While I agree with a lot of the critiques in this comment, I do think it isn’t really engaging with the core point of Ben’s post, which I do think is actually an interesting one.
The question that Ben is trying to answer is “how large is the funding gap for interventions that can save lives for around $5000?”. And for that, the question is not “how much money would it take to eliminate all communicable diseases?”, but instead is the question “how much money do we have to spend until the price of saving a life via preventing communicable diseases becomes significantly higher than $5k?”. The answer to the second question is upper-bounded by the first question, which is why Ben is trying to answer that one, but that only serves to estimate the $5k/life funding gap.
And I think he does have a reasonable point there, in that I think the funding gap on interventions at that level of cost-effectiveness does seem to me to be much lower than the available funding in the space, making the impact of a counterfactual donation likely a lot lower than that (though the game theory here is complicated and counterfactuals are a bit hard to evaluate, making this a non-obvious point).
I think, though I have very high uncertainty bounds around all of this, is that the true number is closer to something in the space of $20k-$30k in terms of donations that would have a counterfactual impact of saving a life. I don’t think this really invalidates a lot of the core EA principles as Ben seems to think it implies, but it does make me unhappy with some of the marketing around EA health interventions.
While I agree with a lot of the critiques in this comment, I do think it isn’t really engaging with the core point of Ben’s post, which I do think is actually an interesting one.
The question that Ben is trying to answer is “how large is the funding gap for interventions that can save lives for around $5000?”. And for that, the question is not “how much money would it take to eliminate all communicable diseases?”, but instead is the question “how much money do we have to spend until the price of saving a life via preventing communicable diseases becomes significantly higher than $5k?”. The answer to the second question is upper-bounded by the first question, which is why Ben is trying to answer that one, but that only serves to estimate the $5k/life funding gap.
And I think he does have a reasonable point there, in that I think the funding gap on interventions at that level of cost-effectiveness does seem to me to be much lower than the available funding in the space, making the impact of a counterfactual donation likely a lot lower than that (though the game theory here is complicated and counterfactuals are a bit hard to evaluate, making this a non-obvious point).
I think, though I have very high uncertainty bounds around all of this, is that the true number is closer to something in the space of $20k-$30k in terms of donations that would have a counterfactual impact of saving a life. I don’t think this really invalidates a lot of the core EA principles as Ben seems to think it implies, but it does make me unhappy with some of the marketing around EA health interventions.