Highly effective charity discovered − 915 QALYs per dollar
I recently discovered that a group of people in Denmark has been taking ‘the promise’, which seems to run very close to something like the ‘giving what we can’ pledge. Its aim is to guarantee food, water, peace and shelter for everyone, forever.
To my understanding, nobody in the EA community has yet assessed this movement, so I created a cost effectiveness analysis. I was quite shocked at the initial results, which suggests 915 QALYs per dollar spent.
I would be glad to have your support in improving this CEA, and taking next steps in running initial trials.
What is the promise
The promise is simply a piece of text, which is read aloud to become a ‘Promiser’. The person makes a promise that if any other Promiser asks them for help with obtaining food, water, peace (defined as freedom from physical violence) or shelter, they must either fulfill that request or bring in another Promiser to help.
Each Promiser creates their own ‘jury’ of five people that they know, whose ethics they admire. This helps them to stick to their promise and have a flexible method of solving moral conundrums.
The promise also has the condition that it comes before all other laws (which is less controversial than it sounds, given that it is restating a subsection the UN human rights convention), and if any Promiser is being punished for putting their promise first, you should either prevent the punishment or bring in more Promisers to help.
You can see the full text of the promise here.
Cost Effectiveness
I created this document to asses the cost effectiveness of a hypothetical charity that has paid employees spreading the promise. Example activities of the charity could be:
Translating the promise
Using networks to share the promise with individuals
Improving the cost effectiveness analysis by monitoring success
Generating media attention for the promise
Feel free to make a copy, trial different input parameters, and make any tweaks.
Key points from the CEA:
The charity’s first employee could continuously save lives for 0.04 USD per life, even with conservative estimates
The promise has features that allow it to grow exponentially:
Low infrastructural requirements
Immediate benefit to those who join the promise
Benefit to Promisers of spreading the promise
We need a trial run
There is a chance that the promise would not have exponential growth, and so would have a much smaller impact, if the defection rate (people dropping out of the promise) is greater than the spread rate. This should be tested in a trial
Intervening early is key
creating the charity when there are only 100 promisers (estimated current number) versus 10,000 will increase cost effectiveness by 3x
Rapid action should of course be balanced with conducting trials and testing evidence
How can you help?
Forecasting
What will the spread rate of the promise be over time?
Test and improve the CEA:
Check for calculation errors
Refine estimates for QALYs lost through lack of clean water, physical violence, and homelessness
A full list of planned model improvements can be found at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Feel free to act on any of these
Create a fancier CEA
Build an SIR-style model (similar to that used by infectious diseases)
Add scenario planning or uncertainties, e.g. through a monte carlo model
Create and fund a charity
I suggest creating a small charity with two employees, to run a trial of spreading the promise and testing the CEA. Let’s do this ASAP. Perhaps someone from Charity Entrepreneurship could take the lead?
Get in touch, and let’s make a plan
P.S. this scheme could work well within EA
The promise would build a safety net from which EAs would be able to take high-impact actions that have personal risks, such as starting a charity or undertaking a research project without institutional funding. What do you think? Would you take the promise together with a group of EA friends?
It’s unclear how demanding this promise is—I find it to be considerably more vague than the GWWC 10% Pledge in terms of how much sacrifice is expected, but let’s assume for the time being that it is ~equally demanding as the 10% Pledge. It’s taken many years and FTEs to get GWWC to ~10,000 pledgers, a rate of progress which makes me think that gaining promisers would be considerably more difficult than your model assumes.
It’s true that there is a theoretical “benefit to those who join the promise” in that they obtain the ability to ask other promisers for material resources. However, for those who currently have enough food, water, peace, and shelter, there is zero marginal benefit to pledging now as one could always defer pledging until one had a need. One could perhaps get around this with an open season and a registry (e.g., people can only promise from Jan 1 to Jan 15 of each year, or else they can’t claim the promise until the next year)? But even then, this system needs a balance between people who have excess resources and people who need basic resources, or ~everyone will likely get frustrated and give up. I’m not sure you’d get that.
The idea of closed communities of promisers in the postscript is interesting, although there would be awkwardness about who is allowed / not allowed into the group, whether people would be screened on various underwriting criteria, and so on.
Thanks very much for all these great hypotheses. I think there is a reasonable chance that these effects will be true, but also that we don’t have strong evidence for any of them yet. I’ve split your comment into the following hypotheses, and tests that can be run to determine whether they are true:
Hypothesis 1: Spread rate will be similar to GWWC 10% pledge, at 10,000 members over 15 years of activity. GWWC currently have 15 employees, with a time averaged number of c. 10 employees. This puts the spread rate per employee at around 0.2 promisers per day, compared to the model’s current estimate of 3. This would lower the QALYs per dollar from 915 to 123.
Test for hypothesis 1: monitor the spread rate per employee
Hypothesis 2: People gaming the system by becoming aware of the promise, but only taking the promise once they are in need, will be a significant effect.
Test A for hypothesis 2: Employees record interactions with potential promisers and indicate what proportion of them seem likely to engage in this behaviour
Test B for hypothesis 2: Monitor the spread rate by employees and by promisers directly, ignoring this intermediate variable
Hypothesis 3: There will be an overwhelming number of promisers without access to food, water, peace and shelter, which will lead to a high defection rate (above the 0.5% per day predicted in the model)
Test A for hypothesis 3: Record the defection rate from the promise by running trials
Test B for hypothesis 3: Observe the ratio of promisers who are able to give and promisers who are making requests for support
If you or anybody else would be interested in supporting the running any of these tests, please let me know.
It will do a service to your reader if you choose a title that explains what your post is arguing.
Could you suggest an alternative title? Maybe you’re thinking something like: “we should set up a pilot charity to formalise the promise—predicted to save 915 QALYs per dollar”?
It sounds like a more effective version of Moai in Okinawa. It will be interesting to see how it goes!
https://www.bluezones.com/2018/08/moai-this-tradition-is-why-okinawan-people-live-longer-better/
I wish you luck with this project!
I’m a bit more skeptical, but this sounds fascinating. Would love to hear more.
Great! What questions do you have? What makes you feel skeptical?
Nothing specific. It just seems like it would make sense for them to write an explanation of why they’re doing this.
Does the promise have a website? Do you happen to know how many people have taken the promise so far? BTW There is a notion page where EAs can sign up to host others so it’s kind of like promise already.
There is no website as far as I have seen. It is not a formal organisation, but rather a text. There is, because of this, no centralised register of who has taken the promise, though I’m sure that would be welcomed, and could be one of the activities that the created charity does. So far, the promise has been working via word of mouth—if you need help, you ask Promisers that you know, and they ask Promisers that they know.
Cool about the notion page. Maybe you could link it?