Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.
Thanks Tom—I think this great comment was missing “One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities.”
It might even be helpful saying something like this near the start of your article? This concept that you were only talking about the most cost-effective programs from the stat wasn’t clear to me from the initial article and now I think your framework makes a lot more sense.
I agree there’s a plausible case for bridging funding fororgs that aren’t as cost-effective, for example if 10% of the remaining funding would help them get over the line with 80% of the impact. I’m sure this can be the situation in rare cases, although I can’t think of an obvious example right now. The only risk here though is you might keep a less cost-effective org afloat when it might be better for it to die, preventing the org accessing more money from the donor pool.
Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.
Thanks again for reading!
Thanks Tom—I think this great comment was missing “One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities.”
It might even be helpful saying something like this near the start of your article? This concept that you were only talking about the most cost-effective programs from the stat wasn’t clear to me from the initial article and now I think your framework makes a lot more sense.
I agree there’s a plausible case for bridging funding fororgs that aren’t as cost-effective, for example if 10% of the remaining funding would help them get over the line with 80% of the impact. I’m sure this can be the situation in rare cases, although I can’t think of an obvious example right now. The only risk here though is you might keep a less cost-effective org afloat when it might be better for it to die, preventing the org accessing more money from the donor pool.
Thanks Nick, helpful!