I totally agree. The “western-by-default” messaging that sometimes occurs in EA spaces not only hurts the efficiency of the movement, but also likely turns some people off who otherwise would have joined the community. If EA is truly about viewing all of humanity as equal, then we need to make sure our communication addresses all of humanity equally, not just westerners.
Anna Gordon
Karma: 15
Hi Gregory,
Very interesting analysis here, but I would add one potential drawback of moving to a high-income country: brain drain. In some countries, there is a lot of lost economic value that happens when highly skilled workers leave developing countries, and it appears that it sometimes (though not always) can harm economic growth. Harming economic growth in a developing country is a bad thing, and can potentially outweigh the benefits of earning to give. The second study I have linked focuses specifically on the negative effects of healthcare worker emigration in Kenya, and though it is a bit old, I think it’s an interesting read.
I was also wondering if you can explain what you mean by “The effect size interval of ‘physician density’ crosses zero (P value ~ 0.4(!)). So with more sceptical priors/practices you might take this as a negative result.” I haven’t encountered some of these terms before so if you could explain them to me I would really appreciate it!
Just off hand-having spent a couple of months in a rural part of Kenya with a severe doctor shortage, the estimate of 1 ‘life saved’ per year of Kenyan medical practice seems off to me, especially in rural areas, but I’m basing this purely off of discussions with people and anecdotal stories so I could be completely wrong. I’ve just heard a lot of stories of patients dying bc there wasn’t enough available healthcare staff in the area. I do think you’re right that investing in less intensive medical training like nursing is probably more cost-effective than investing in doctors.
Sources:
https://wol.iza.org/articles/brain-drain-from-developing-countries/long
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-6-89