Congrats James! By my accounting, I think there’s a pretty reasonable through line from you investigating this issue at GiveWell in late 2017 to the progress we’re seeing today. I hope you feel immensely proud of that.
Some questions I’d love to get your thoughts on:
How did you first learn about lead as an issue? I know you were looking into public health regulation broadly at that time (e.g. pesticides) and in your conversation notes from 2017 you cite various statistics (e.g. WHO statistic that 10% of children globally have >20 micrograms of lead NYU study on $1 trillion of economic costs). What first rang the alarm bells for you that this was an area worth investigating?
How was Pure Earth so far ahead of everyone on this? They published their first “World’s Most Polluted Places Report” in 2008 and wrote in it: “Relative to other public health interventions, pollution remediation can be very cost effective..… projects cost between $1 - $50 per year of life gained. This compares favorably to the $35 to $200 per year of life gained for World Bank estimates on interventions related to water supply, improved cooking stoves and malaria controls.”
Besides your $250K grant to IPEN in July 2019, why did it take you nearly four years from when you started investigating the topic in late 2017 to start funding work in the space? Relatedly, why did it take you so long to fund LEEP, and with relatively small grants to-date?
Thanks Parth, I appreciate it and thank you for your support along the way!
How did you first learn about lead as an issue? I know you were looking into public health regulation broadly at that time (e.g. pesticides) and in your conversation notes from 2017 you cite various statistics (e.g. WHO statistic that 10% of children globally have >20 micrograms of lead NYU study on $1 trillion of economic costs). What first rang the alarm bells for you that this was an area worth investigating?
IIRC, I first learned about it as a development issue from some very early work my colleague Andrew did at GiveWell. At the time, GiveWell wasn’t funding policy work, so it’d been deprioritized. But I’d got interested in public health policy from investigating this grant on pesticide suicide when I was at Giving What We Can, so I was pretty keen to dig into it.
But it was a pretty slow burn and I only got really excited about it between 2019 and 2021. Things I found particularly persuasive were this systematic review suggesting the median kid in an LMIC had elevated blood lead by US standards, Pure Earth telling me about Jenna Forsyth’s work in Bangladesh to remove lead from spices, and this comparative analysis highlighting its relative neglectedness, even compared to other hugely neglected issues like tobacco.
How was Pure Earth so far ahead of everyone on this? They published their first “World’s Most Polluted Places Report” in 2008 and wrote in it: “Relative to other public health interventions, pollution remediation can be very cost effective..… projects cost between $1 - $50 per year of life gained. This compares favorably to the $35 to $200 per year of life gained for World Bank estimates on interventions related to water supply, improved cooking stoves and malaria controls.”
I’m not sure! When I first started talking to Pure Earth, they’d recently started to focus more narrowly on lead exposure, having previously worked across a bunch of different pollutants. They were also starting to explore focusing on more regulatory interventions when before they were mostly cleaning up individual toxic waste sites. It was pretty cool to see an organization really shifting and following the burden like that. Fwiw I haven’t reviewed the $1-$50 estimate, but I’m skeptical of the claim if it’s referring to remediating individual toxic waste sites (though so much is down to how many years of “speedup” to count that it’s hard to know without digging in).
Besides your $250K grant to IPEN in July 2019, why did it take you nearly four years from when you started investigating the topic in late 2017 to start funding work in the space? Relatedly, why did it take you so long to fund LEEP, and with relatively small grants to-date?
Yeah, I think about this a lot. If we believe the GBD estimates, 6 million people died from lead exposure in the four years it took me to recommend substantial grants in the space. So even though that certainly wasn’t the only bottleneck, it’s a source of personal angst.
The short (and probably unsatisfying) answer is I was working on a lot of other things. I think over the ~5 years I spent at GiveWell, ~25% of my time was on public health policy, and lead was only a fraction of that. With hindsight, I wish I’d advocated more effectively for GiveWell to put more capacity towards that work (though it’s also worth noting that a lot of the most compelling data points weren’t available until ~2020).
On LEEP specifically, we were pretty close to making a grant at GiveWell, but I’d got hung up on whether I believed the evidence for lead paint being a significant source of exposure (I still find that evidence tricky to interpret, but lead paint regulation has also been far more tractable than I expected such that I think it should be a priority anyway). When I moved to Open Phil in 2022, it was to launch the EA program on global health and wellbeing. We also agreed to transition the lead portfolio and other public health policy grants from GiveWell to Open Phil, but it took a bit of time for us to get to launching a program. I agree with Alexander’s assessment of our mistakes here. Fwiw this has all made me quite appreciative of other funders in the EA space who funded LEEP. I admire their work, and it’s been fun working with Lucia and Clare (LEEP’s co-EDs) in the build up to the launch.
Congrats James! By my accounting, I think there’s a pretty reasonable through line from you investigating this issue at GiveWell in late 2017 to the progress we’re seeing today. I hope you feel immensely proud of that.
Some questions I’d love to get your thoughts on:
How did you first learn about lead as an issue? I know you were looking into public health regulation broadly at that time (e.g. pesticides) and in your conversation notes from 2017 you cite various statistics (e.g. WHO statistic that 10% of children globally have >20 micrograms of lead NYU study on $1 trillion of economic costs). What first rang the alarm bells for you that this was an area worth investigating?
How was Pure Earth so far ahead of everyone on this? They published their first “World’s Most Polluted Places Report” in 2008 and wrote in it: “Relative to other public health interventions, pollution remediation can be very cost effective..… projects cost between $1 - $50 per year of life gained. This compares favorably to the $35 to $200 per year of life gained for World Bank estimates on interventions related to water supply, improved cooking stoves and malaria controls.”
Besides your $250K grant to IPEN in July 2019, why did it take you nearly four years from when you started investigating the topic in late 2017 to start funding work in the space? Relatedly, why did it take you so long to fund LEEP, and with relatively small grants to-date?
Thanks Parth, I appreciate it and thank you for your support along the way!
IIRC, I first learned about it as a development issue from some very early work my colleague Andrew did at GiveWell. At the time, GiveWell wasn’t funding policy work, so it’d been deprioritized. But I’d got interested in public health policy from investigating this grant on pesticide suicide when I was at Giving What We Can, so I was pretty keen to dig into it.
But it was a pretty slow burn and I only got really excited about it between 2019 and 2021. Things I found particularly persuasive were this systematic review suggesting the median kid in an LMIC had elevated blood lead by US standards, Pure Earth telling me about Jenna Forsyth’s work in Bangladesh to remove lead from spices, and this comparative analysis highlighting its relative neglectedness, even compared to other hugely neglected issues like tobacco.
I’m not sure! When I first started talking to Pure Earth, they’d recently started to focus more narrowly on lead exposure, having previously worked across a bunch of different pollutants. They were also starting to explore focusing on more regulatory interventions when before they were mostly cleaning up individual toxic waste sites. It was pretty cool to see an organization really shifting and following the burden like that. Fwiw I haven’t reviewed the $1-$50 estimate, but I’m skeptical of the claim if it’s referring to remediating individual toxic waste sites (though so much is down to how many years of “speedup” to count that it’s hard to know without digging in).
Yeah, I think about this a lot. If we believe the GBD estimates, 6 million people died from lead exposure in the four years it took me to recommend substantial grants in the space. So even though that certainly wasn’t the only bottleneck, it’s a source of personal angst.
The short (and probably unsatisfying) answer is I was working on a lot of other things. I think over the ~5 years I spent at GiveWell, ~25% of my time was on public health policy, and lead was only a fraction of that. With hindsight, I wish I’d advocated more effectively for GiveWell to put more capacity towards that work (though it’s also worth noting that a lot of the most compelling data points weren’t available until ~2020).
On LEEP specifically, we were pretty close to making a grant at GiveWell, but I’d got hung up on whether I believed the evidence for lead paint being a significant source of exposure (I still find that evidence tricky to interpret, but lead paint regulation has also been far more tractable than I expected such that I think it should be a priority anyway). When I moved to Open Phil in 2022, it was to launch the EA program on global health and wellbeing. We also agreed to transition the lead portfolio and other public health policy grants from GiveWell to Open Phil, but it took a bit of time for us to get to launching a program. I agree with Alexander’s assessment of our mistakes here. Fwiw this has all made me quite appreciative of other funders in the EA space who funded LEEP. I admire their work, and it’s been fun working with Lucia and Clare (LEEP’s co-EDs) in the build up to the launch.