So, to be clear, it’s not like I have a back-of-the-envelope calculation or anything.
The way I see it, charity is hard mainly because it’s hard to identify opportunities that scale, and even when we do, most of our efforts are wasted. With Deworm The World, for example, only about half of treated children have any worm infection at all. Targeting charitable interventions is usually not cost-effective because the best beneficiaries can be hard to find. This is even harder if we need the reasoning and evidence to be legible.
But, if we are able to identify targeted cases “by accident” (or, in the course of living life), then we get the benefits of targeting for free, without either the cost of finding beneficiaries or the cost of legible/rigorous impact evaluation.
In the rich world, I think this sort of impact usually comes from behaviors that are free or very low cost to the donor. An example is giving CPR in a public place — it could potentially save a life, for a pretty small opportunity cost, but it wouldn’t be worth it to give up your career just to be around in case someone needs CPR. Or a more minor (but also maybe more common) example might be introducing two people who are well positioned to help one another, where the potential connection is discovered incidentally, or by accident.
Thanks Ian that makes perfect sense, really like the CPR and introducing people examples makes a lot of sense. Also like the “free targeting” concept, its true that we are likely to stumble accross cost-effective things along the way :).
So, to be clear, it’s not like I have a back-of-the-envelope calculation or anything.
The way I see it, charity is hard mainly because it’s hard to identify opportunities that scale, and even when we do, most of our efforts are wasted. With Deworm The World, for example, only about half of treated children have any worm infection at all. Targeting charitable interventions is usually not cost-effective because the best beneficiaries can be hard to find. This is even harder if we need the reasoning and evidence to be legible.
But, if we are able to identify targeted cases “by accident” (or, in the course of living life), then we get the benefits of targeting for free, without either the cost of finding beneficiaries or the cost of legible/rigorous impact evaluation.
In the rich world, I think this sort of impact usually comes from behaviors that are free or very low cost to the donor. An example is giving CPR in a public place — it could potentially save a life, for a pretty small opportunity cost, but it wouldn’t be worth it to give up your career just to be around in case someone needs CPR. Or a more minor (but also maybe more common) example might be introducing two people who are well positioned to help one another, where the potential connection is discovered incidentally, or by accident.
Does that make sense?
Thanks Ian that makes perfect sense, really like the CPR and introducing people examples makes a lot of sense. Also like the “free targeting” concept, its true that we are likely to stumble accross cost-effective things along the way :).