James Snowden

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James Snowden 4 Oct 2024 5:17 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Midtermist12’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Hi Midtermist, I think this is a pretty important worry and appreciate you sharing your perspective.
Just speaking for myself and the EA (global health and wellbeing) program I work on (though it’s mostly led by Mel Basnak now).
Here are a few things we’re doing:
- We fund Probably Good, who try to empower people to think along impact-focused lines while remaining open-minded about how different people can best help others.
- We support orgs like Founders Pledge and Charity Entrepreneurship, who share our core values but who do their own research and might have different views.
- Our grants to effective giving orgs have not been conditional on them changing their recommendations (though we’re more likely to support orgs whose recommendations we believe in).
Tbc, I think it’s a tough problem and tradeoffs between respecting autonomy and standing behind your judgment calls as a grantmaker.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 18:58 UTC
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in reply to: Joel Tan🔸’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Yes, I think that’s mostly fair.
Air pollution in South Asia has a lot of different sources requiring distinct policy interventions, and often at local levels. Eliminating emissions entirely from any one source category would address a relatively small fraction (5%-10%, say) of the problem in a given city or state.
Some interventions that are relatively scalable across India, and likely to be effective are politically intractable: power plant emission controls (expensive and with costs borne by a small group of influential firms), or subsidies to make cleaner fuels affordable for household cooking (expensive—needs an outlay of at least $1B/year).
That said, about $5M/ $18M spent so far in the program in India fund organizations that work with government agencies in identifying and executing interventions, leveraging existing government resources.
Some of the promising ideas so far that our grantees are working on include better handling of construction dust by large private developers, and support for city governments to handle dispersed sources (municipal waste burning, resuspension of road dust). We also think that crop residue burning in northern India has seen steady (if slow) improvement, and expect to continue supporting governments in this process.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:46 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: ajyl’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Thanks ajyl! I think the biggest takeaway for me is that you can do a bit of storytelling without compromising on rigor / honesty.
- The ITN framework is compelling and appeals to people outside EA.
- Jenna Forsyth’s work in Bangladesh really resonated with people. Combining that story with an estimate of 20,000 lives saved seemed to hit home for a lot of folks.
- Comparison is helpful. Lead exposure is estimated to kill 1.5 million people but receives only $15m in funding is compelling to people who can put those numbers in perspective. But lead exposure is estimated to kill more people than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, but receives ~1,000x less funding is much more universally powerful.
- I think focusing on our plan in the funding proposal (measurement, mitigation, mainstreaming), and setting measurable goals against that was helpful.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:28 UTC
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in reply to: Will Howard🔹’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
You’re right that was referring to LEAF. We’ve been excited at how well this collaboration’s gone, so we’re thinking about what else we might be able to do in a similar vein, but haven’t decided what that’ll look like yet.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:28 UTC
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in reply to: RafaDib’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Thanks Rafa! A few theories:
- There just aren’t many people whose job it is to look for important, tractable and neglected causes. It’s striking how much of the recent upsurge in interest has been related to EA.
- While there are some individual cases of very severe exposure, most of the burden is caused by relatively small risks of harm spread across entire populations, so victims aren’t identifiable.
- A lot of global health funding is allocated by disease category. Lead exposure cuts across disease categories, so it just doesn’t naturally fit into a lot of funding mechanisms.
- The elimination of leaded gasoline had a huge positive impact globally. The US, and a few other countries, also do regular testing and surveillance to identify other sources of exposure. But not many other countries do that. So I think there’s a story that with the decline in US blood lead levels, people assumed the problem was fixed by eliminating leaded gasoline when other countries, particularly LMICs, still have a lot of exposure from other sources.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:24 UTC
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in reply to: Filip_Murar’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
The most direct focus of LEAF’s source-specific mitigation work is paint and spices, but that’s largely because of tractability: these are both products where there are only weak economic incentives to use lead, and where production is fairly consolidated. That makes them easier to regulate. For other sources (batteries, cookware, cosmetics etc.), we want to fund more exploratory work: piloting and testing regulatory interventions rather than scaling them.
I think figuring out what to do on informal ULAB recycling is really important. ~80% of global lead is used in lead acid batteries, and informal recycling is responsible for particularly severe cases of exposure for people living nearby.
A benefit of all the recent attention on lead exposure is I expect we’ll increasingly see requests for assistance from governments, so it would be very helpful to have “best practice” playbooks we could apply to ULAB regulation. To my knowledge, those don’t currently exist (though there are some resources here and here). Intuitively, I’m excited by market-based solutions like tax breaks or even subsidies for well-regulated formal sector battery recycling to make it cost-competitive with unsafe informal recycling. But that’s pretty weakly held. Pure Earth have been thinking about this a lot, as have the US EPA and others.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:23 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: parthion’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Thanks Parth, I appreciate it and thank you for your support along the way!
How did you first learn about lead as an issue? I know you were looking into public health regulation broadly at that time (e.g. pesticides) and in your conversation notes from 2017 you cite various statistics (e.g. WHO statistic that 10% of children globally have >20 micrograms of lead NYU study on $1 trillion of economic costs). What first rang the alarm bells for you that this was an area worth investigating?
IIRC, I first learned about it as a development issue from some very early work my colleague Andrew did at GiveWell. At the time, GiveWell wasn’t funding policy work, so it’d been deprioritized. But I’d got interested in public health policy from investigating this grant on pesticide suicide when I was at Giving What We Can, so I was pretty keen to dig into it.
But it was a pretty slow burn and I only got really excited about it between 2019 and 2021. Things I found particularly persuasive were this systematic review suggesting the median kid in an LMIC had elevated blood lead by US standards, Pure Earth telling me about Jenna Forsyth’s work in Bangladesh to remove lead from spices, and this comparative analysis highlighting its relative neglectedness, even compared to other hugely neglected issues like tobacco.
How was Pure Earth so far ahead of everyone on this? They published their first “World’s Most Polluted Places Report” in 2008 and wrote in it: “Relative to other public health interventions, pollution remediation can be very cost effective..… projects cost between $1 - $50 per year of life gained. This compares favorably to the $35 to $200 per year of life gained for World Bank estimates on interventions related to water supply, improved cooking stoves and malaria controls.”
I’m not sure! When I first started talking to Pure Earth, they’d recently started to focus more narrowly on lead exposure, having previously worked across a bunch of different pollutants. They were also starting to explore focusing on more regulatory interventions when before they were mostly cleaning up individual toxic waste sites. It was pretty cool to see an organization really shifting and following the burden like that. Fwiw I haven’t reviewed the $1-$50 estimate, but I’m skeptical of the claim if it’s referring to remediating individual toxic waste sites (though so much is down to how many years of “speedup” to count that it’s hard to know without digging in).
Besides your $250K grant to IPEN in July 2019, why did it take you nearly four years from when you started investigating the topic in late 2017 to start funding work in the space? Relatedly, why did it take you so long to fund LEEP, and with relatively small grants to-date?
Yeah, I think about this a lot. If we believe the GBD estimates, 6 million people died from lead exposure in the four years it took me to recommend substantial grants in the space. So even though that certainly wasn’t the only bottleneck, it’s a source of personal angst.
The short (and probably unsatisfying) answer is I was working on a lot of other things. I think over the ~5 years I spent at GiveWell, ~25% of my time was on public health policy, and lead was only a fraction of that. With hindsight, I wish I’d advocated more effectively for GiveWell to put more capacity towards that work (though it’s also worth noting that a lot of the most compelling data points weren’t available until ~2020).
On LEEP specifically, we were pretty close to making a grant at GiveWell, but I’d got hung up on whether I believed the evidence for lead paint being a significant source of exposure (I still find that evidence tricky to interpret, but lead paint regulation has also been far more tractable than I expected such that I think it should be a priority anyway). When I moved to Open Phil in 2022, it was to launch the EA program on global health and wellbeing. We also agreed to transition the lead portfolio and other public health policy grants from GiveWell to Open Phil, but it took a bit of time for us to get to launching a program. I agree with Alexander’s assessment of our mistakes here. Fwiw this has all made me quite appreciative of other funders in the EA space who funded LEEP. I admire their work, and it’s been fun working with Lucia and Clare (LEEP’s co-EDs) in the build up to the launch.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:19 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: anormative’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Open Phil’s main role was organizing a group of donors to commit most of the funding which was announced alongside the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. The Lead Exposure Action Fund comprises $104m of the $150m that was announced, and Open Phil staff will manage the allocation of those funds. The work to launch a collaborative fund was quite far along when we formalized a partnership with USAID, so it’s an interesting coming together of two strands.
We’ve also been working very closely with USAID and UNICEF to help design the PLF (and we’re still working together to flesh it out), and have pledged to co-fund a portion of the PLF’s operating costs.
Overall, it’s been a really positive (and fun!) experience working with USAID. Smoother than I would’ve guessed. I think there’s a few things that have helped with that.
First, lead exposure is just really compelling on impact grounds; Samantha Power and Atul Gawande are convinced about it for the same reasons we are. Two generalizable takeaways for me were that the ITN framework is convincing outside narrow EA circles, and people at the very highest levels of government resonate with cause prioritization. That makes sense: they’re the people who have to make decisions at that level. Both those make me optimistic about the potential for more collaboration.
Second, we’ve been working with some really cool people who share our values. Samantha Power’s senior adviser, Garrett Lam, is the person who first brought lead exposure to Samantha Power’s attention, and I believe that was partly due to various touchpoints with this community (but wouldn’t want to speak too much for him).

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:13 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Thanks Nick, that’s very kind of you to say. I’ve also really appreciated your contributions to the forum.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:13 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Yes! I’ve updated on how quickly smart and driven people can build networks and expertise to make an impact on policy, especially in neglected areas.
I do think lead exposure (and particularly paint) was a wise choice for LEEP’s founders who were starting out with less previous policy experience. It’s a fairly technocratic regulatory intervention without much opposition, the area’s neglected so it’s easier to build your network, and there are already model laws and various international agreements in place. And I also think LEEP’s team is unusually capable!
Other kinds of policy advocacy (e.g. global aid policy in countries like the U.S.) are pretty different in my experience. Speaking loosely, it’s a more crowded space with many established players, and often involves navigating complex political landscapes and competing priorities. I wouldn’t want to write off less experienced people having an impact here, but coming in cold does seem tough. The Partnership for a Lead-Free Future shows we can have an impact there as well, but I think that story relied at least in part on strong networks and subject matter expertise.

James Snowden 3 Oct 2024 0:12 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: AnonymousTurtle’s comment on: AMA, James Snowden, Open Philanthropy
Yes! Giving What We Can is how I first got involved with effective altruism, and I’ve given at least 10% of my income since graduating. This year, I gave to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, Effektiv Spenden, and the GiveWell All Grants Fund. I think they’re all awesome organizations, and I feel confident in personally standing behind them, given how well I know their work.
In 2017, I split my donation across cause areas and part of the reason was to signal that I believed in the importance of GCR and animal welfare work. I also thought giving might motivate me to learn more about those areas. But I don’t think the signaling really mattered, and as I became more convinced health policy was an area I could make a difference in, forming a more concrete view on high level cross-cause comparisons didn’t seem like a priority.
So since then I’ve mostly donated to orgs I know well through my work. As well as feeling like I could stand behind those decisions, I also see it as a gesture of appreciation to grantees and putting my money where my mouth is.

James Snowden 25 Sep 2024 19:57 UTC
31 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: GWWC’s Giving Multiplier
We’re limiting ourselves to a fraction of GWWC’s funding. At the moment, that’s in the region of 70%, but GWWC and OP are aligned that we expect to dial it down substantially over time, both to enable a more diverse funding base for GWWC and to free up programmatic budget for other organizations.
Fwiw I disagree that OP’s bar is 2x the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities in practice. In my view (not an official OP position or anything) differences in modeled cost-effectiveness between GW and OP’s bar are indistinguishable from noise.

James Snowden 25 Sep 2024 2:16 UTC
41 points
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: Announcing the Lead Exposure Action Fund
Hi Evan, thank you for the kind words!
I wanted to clarify one point:
>It could exceed the value of all the money that has ever flowed through EA to any charity GiveWell has ever recommended.
LEAF and the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future wouldn’t have happened without GiveWell. They were the first major funder in the EA space to recommend grants for lead exposure, and much of the recent progress comes from those early investments, such as grants to Pure Earth and CGD. I also believe (though I’m less certain) that Charity Entrepreneurship’s recommendation of lead paint regulation and its incubation of LEEP were based largely on GiveWell’s research.
I know that wasn’t really what you were saying, but felt compelled to mention because I’ve heard lead exposure used as an example of what GiveWell gets wrong, when, in fact, GiveWell was earlier to lead exposure than almost anyone, and I’m grateful to former colleagues who put in a lot of hard work.
(For transparency: I was at GiveWell during this time and have since moved to Open Phil where I work on LEAF. I also think GiveWell made mistakes on lead exposure, many of them mine)

James Snowden 29 Jun 2024 0:57 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Seth Ariel Green’s comment on: Extraordinary cost-effectiveness analyses call for supporting theory
You might find this article helpful for context: https://undark.org/2023/07/19/the-vice-of-spice-confronting-lead-tainted-turmeric/

Fwiw I’m sympathetic to your general point

James Snowden 26 Nov 2023 14:47 UTC
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Implicitly, yes. Though don’t use that exact formulation. money vs daly comparison is based on reported preference not swb. Daly vs swb comparison implicitly writes off time spent asleep where I assumed 1 daly = difference between 40->100 on swb scale.

If didn’t exclude sleep in botec, would make alcohol look worse as happiness bump from alcohol would be for lower % of time. (Set row 21 to 24)

James Snowden 24 Nov 2023 17:42 UTC
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
>Another thought—you measure the effects of alcohol on subjective wellbeing as a fraction of someone’s waking hours. This seems right from a subjective wellbeing perspective. But is that also the way you think about the value lost by a death? By consistency, you would also need to implicitly downweight the disvalue a death by a third for the time people spend asleep. Or do you already do that in your moral weights?
Oh that’s interesting. It’s been a while now since I did this, but I think I was implicitly doing that with this calc

James Snowden 24 Nov 2023 17:34 UTC
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
>I’m not sure I follow the claim that if you assume that alcohol taxation merely shifts the tax burden, there aren’t strong reasons to think the deadweight loss will be greater from alcohol taxation vs other forms of taxation. The subjective wellbeing study found that drinking increases people’s wellbeing by almost as much as spending time with friends. It seems unlikely to me that if the tax were instead eg on income that the benefits of the income would be as large as this. Intuitively, this seems off.
Interesting. That doesn’t seem off to me. If I’m understanding correctly, the implication of your view is that people would generally be better off if they consumed more alcohol and less of other goods on the margin. Is that right?
To put it another way: increasing taxes on alcohol has two effects on consumer surplus: (i) deadweight loss (ii) a transfer from consumers to the government. I think (ii) is probably positive. Almost all taxes involve some amount of deadweight loss, but we do them anyway because we think public goods and redistribution are worth it.
TBC, I’m not claiming that higher excise taxes on alcohol relative to other goods merely shifts the tax burden. If we assume perfect rationality (which I believe would be mistaken), having unequal marginal taxes between goods does result in some additional deadweight loss. But it is a counterveiling factor.
>On your botec on the benefits of alcohol, a lot rides on you assuming that a death from alcohol accounts for 40 units of value
~~A unit of value (in GiveWell’s terms) is equivalent to doubling consumption for a person for a year. A DALY is 2.3 units of value. So you want to be dividing your estimates by 2.3.~~
~~The Global Burden of Disease estimates ~30 YLLs and ~10 YLDs per death~~ (I didn’t include YLDs in the BOTEC and I underestimated YLLs which makes it conservative, though I also didn’t discount the GBD estimates for imperfect evidence quality and black market consumption not addressable through policy which makes it optimistic. I’d guess these ~cancel).
Edit: didn’t see your second comment when writing this where you saw this
>On the other hand, none of this considers hangovers.
Yeah, although interestingly (IIRC) the Baumberg study didn’t find any effect on SWB the day after drinking (though I’m skeptical—maybe people didn’t feel like inputting how sad they were on their phone when they were hungover!)

James Snowden 23 Nov 2023 14:21 UTC
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Hi Nick, thanks for your thoughts.
I agree air quality is meaningfully different from the other areas we highlight in terms of domestic salience (at least in India). But it’s not clear to me whether the existence of nascent government funding (and the consequent opportunity to improve the allocation of that funding) make philanthropic opportunities better or worse.
Efforts like the NCAP framework and 15th Finance Commission budget allocations in India are fairly new, and there aren’t well-developed playbooks for prioritizing and addressing sources of air pollution in this context. So we think there are large potential benefits to helping improve the effectiveness of those efforts. Among other things, we’re doing that by supporting organizations to help governments develop and implement specific action plans (e.g.), developing better models to enable cost-effectiveness analysis (e.g.), and providing independent assessment of progress against policy goals (e.g.). We think these are areas where philanthropic funding may be able to have an outsized impact. Santosh gives some more examples of grants he’s made in this part of his podcast. We’re also exploring working in other countries in South Asia with fewer government resources allocated to air quality than India. The program hasn’t been running long enough to make confident claims of impact yet.

James Snowden 22 Nov 2023 20:45 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Barry Grimes’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Thanks Barry,
At GiveWell (where I was working when we started the suicide prevention work), we discounted the impact to account for people who would otherwise die by suicide potentially living somewhat worse lives than a typical person in their context. Given the empirical and moral uncertainty, that estimate was based on a deliberative process and preference aggregation of different staff views rather than a single bottom-up model. Open Phil hasn’t yet decided whether to incorporate a similar discount.
An overview of how GiveWell thought about it is available on this page and a selection of the evidence considered is in this Google Doc.
Speaking for myself, the evidence in that doc did update me towards valuing suicide prevention through means restriction highly. Interviews with survivors and psychological autopsies suggests that suicide (particularly pesticide suicide) is often impulsive and in response to short term life events. Under 5% of suicide attempt survivors go on to die by suicide in the next 5 years, which suggests that most survivors regret their first attempts and prefer to be alive.
I agree that, all else equal, addressing the social determinants of mental health would be preferable to preventing suicide by means restriction. But means restriction has empirically been very successful at reducing suicide rates.
Thanks for sharing the Lund paper!

James Snowden 22 Nov 2023 20:41 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Karthik Tadepalli’s comment on: Open Philanthropy’s newest focus area: Global Public Health Policy
Thanks for the thoughts Kartik!
(Speaking for myself; the 10% estimate comes from work I did at GiveWell but others at Open Phil and GiveWell may disagree with me)
I agree we shouldn’t dismiss consumer surplus entirely, and in retrospect would soften some of the wording in that doc – I think the irrationality point is important but not totalizing. The Nielsen idea is interesting and I’d like to think about it more. I think internalities are less bimodally distributed between people than your model, which muddies the waters, but I wonder if an analysis like that could still be informative.
Fwiw the program we funded is primarily focused on taxation, which is a nice mechanism to balance a recognition of externalities / internalities with a general prior towards personal choice. I’d estimate higher than 10% if that wasn’t the case. A focus on tax means the reduced consumption will be from the drinks for which people had the lowest willingness to pay, limiting lost consumer surplus.^[1] It also results in increased tax revenue, so could be considered as trading off against alternative ways of raising tax revenue with their own deadweight loss in consumer surplus.
TBC, I recognize the inherent fragility / subjectivity of the 10% estimate and I suspect different people would come to quite different conclusions about what input to use, so I’d be excited to see more efforts to estimate this considering the broad sweep of evidence.
1. ^
  Of the two studies I could find on consumer surplus, the one which attempted to estimate consumer surplus from a marginal increase in price (rather than for typical consumption) estimates a loss of €58 million in consumer surplus, compared to a €700m improvement in “health, productivity, and non-financial welfare losses” (Anderson and Baumberg 2010, pg 34), implying an offsetting impact of ~8%. (Though I think there are a bunch of ways in which that study isn’t analogous to the models we use, including a higher estimate of non-health impacts, so difficult to know what to make of it).
  This also raises a separate worry about the extent to which taxation affects heavy drinkers, where the marginal harm is likely highest, which we tried to account for separately in the effect size estimate.