As far as I’m aware, coefficient giving may slightly adjust which global health causes they support based on how neglected those are, but it’s less than a 1:1 effect, and the size of the global health funding pool at CG is fairly fixed. And there are a bunch of people dying each year, especially given the foreign aid cuts, who would not die if there was more money given to global health stuff, including GiveWell top charities (if nothing else, GiveDirectly seems super hard to saturated). So I don’t really see much cause for despondency here, your donations can do a lot of good! (other than the fact that the world is like this being terrible). I think it would be accurate to say that GiveWell top charities are not obviously the most impactful thing to fund on the margin, but that is very different from not being impactful or not being neglected.
Concretely, I recommend funding the GiveWell all grants fund, which they can allocate to wherever it would do the most good in global health, including higher risk things. Given the foreign aid cuts there’s likely a bunch of important but smaller and time sensitive opportunities, and as a non expert in global health, I’m happy to defer to GiveWell’s recommendations here, in the same way that I used to be happy to give to their top charities, or am happy to invest my savings in index funds.
And yeah funding your own direct work seems totally fine to me
As this person seems very worried about counterfactuals, I should probably point out that the All Grants Fund does still make substantial grants to the Top Charities because they don’t get enough granting opportunities that are reliably estimated as more effective than a top charity, so on the margin your donations are equivalent.
This may change in future—GiveWell are investigating lots more scalable grants in things like water treatment and humanitarian contexts.
As far as I’m aware, coefficient giving may slightly adjust which global health causes they support based on how neglected those are, but it’s less than a 1:1 effect, and the size of the global health funding pool at CG is fairly fixed. And there are a bunch of people dying each year, especially given the foreign aid cuts, who would not die if there was more money given to global health stuff, including GiveWell top charities (if nothing else, GiveDirectly seems super hard to saturated). So I don’t really see much cause for despondency here, your donations can do a lot of good! (other than the fact that the world is like this being terrible). I think it would be accurate to say that GiveWell top charities are not obviously the most impactful thing to fund on the margin, but that is very different from not being impactful or not being neglected.
Concretely, I recommend funding the GiveWell all grants fund, which they can allocate to wherever it would do the most good in global health, including higher risk things. Given the foreign aid cuts there’s likely a bunch of important but smaller and time sensitive opportunities, and as a non expert in global health, I’m happy to defer to GiveWell’s recommendations here, in the same way that I used to be happy to give to their top charities, or am happy to invest my savings in index funds.
And yeah funding your own direct work seems totally fine to me
As this person seems very worried about counterfactuals, I should probably point out that the All Grants Fund does still make substantial grants to the Top Charities because they don’t get enough granting opportunities that are reliably estimated as more effective than a top charity, so on the margin your donations are equivalent.
This may change in future—GiveWell are investigating lots more scalable grants in things like water treatment and humanitarian contexts.