How about: Not being consistent in whether indirect effects like opportunity costs are counted in impacts or total costs.
For example, say if you donate to a charity, and they hire someone who would have otherwise earned to give. Should we treat those lost donations as additional costs (possibly weighted by relative cost-effectiveness with your donations) or as a negative impact?
Doing cost-benefit analysis instead of cost-effectiveness analysis would put everything in the same terms and make sure this doesn’t happen, but then we’d have to agree on how to convert to or from $.
Have we been generally only treating direct donations towards costs and everything else towards impacts?
How about: Not being consistent in whether indirect effects like opportunity costs are counted in impacts or total costs.
For example, say if you donate to a charity, and they hire someone who would have otherwise earned to give. Should we treat those lost donations as additional costs (possibly weighted by relative cost-effectiveness with your donations) or as a negative impact?
Doing cost-benefit analysis instead of cost-effectiveness analysis would put everything in the same terms and make sure this doesn’t happen, but then we’d have to agree on how to convert to or from $.
Have we been generally only treating direct donations towards costs and everything else towards impacts?
Personally, I don’t remember any cost-effectiveness estimate that accounted for things like money lost due to hiring earning-to-givers in any way.
Charity Entrepreneurship has included opportunity costs for cofounders in charity cost-effectiveness analyses towards the charities’ impacts, e.g.:
https://​​www.getguesstimate.com/​​models/​​13821
https://​​www.getguesstimate.com/​​models/​​13828
https://​​www.getguesstimate.com/​​models/​​13985