note that CE’s own previous research (which we did not really look at when we conducted our own research) estimates ~20-30 welfare points per dollar, which is somewhat higher than our best guess of 12 WP/$.