I think that this kind of criticism is really useful, and I am glad it was written.
That being said, there is something about this post that really rubbed me the wrong way. This is a shame, because the topic is very pertinent and deserves an in-depth discussion—how do opportunities for funding today compare to opportunities for funding 5 or 10 years from now?
Let me try to give my best shot at a more thoughtful critique.
In the midst of a global pandemic that pushed 150 million people into extreme poverty while billionaires’ wealth grew by $5.5 trillion, it’s odd timing.
This is pretty much an unrelated remark. While I agree that this reflects inequality and a sad arrangement of the world, it has very little to do with whether GiveWell should or not be patient.
I am pointing this out because this is one of things that made me icky about the post, even though it is a great post otherwise.
The team at GiveWell know all these numbers of course, and they would likely agree that influencing more money is better. But their decision here tries to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving in isolation from the other 99.9%; when, in reality, growing that 99.9% and allocating it better will mean a lot more for our world than asking those donors to hold out for possible silver bullets down the road.
The argument here is that focusing on fundraising is probably a better use of GiveWell’s resources than being patient with their money. But this assumes that fundraising trades off against patience, which I believe is false. GiveWell can focus on fundraising AND be patient.
I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall. I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.
Since 2018, we have asked GiveWell to fully engage with this study and others, but they have opted not to, citing capacity constraints. Until they do, they may be underestimating the effects of cash transfers by 2.6x and overstating the benefits of waiting by the same amount.
This is the strongest argument in this document. If GiveWell has not taken into account these second hand effects and those would increase the effectiveness by x2 that might push them over the edge of effectiveness that would justify giving more now.
On the other hand, I am unsure of how much this affects the math on whether to expect better giving opportunities in the future. In fact, it could counterintuitively mean that good spending opportunities are easier to find than we expected, which could incentive waiting.
We’re skeptical about GiveWell’s hopes to find much more without a more fundamental re-evaluation of the scale of the sector, the opportunities available, and their role within it. We hope we’re wrong about that, but if we’re not it’s another reason to move faster now, rather than hold out for better opportunities down the road.
I agree with your position—if I believed that GiveWell has run out of low hanging fruit then this definitely is a good argument in favour of spending more now instead of waiting.
On the other hand, GiveWell is incredibly young. And they seem to be capacity constrained enough that they cannot afford to look into very relevant studies on cost-effectiveness like the one you mention in the post. I would be quite surprised if there weren’t better funding opportunities than the ones already identified.
So it seems prudent to expect that better opportunities will be identified later.
However, people living in poverty have good reasons to answer this table’s impossible questions in a variety of different ways. They may also have good reasons to differ with GiveWell on what else matters, let alone which interventions will do the most for the things that matter most to them. Many of these potential differences of opinion are highly relevant to whether or not GiveWell should save funds and give further down the road.
I absolutely agree with this. And I commend GiveDirectly on its efforts to incorporate the voice of their recipients in their processes—I think its exemplary and something to be imitated.
I’d love to see GiveWell expand their work on this area, and to hire a more diverse team to help integrate many valuable perspectives.
I know very little about the chances of finding better funding opportunities in the future and of GiveWell and GiveDirectly. So please definitely take all of this with a grain of salt.
My TL;DR of the post is that GiveWell might be understimating direct giving and needs to do more work on listening to charity beneficiaries to learn how to help them best. It was also argued that GiveWell is unlikely to find better funding opportunities in the future, but I didn’t find those arguments particularly convincing.
Thank you to GiveDirectly for taking the time to engage with the community. Highlighting these problems is definitely something I would like to happen more often, so we stand a better chance at fixing them.
“I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall. I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.”
I’m not entirely sure what the answer is here either, but one thought I had today was “I should make a Facebook post for Thanksgiving/Christmas telling my friends why I think it’s so important to donate to GiveWell—your marginal donation can save a life for $3-5k! Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.”
I do think from an optics perspective, when the draw from GiveWell is that your marginal dollar will actually help save someone’s life, it’s discouraging to see “you’re marginal dollar will help save someone’s life—in 3 years when we no longer need to roll over funds”. It pushes me in the direction of “well I’ll donate somewhere else this year and then donate to GiveWell in 3 years”. And I know that’s not the right calculation from a utility perspective—I should donate to the most cost-effective charity with little-to-no time discounting. But most people outside EA who might be attracted to effective giving have a yearly giving budget that they want to see deployed effectively in the near-term.
Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.
That’s incorrect; GiveWell will in fact disburse the marginal dollar you donate this year. The only donation GiveWell doesn’t expect to disburse this year is part of Open Philanthropy’s donation.
I’m curious how you got the impression that GiveWell won’t disburse donations other individuals donate to GiveWell this year? Was it from GiveWell’s communications or from this GiveDirectly post or other content you’ve read (e.g. on the EA Forum)?
As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.
However, given that GiveWell want to use a bar of 5-7x GiveDirectly, I think accounting for a study that at best will demonstrate that GiveDirectly is 2.6 times more effective than previously thought, will not influence GiveWell’s decision to wait for better opportunities, since it still doesn’t meet the 5-7x GiveDirectly bar.
I agree that the criticism is very welcome and also in places felt a bit odd—I think your comment about the pandemic remark being both unrelated to GiveDirectly’s arguments and very emotive captures why it doesn’t feel quite right.
I think that this kind of criticism is really useful, and I am glad it was written.
That being said, there is something about this post that really rubbed me the wrong way. This is a shame, because the topic is very pertinent and deserves an in-depth discussion—how do opportunities for funding today compare to opportunities for funding 5 or 10 years from now?
Let me try to give my best shot at a more thoughtful critique.
This is pretty much an unrelated remark. While I agree that this reflects inequality and a sad arrangement of the world, it has very little to do with whether GiveWell should or not be patient.
I am pointing this out because this is one of things that made me icky about the post, even though it is a great post otherwise.
The argument here is that focusing on fundraising is probably a better use of GiveWell’s resources than being patient with their money. But this assumes that fundraising trades off against patience, which I believe is false. GiveWell can focus on fundraising AND be patient.
I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall.
I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.
This is the strongest argument in this document. If GiveWell has not taken into account these second hand effects and those would increase the effectiveness by x2 that might push them over the edge of effectiveness that would justify giving more now.
On the other hand, I am unsure of how much this affects the math on whether to expect better giving opportunities in the future. In fact, it could counterintuitively mean that good spending opportunities are easier to find than we expected, which could incentive waiting.
I agree with your position—if I believed that GiveWell has run out of low hanging fruit then this definitely is a good argument in favour of spending more now instead of waiting.
On the other hand, GiveWell is incredibly young. And they seem to be capacity constrained enough that they cannot afford to look into very relevant studies on cost-effectiveness like the one you mention in the post. I would be quite surprised if there weren’t better funding opportunities than the ones already identified.
So it seems prudent to expect that better opportunities will be identified later.
I absolutely agree with this. And I commend GiveDirectly on its efforts to incorporate the voice of their recipients in their processes—I think its exemplary and something to be imitated.
I’d love to see GiveWell expand their work on this area, and to hire a more diverse team to help integrate many valuable perspectives.
I know very little about the chances of finding better funding opportunities in the future and of GiveWell and GiveDirectly. So please definitely take all of this with a grain of salt.
My TL;DR of the post is that GiveWell might be understimating direct giving and needs to do more work on listening to charity beneficiaries to learn how to help them best. It was also argued that GiveWell is unlikely to find better funding opportunities in the future, but I didn’t find those arguments particularly convincing.
Thank you to GiveDirectly for taking the time to engage with the community. Highlighting these problems is definitely something I would like to happen more often, so we stand a better chance at fixing them.
“I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall.
I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don’t see this as obvious.”
I’m not entirely sure what the answer is here either, but one thought I had today was “I should make a Facebook post for Thanksgiving/Christmas telling my friends why I think it’s so important to donate to GiveWell—your marginal donation can save a life for $3-5k! Ah, but actually GiveWell won’t disburse the marginal dollar I donate this year, so I can’t really make that argument this year.”
I do think from an optics perspective, when the draw from GiveWell is that your marginal dollar will actually help save someone’s life, it’s discouraging to see “you’re marginal dollar will help save someone’s life—in 3 years when we no longer need to roll over funds”. It pushes me in the direction of “well I’ll donate somewhere else this year and then donate to GiveWell in 3 years”. And I know that’s not the right calculation from a utility perspective—I should donate to the most cost-effective charity with little-to-no time discounting. But most people outside EA who might be attracted to effective giving have a yearly giving budget that they want to see deployed effectively in the near-term.
That’s incorrect; GiveWell will in fact disburse the marginal dollar you donate this year. The only donation GiveWell doesn’t expect to disburse this year is part of Open Philanthropy’s donation.
I’m curious how you got the impression that GiveWell won’t disburse donations other individuals donate to GiveWell this year? Was it from GiveWell’s communications or from this GiveDirectly post or other content you’ve read (e.g. on the EA Forum)?
Very late response, thank you for catching this!
As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.
I agree with most of your comment.
However, given that GiveWell want to use a bar of 5-7x GiveDirectly, I think accounting for a study that at best will demonstrate that GiveDirectly is 2.6 times more effective than previously thought, will not influence GiveWell’s decision to wait for better opportunities, since it still doesn’t meet the 5-7x GiveDirectly bar.
I agree that the criticism is very welcome and also in places felt a bit odd—I think your comment about the pandemic remark being both unrelated to GiveDirectly’s arguments and very emotive captures why it doesn’t feel quite right.