(I don’t lead on the air quality work, so be more careful with this comment that the others that I’ve left here).
India wasn’t picked as an example to illustrate the importance and neglectedness of air quality work. Rather, India has been the dominant setting for Open Philanthropy’s air quality work to date—it even has its own updated web page. You can read more about why Open Philanthropy launched the work on South Asian air quality here and here. Santosh Harish, the Program Officer who leads that work, recently gave an excellent interview to the 80,000 hours podcast—transcript and recording here.
I agree domestic financing complicates relative neglectedness—the effort here was to be as consistent as reasonably possible between the risk factors. Neglectedness comparisons are very tricky to nail down in general (e.g. how to attribute non-specific health systems spending across both causes and risks, whether to include treatment for linked health conditions like lung cancer or cirrhosis, how to think about relatively ineffective uses of money like e.g. biofuel subsidies for climate change, or a more relevant example here would be smog towers for air quality). One nod to the uncertainty of both measurement and scope here is the use of ranges; but yeah, we’re trading off a bunch of different considerations here.
There’s a lot of internal research stress testing the IHME burden estimates for lead and air quality, and some on alcohol—I’m doing more on alcohol specifically at the moment. Here we’re pointing to the IHME GBD study for several reasons: it’s widely recognized, easy to interact with, has a largely consistent / common methodology between different causes of death and disease, and importantly doesn’t allow for deaths to be attributed to more than one cause. This works well for problems where the Open Philanthropy way of conceptualizing the problem (e.g. malaria, lead exposure) matches a GBD cause (e.g. malaria) or risk (e.g. lead exposure). This doesn’t mean we uncritically use the GBD in all of our own decision making—but this set of reasons make it very helpful to refer to when communicating externally. It might be that we publish more of our internal research on this in the future, but honestly it’s a serious time investment and I don’t want to over promise.
DALYs sit behind the framework but can be understandably offputting for many audiences. The BOTECs / grant decisions are in line with our usual GHW cause prioritization framework of valuing increases in healthy life and log-income.
Thanks heaps for the reply Chris! Yes I have read the OpenPhil work on air quality. That explains to some extent the India choice, although I still feel like its a misleading graphic.
I would be interested to hear what you found interesting and compelling about the 80,000 hours interview? Maybe though you can’t say much (or anything) given your position at GiveWell. I was impressed by his knowledge and passion about the issue, but found his arguments about potentially tractable interventions somewhat unconvincing. I struggled to see a clear theory of change in his proposed interventions. I can definitely be convinced, but just aren’t right now. think its likely India will greatly reduce air pollution over the next 20 years, but its hard for me right now to envisage how marginal funding will make a difference. Obviously I’m not an expert at all though so could easily just be dead wrong.
If anything the interview made me a bit less convinced than I was before that air quality in India was likely to be a cost-effective cause area. I was also surprised that he didn’t talk about the significant domestic funding going towards cleaning the air as well.
I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.
Thanks so much for your great explanation James and the other ones on the post. Great to see direct engagement from the people running the program.
the theory of change of trying to change the government’s current allocation of makes some sense (I didn’t pick it up in the podcast, but reading back it is there to some degree), but its very difficult. Its always a difficult task influence governments to spend their money in more impactful directions—especially just with science and logic. Advocacy skills might be at least as important to your cause as the data the projects you fund produce.
I would be interested to see if you have examples of philanthropies with small amounts of money and no real carrot or stick, influencing governments with larger amounts of money on the issue. Here in Uganda philanthropies can definitely influence the direction of healthcare for example (HIV, Malaria national programs. etc.), but its largely through pouring significant resources into that area, often more than the government can even which gives them hard power and carrots and sticks to wield.
I’m also interested if Indian governments have shown in any practical way that they might be genuinely interested in cost-effectiveness analysis driving fund allocation? As far as I know in East Africa here cost-effectiveness analysis is almost completely unutilised by governments, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to from any level of government in any intervention here, health or otherwise. I hope India is more switched on than that and might pay more attention. I know nothing about the region really so maybe they do already use it.
Anyway we will see what happens! Obvious clean air is wildly important and causes ludicrous amnounts of suffering and death. It may well be a hard thing to judge the impact on—a rough one for the grantmaker and those doing the interventions. If the quality doesn’t improve obviously that will be a fail, but if it does (as is likely) its going to be hard to pin down the counterfactual impact of the grants. If they do allocate more efforts to rural areas that’s a win you could tick up I’d imagine, but if air quality gets better in general it may well be hard to figure out what portion of it was due to your guys work—even if most of it was.
Anyway thanks again for the reply and all the best with the project!
(I don’t lead on the air quality work, so be more careful with this comment that the others that I’ve left here).
India wasn’t picked as an example to illustrate the importance and neglectedness of air quality work. Rather, India has been the dominant setting for Open Philanthropy’s air quality work to date—it even has its own updated web page. You can read more about why Open Philanthropy launched the work on South Asian air quality here and here. Santosh Harish, the Program Officer who leads that work, recently gave an excellent interview to the 80,000 hours podcast—transcript and recording here.
I agree domestic financing complicates relative neglectedness—the effort here was to be as consistent as reasonably possible between the risk factors. Neglectedness comparisons are very tricky to nail down in general (e.g. how to attribute non-specific health systems spending across both causes and risks, whether to include treatment for linked health conditions like lung cancer or cirrhosis, how to think about relatively ineffective uses of money like e.g. biofuel subsidies for climate change, or a more relevant example here would be smog towers for air quality). One nod to the uncertainty of both measurement and scope here is the use of ranges; but yeah, we’re trading off a bunch of different considerations here.
There’s a lot of internal research stress testing the IHME burden estimates for lead and air quality, and some on alcohol—I’m doing more on alcohol specifically at the moment. Here we’re pointing to the IHME GBD study for several reasons: it’s widely recognized, easy to interact with, has a largely consistent / common methodology between different causes of death and disease, and importantly doesn’t allow for deaths to be attributed to more than one cause. This works well for problems where the Open Philanthropy way of conceptualizing the problem (e.g. malaria, lead exposure) matches a GBD cause (e.g. malaria) or risk (e.g. lead exposure). This doesn’t mean we uncritically use the GBD in all of our own decision making—but this set of reasons make it very helpful to refer to when communicating externally. It might be that we publish more of our internal research on this in the future, but honestly it’s a serious time investment and I don’t want to over promise.
DALYs sit behind the framework but can be understandably offputting for many audiences. The BOTECs / grant decisions are in line with our usual GHW cause prioritization framework of valuing increases in healthy life and log-income.
Thanks heaps for the reply Chris! Yes I have read the OpenPhil work on air quality. That explains to some extent the India choice, although I still feel like its a misleading graphic.
I would be interested to hear what you found interesting and compelling about the 80,000 hours interview? Maybe though you can’t say much (or anything) given your position at GiveWell. I was impressed by his knowledge and passion about the issue, but found his arguments about potentially tractable interventions somewhat unconvincing. I struggled to see a clear theory of change in his proposed interventions. I can definitely be convinced, but just aren’t right now. think its likely India will greatly reduce air pollution over the next 20 years, but its hard for me right now to envisage how marginal funding will make a difference. Obviously I’m not an expert at all though so could easily just be dead wrong.
If anything the interview made me a bit less convinced than I was before that air quality in India was likely to be a cost-effective cause area. I was also surprised that he didn’t talk about the significant domestic funding going towards cleaning the air as well.
Hi Nick, thanks for your thoughts.
I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.
Thanks so much for your great explanation James and the other ones on the post. Great to see direct engagement from the people running the program.
the theory of change of trying to change the government’s current allocation of makes some sense (I didn’t pick it up in the podcast, but reading back it is there to some degree), but its very difficult. Its always a difficult task influence governments to spend their money in more impactful directions—especially just with science and logic. Advocacy skills might be at least as important to your cause as the data the projects you fund produce.
I would be interested to see if you have examples of philanthropies with small amounts of money and no real carrot or stick, influencing governments with larger amounts of money on the issue. Here in Uganda philanthropies can definitely influence the direction of healthcare for example (HIV, Malaria national programs. etc.), but its largely through pouring significant resources into that area, often more than the government can even which gives them hard power and carrots and sticks to wield.
I’m also interested if Indian governments have shown in any practical way that they might be genuinely interested in cost-effectiveness analysis driving fund allocation? As far as I know in East Africa here cost-effectiveness analysis is almost completely unutilised by governments, I’ve certainly never heard it referred to from any level of government in any intervention here, health or otherwise. I hope India is more switched on than that and might pay more attention. I know nothing about the region really so maybe they do already use it.
Anyway we will see what happens! Obvious clean air is wildly important and causes ludicrous amnounts of suffering and death. It may well be a hard thing to judge the impact on—a rough one for the grantmaker and those doing the interventions. If the quality doesn’t improve obviously that will be a fail, but if it does (as is likely) its going to be hard to pin down the counterfactual impact of the grants. If they do allocate more efforts to rural areas that’s a win you could tick up I’d imagine, but if air quality gets better in general it may well be hard to figure out what portion of it was due to your guys work—even if most of it was.
Anyway thanks again for the reply and all the best with the project!