Biosecurity isn’t a knob that we turn between ‘less’ and ‘more’, it’s a broad field where we can try to discover and fund the best interventions. To make an analogy to global health and development, if we learn that funding for textbooks in low income countries has generally been very low impact (say, because of issues with absenteeism, nutrition, etc) that isn’t very relevant when deciding whether to distribute anti-malarial nets.
I wonder how much interventions in biosecurity differ in their cost-effectiveness. From Ben Todd’s related in-depth analysis, which I should note does not look into biosecurity interventions:
Overall, I roughly estimate that the most effective measurable interventions in an area are usually around 3–10 times more cost effective than the mean of measurable interventions (where the mean is the expected effectiveness you’d get from picking randomly). If you also include interventions whose effectiveness can’t be measured in advance, then I’d expect the spread to be larger by another factor of 2–10, though it’s hard to say how the results would generalise to areas without data.
The above suggests that, in a given area, the most effective interventions are 24.5 (= (3*10)^0.5*(2*10)^0.5) times as cost-effectivene as randomly selected ones. For education in low income countries, the ratio is around 20. These ratios are not super large, so there is a sense in which knowing about the cost-effectiveness of a bunch of random interventions in a given area could inform us about the cost-effectiveness of the best ones.
Yet, it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention, despite the large investment. If so, the best biosecurity interventions could still easily be orders of magnitude more cost-effective.
it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention
I think many biosecurity interventions have historically made us less safe, likely including the anthrax research, and probably also including the median intervention. So an analysis that works by scaling the cost effectiveness of a random intervention doesn’t look so good!
Thanks for the clarifications, Jeff!
I wonder how much interventions in biosecurity differ in their cost-effectiveness. From Ben Todd’s related in-depth analysis, which I should note does not look into biosecurity interventions:
The above suggests that, in a given area, the most effective interventions are 24.5 (= (3*10)^0.5*(2*10)^0.5) times as cost-effectivene as randomly selected ones. For education in low income countries, the ratio is around 20. These ratios are not super large, so there is a sense in which knowing about the cost-effectiveness of a bunch of random interventions in a given area could inform us about the cost-effectiveness of the best ones.
Yet, it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention, despite the large investment. If so, the best biosecurity interventions could still easily be orders of magnitude more cost-effective.
I think many biosecurity interventions have historically made us less safe, likely including the anthrax research, and probably also including the median intervention. So an analysis that works by scaling the cost effectiveness of a random intervention doesn’t look so good!