The amount of global spending on each cause is basically irrelevant if you think most of it is non-impactful.
(I realise this was posted a month ago but) this sounds to me like it overstates how bad global health aid is? I think all GiveWell top charities are existing organisations and programs that GiveWell only advocates increasing spending to, so surely effective aid existed before GiveWell did. Moreover, I have a not-particularly-concrete impression that e.g. vaccine distribution is only not an EA cause because it was already fully funded (at least in the easy cases) by non-EAs, so that our top charities are very much âtop remainingâ and not âbest everâ.
I have the impression that even if EA and OpenPhil collectively tomorrow decided to move all of our global health funding to animals, there would still be a lot of effective global development aidâthere would still be e.g. Gavi and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which sure, does ineffective things, but does effective things too) and many others. Wouldnât that still meet the need you identified in your original answer for a compromise position?
(I realise this was posted a month ago but) this sounds to me like it overstates how bad global health aid is? I think all GiveWell top charities are existing organisations and programs that GiveWell only advocates increasing spending to, so surely effective aid existed before GiveWell did. Moreover, I have a not-particularly-concrete impression that e.g. vaccine distribution is only not an EA cause because it was already fully funded (at least in the easy cases) by non-EAs, so that our top charities are very much âtop remainingâ and not âbest everâ.
I have the impression that even if EA and OpenPhil collectively tomorrow decided to move all of our global health funding to animals, there would still be a lot of effective global development aidâthere would still be e.g. Gavi and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which sure, does ineffective things, but does effective things too) and many others. Wouldnât that still meet the need you identified in your original answer for a compromise position?