That’s a fairly decent analogy but I don’t think it quite works. Investing markets are much more efficient than charity markets; if GiveWell didn’t exist, most GiveWell donors probably would have given their money to charities less than half as good. So of the money moved, (conservatively) 50% of that is additional value added, and subtracting 4.6% leaves about 45% value added. Whereas it’s quite rare for investment managers to earn a 5 percentage point premium over the market.
I do tend to think other actors could have produced charity recommendations that are about as good as GiveWell’s. Indeed, I believe Giving What We Can’s recommendations have been on par, and Animal Charity Evaluators’ have been much better (although ACE gets an advantage by focusing on a more cost-effective cause). However, GiveWell has done exceptionally well at attracting funding—no one else has come anywhere close to this, and I tend to think that the ability to attract this much funding is very rare.
ACE’s recommendations may well be much better than Givewell if the general case for animal welfare >> global poverty in terms of cause area. Yet this may be less helpful (a hypothetical far future metacharity I set up now and recommend FHI or whatever might be far better than either by a similar sort of argument).
I think for overall quality of work, Givewell has done much better than ACE, if only by virtue of having far more resources to throw at the issue. In terms of rigour, Givewell probably do much better than anyone.
Perhaps an appropriate metric would be something like quality per full-time equivalent or similar. Then things are pretty murky: GWWC’s track record of recommendations seems about on par with Givewell (I’m doing some work on this at the moment), which is surprising given GWWC has had far fewer research staff and money over this period. This may imply GWWC has been more effective, or that diminishing returns kick in quite early, or something else. The same story may apply to ACE, but ‘track records’ in diverse cause areas are hard.
That’s a fairly decent analogy but I don’t think it quite works. Investing markets are much more efficient than charity markets; if GiveWell didn’t exist, most GiveWell donors probably would have given their money to charities less than half as good. So of the money moved, (conservatively) 50% of that is additional value added, and subtracting 4.6% leaves about 45% value added. Whereas it’s quite rare for investment managers to earn a 5 percentage point premium over the market.
-
I do tend to think other actors could have produced charity recommendations that are about as good as GiveWell’s. Indeed, I believe Giving What We Can’s recommendations have been on par, and Animal Charity Evaluators’ have been much better (although ACE gets an advantage by focusing on a more cost-effective cause). However, GiveWell has done exceptionally well at attracting funding—no one else has come anywhere close to this, and I tend to think that the ability to attract this much funding is very rare.
‘Betterness’ is challenging here.
ACE’s recommendations may well be much better than Givewell if the general case for animal welfare >> global poverty in terms of cause area. Yet this may be less helpful (a hypothetical far future metacharity I set up now and recommend FHI or whatever might be far better than either by a similar sort of argument).
I think for overall quality of work, Givewell has done much better than ACE, if only by virtue of having far more resources to throw at the issue. In terms of rigour, Givewell probably do much better than anyone.
Perhaps an appropriate metric would be something like quality per full-time equivalent or similar. Then things are pretty murky: GWWC’s track record of recommendations seems about on par with Givewell (I’m doing some work on this at the moment), which is surprising given GWWC has had far fewer research staff and money over this period. This may imply GWWC has been more effective, or that diminishing returns kick in quite early, or something else. The same story may apply to ACE, but ‘track records’ in diverse cause areas are hard.