AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
This week, Open Phil launched the Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF) and became a founding partner of the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF). Given the interest around these initiatives, I thought an AMA might be a good way to share more.
At Open Phil, I’ve been fortunate to oversee our work on lead exposure with Santosh Harish and have been involved in some of the recent developments. I’ve particularly focused on helping get LEAF off the ground and contributing to the early stages of the PLF.
If you’re interested in learning more, here are a few useful resources:
A bit more about me:
I’ve been with Open Phil for about 2.5 years, after five years at GiveWell and a year with Giving What We Can. Currently, I lead our grantmaking in public health policy — covering areas like lead exposure, air quality, alcohol policy, and suicide prevention — as well as Global Aid Policy, and some work related to effective altruism (GHW). Before joining Open Phil, I worked across a variety of areas at GiveWell, from public health policy to charity evaluations, including methodological questions around moral weights and discount rates. I also contributed to GiveWell’s response to COVID-19.
I’m happy to answer any questions you have about lead exposure, our work at Open Phil, or anything else that catches your eye! I’ll be answering questions on Thursday afternoon, October 3rd Pacific Time (Edit: I answered some questions a bit early, but will check back)
In 2020 when I asked you about lead policy work, you weren’t optimistic that people without strong networks and expertise could make much progress on policy advocacy. Has your view changed?
Yes! I’ve updated on how quickly smart and driven people can build networks and expertise to make an impact on policy, especially in neglected areas.
I do think lead exposure (and particularly paint) was a wise choice for LEEP’s founders who were starting out with less previous policy experience. It’s a fairly technocratic regulatory intervention without much opposition, the area’s neglected so it’s easier to build your network, and there are already model laws and various international agreements in place. And I also think LEEP’s team is unusually capable!
Other kinds of policy advocacy (e.g. global aid policy in countries like the U.S.) are pretty different in my experience. Speaking loosely, it’s a more crowded space with many established players, and often involves navigating complex political landscapes and competing priorities. I wouldn’t want to write off less experienced people having an impact here, but coming in cold does seem tough. The Partnership for a Lead-Free Future shows we can have an impact there as well, but I think that story relied at least in part on strong networks and subject matter expertise.
Question for either James or Julia: Is this specifically for lead policy or just policy advocacy in general? And can you elaborate why?
Hi James, on the South Asian Air Quality portfolio, would be it be fair to say that OP’s grants so far have been focused on research and diagnosing both the problem and potential solutions, rather than executing on interventions themselves? Is the current bottleneck a lack of cost-effective and feasible ideas—and if so, what looks most promising so far?
Yes, I think that’s mostly fair.
Air pollution in South Asia has a lot of different sources requiring distinct policy interventions, and often at local levels. Eliminating emissions entirely from any one source category would address a relatively small fraction (5%-10%, say) of the problem in a given city or state.
Some interventions that are relatively scalable across India, and likely to be effective are politically intractable: power plant emission controls (expensive and with costs borne by a small group of influential firms), or subsidies to make cleaner fuels affordable for household cooking (expensive—needs an outlay of at least $1B/year).
That said, about $5M/ $18M spent so far in the program in India fund organizations that work with government agencies in identifying and executing interventions, leveraging existing government resources.
Some of the promising ideas so far that our grantees are working on include better handling of construction dust by large private developers, and support for city governments to handle dispersed sources (municipal waste burning, resuspension of road dust). We also think that crop residue burning in northern India has seen steady (if slow) improvement, and expect to continue supporting governments in this process.
Can you tell us a little bit about how this project and partnership came together? What was OpenPhil’s role? What is it like working with such a large number of organizations, including governments? Do you see potential for more collaborations like this?
Open Phil’s main role was organizing a group of donors to commit most of the funding which was announced alongside the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. The Lead Exposure Action Fund comprises $104m of the $150m that was announced, and Open Phil staff will manage the allocation of those funds. The work to launch a collaborative fund was quite far along when we formalized a partnership with USAID, so it’s an interesting coming together of two strands.
We’ve also been working very closely with USAID and UNICEF to help design the PLF (and we’re still working together to flesh it out), and have pledged to co-fund a portion of the PLF’s operating costs.
Overall, it’s been a really positive (and fun!) experience working with USAID. Smoother than I would’ve guessed. I think there’s a few things that have helped with that.
First, lead exposure is just really compelling on impact grounds; Samantha Power and Atul Gawande are convinced about it for the same reasons we are. Two generalizable takeaways for me were that the ITN framework is convincing outside narrow EA circles, and people at the very highest levels of government resonate with cause prioritization. That makes sense: they’re the people who have to make decisions at that level. Both those make me optimistic about the potential for more collaboration.
Second, we’ve been working with some really cool people who share our values. Samantha Power’s senior adviser, Garrett Lam, is the person who first brought lead exposure to Samantha Power’s attention, and I believe that was partly due to various touchpoints with this community (but wouldn’t want to speak too much for him).
No question, just a huge thanks for all the engagement James, its a great touch point to have a senior Open Phil staff open to touching base with the community on the forum and answering questions. Helps make big orgs seem a little more real and personal. I especially appreciated the Global Health Policy earlier.
Thanks Nick, that’s very kind of you to say. I’ve also really appreciated your contributions to the forum.
The linked blog post says that starting a collaboration with other funders was one of OP’s goals for this year (quote from the section on 2024 goals from another blog post):
Which, from the wording and the timeline I assume was essentially referring to LEAF project. Is this a direction OP (perhaps inspired by this argument about PEPFAR?) increasingly wants to go in with other projects? And do you know if there are other collaborations like this in the pipeline?
You’re right that was referring to LEAF. We’ve been excited at how well this collaboration’s gone, so we’re thinking about what else we might be able to do in a similar vein, but haven’t decided what that’ll look like yet.
Really exciting news about LEAF. I’m wondering—you’ve successfully managed to build this coalition with non-EA orgs for LEAF, are there generalizable learnings about how to do that well? Or language you’ve been using to translate some EA/OpenPhil concepts to wider audiences?
Thanks ajyl! I think the biggest takeaway for me is that you can do a bit of storytelling without compromising on rigor / honesty.
The ITN framework is compelling and appeals to people outside EA.
Jenna Forsyth’s work in Bangladesh really resonated with people. Combining that story with an estimate of 20,000 lives saved seemed to hit home for a lot of folks.
Comparison is helpful. Lead exposure is estimated to kill 1.5 million people but receives only $15m in funding is compelling to people who can put those numbers in perspective. But lead exposure is estimated to kill more people than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, but receives ~1,000x less funding is much more universally powerful.
I think focusing on our plan in the funding proposal (measurement, mitigation, mainstreaming), and setting measurable goals against that was helpful.
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.
I am very happy about the LEAF initiative!
Do you have any ideas for why funders didn’t pay attention to lead sooner?
Thanks Rafa! A few theories:
There just aren’t many people whose job it is to look for important, tractable and neglected causes. It’s striking how much of the recent upsurge in interest has been related to EA.
While there are some individual cases of very severe exposure, most of the burden is caused by relatively small risks of harm spread across entire populations, so victims aren’t identifiable.
A lot of global health funding is allocated by disease category. Lead exposure cuts across disease categories, so it just doesn’t naturally fit into a lot of funding mechanisms.
The elimination of leaded gasoline had a huge positive impact globally. The US, and a few other countries, also do regular testing and surveillance to identify other sources of exposure. But not many other countries do that. So I think there’s a story that with the decline in US blood lead levels, people assumed the problem was fixed by eliminating leaded gasoline when other countries, particularly LMICs, still have a lot of exposure from other sources.
A lot of the recent discussion in the lead space has focused on sources such as paint, spices, ceramics, and cookware. In terms of trends, my (low-confidence) sense is that these sources of exposure are likely either plateauing or decreasing. But the use of lead in batteries is expected to increase a lot (based on a quick search, the market may double in the next 10-15 years).
1) How much do you think we should be focusing on batteries – and informal ULAB recycling – compared to other sources of exposure?
2) Are there any prevention/mitigation strategies in this space that people are pursuing that you’re excited about? Or approaches that you’d be keen for people to explore?
The most direct focus of LEAF’s source-specific mitigation work is paint and spices, but that’s largely because of tractability: these are both products where there are only weak economic incentives to use lead, and where production is fairly consolidated. That makes them easier to regulate. For other sources (batteries, cookware, cosmetics etc.), we want to fund more exploratory work: piloting and testing regulatory interventions rather than scaling them.
I think figuring out what to do on informal ULAB recycling is really important. ~80% of global lead is used in lead acid batteries, and informal recycling is responsible for particularly severe cases of exposure for people living nearby.
A benefit of all the recent attention on lead exposure is I expect we’ll increasingly see requests for assistance from governments, so it would be very helpful to have “best practice” playbooks we could apply to ULAB regulation. To my knowledge, those don’t currently exist (though there are some resources here and here). Intuitively, I’m excited by market-based solutions like tax breaks or even subsidies for well-regulated formal sector battery recycling to make it cost-competitive with unsafe informal recycling. But that’s pretty weakly held. Pure Earth have been thinking about this a lot, as have the US EPA and others.
That’s really helpful. Thank you!
A common perception in EA is that Open Philanthropy and other elite EA organizations focus on doing the most good, which can come across as detached from broader community engagement. However, I believe there is a strong case, even from an impartial welfarist perspective, that empowering the broader EA community to explore and test ideas could be extremely high-EV. The EA community is vast, and there is a wealth of ideas beyond what the elite circle generates. Yet, the “do-ocracy” model, where people are encouraged to pursue their own projects, often disempowers those who don’t have the time or resources to do so.
Additionally, the dismissal of “EA should” statements, where suggestions are ignored because the originator isn’t positioned to implement them, further limits the potential for innovation. While tools like the EA Funds exist, they focus narrowly on pre-determined areas, and rejections are often made without feedback, leaving many high-EV ideas unexplored and unsupported.
Given that much of EA’s potential for innovation lies within the broader community, what steps can Open Phil take to better engage with and support exploratory, high-EV ideas from the wider EA base? How can Open Phil foster an environment where more ideas from the community can be tested, rather than maintaining a top-down approach that may be missing valuable opportunities?
Hi Midtermist, I think this is a pretty important worry and appreciate you sharing your perspective.
Just speaking for myself and the EA (global health and wellbeing) program I work on (though it’s mostly led by Mel Basnak now).
Here are a few things we’re doing:
We fund Probably Good, who try to empower people to think along impact-focused lines while remaining open-minded about how different people can best help others.
We support orgs like Founders Pledge and Charity Entrepreneurship, who share our core values but who do their own research and might have different views.
Our grants to effective giving orgs have not been conditional on them changing their recommendations (though we’re more likely to support orgs whose recommendations we believe in).
Tbc, I think it’s a tough problem and tradeoffs between respecting autonomy and standing behind your judgment calls as a grantmaker.
Do you still do personal donations? If so, to which charities?
Followup question: in 2017 you used part of your donations to support animal welfare and the long term future, but later stopped doing so, what was the reasoning behind this change?
Yes! Giving What We Can is how I first got involved with effective altruism, and I’ve given at least 10% of my income since graduating. This year, I gave to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, Effektiv Spenden, and the GiveWell All Grants Fund. I think they’re all awesome organizations, and I feel confident in personally standing behind them, given how well I know their work.
In 2017, I split my donation across cause areas and part of the reason was to signal that I believed in the importance of GCR and animal welfare work. I also thought giving might motivate me to learn more about those areas. But I don’t think the signaling really mattered, and as I became more convinced health policy was an area I could make a difference in, forming a more concrete view on high level cross-cause comparisons didn’t seem like a priority.
So since then I’ve mostly donated to orgs I know well through my work. As well as feeling like I could stand behind those decisions, I also see it as a gesture of appreciation to grantees and putting my money where my mouth is.