Strategy Fellow at Open Philanthropy, working to help identify new cause areas within the Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio. Based in Brussels, grown in the UK.
Giving What We Can member since 2011. Previously earning to give as a strategy consultant.
Not the Chris Smith who used to work at GiveWell.
Tweets on global health, statistics, economics, feminism, and effective altruism at @chris_topian
(I don’t lead on the air quality work, so be more careful with this comment that the others that I’ve left here).
India wasn’t picked as an example to illustrate the importance and neglectedness of air quality work. Rather, India has been the dominant setting for Open Philanthropy’s air quality work to date—it even has its own updated web page. You can read more about why Open Philanthropy launched the work on South Asian air quality here and here. Santosh Harish, the Program Officer who leads that work, recently gave an excellent interview to the 80,000 hours podcast—transcript and recording here.
I agree domestic financing complicates relative neglectedness—the effort here was to be as consistent as reasonably possible between the risk factors. Neglectedness comparisons are very tricky to nail down in general (e.g. how to attribute non-specific health systems spending across both causes and risks, whether to include treatment for linked health conditions like lung cancer or cirrhosis, how to think about relatively ineffective uses of money like e.g. biofuel subsidies for climate change, or a more relevant example here would be smog towers for air quality). One nod to the uncertainty of both measurement and scope here is the use of ranges; but yeah, we’re trading off a bunch of different considerations here.
There’s a lot of internal research stress testing the IHME burden estimates for lead and air quality, and some on alcohol—I’m doing more on alcohol specifically at the moment. Here we’re pointing to the IHME GBD study for several reasons: it’s widely recognized, easy to interact with, has a largely consistent / common methodology between different causes of death and disease, and importantly doesn’t allow for deaths to be attributed to more than one cause. This works well for problems where the Open Philanthropy way of conceptualizing the problem (e.g. malaria, lead exposure) matches a GBD cause (e.g. malaria) or risk (e.g. lead exposure). This doesn’t mean we uncritically use the GBD in all of our own decision making—but this set of reasons make it very helpful to refer to when communicating externally. It might be that we publish more of our internal research on this in the future, but honestly it’s a serious time investment and I don’t want to over promise.
DALYs sit behind the framework but can be understandably offputting for many audiences. The BOTECs / grant decisions are in line with our usual GHW cause prioritization framework of valuing increases in healthy life and log-income.