I run CEARCH, a research and grantmaking organization; we try to find and fund cost-effective philanthropic ideas.
Joel Tanšø
Karma: 2,062
CEARCH global health policy fund
Thereās very strong empirical evidence that taxes reduce alcohol consumption (price elasticity is about ā0.5, so a 10% increase in price reduces consumption by 5%), and the evidence that alcohol harms health is well-established enough that I wonāt belabour the point
Itās probably also cost-effective. Rough rule of thumb is that policy interventions are highly cost-effective due to large scale of impact (policy has national level reach, while is hard to beat), and low cost per capita (particularly due to leveraging less impactful government spending). GiveWell estimates that alcohol policy may be more cost-effective than its top charities, and Charity Entrepreneurship estimates that itās potentially competitive with GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is very high, of course.
The other posters have also rightly pointed out the conflict-of-interest reasons you should distrust this Snowdon fellow, but also the fact of the matter is that the scientific consensus is what it is for a reason, and even without conflict-of-interest reasons you shouldnāt put too much stock in what some rando says over what experts as a whole say.
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evinced by myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Object level I agree, though ironically I think we would agree this also falls into the entertainment category (as evidenced ny myself and a whole bunch of people posting on this)
Thanks Vasco! Did you use GWWC latest data? Also, would value your thoughts on GWWCās current analysis of recorded donations per pledger over time
Yep, and thatās about 5x existing GiveWell top charities. Also, GiveWell has made a 700k grant to Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) for their salt reduction work in China; CEARCH previously recommended and evaluated RTSL for their salt policy work in Southeast & South Asia, and Iām very excited to see GiveWell make this exploratory grant.
One minor suggestion I have is to do annual donations (i.e. sit down at the end of the year /ā whenever you do your taxes, and decide how much disposable income you have and how much you want to give). It feels more special this way, you get more invested (if you spend time looking at potential charities recommended by GiveWell and charity evaluators), and of course itās less of a hassle than deciding monthly.
Letās discuss this at length!
The tractability on this will be terribleāyouāll be trying to persuade poor countries to limit quality/āquantity/āvariety of food availability to their own people, and you can imagine how that will go. Additionally, there may be potential human costs in terms of nutrition and economic growth.
If you do want to affect AW in LMICs, Innovate Animal Agriculture style work trying to affect the kind of industrial animal agriculture seems far more tractable (in fact itās probably more tractable than in HICs, since e.g. there are no sunk costs in terms of equipment and capital).
[InĀterĀmeĀdiĀate ReĀport] EffecĀtive GivĀing in Asia
Hi Vasco,
We have standard GCR discounts when estimating long term impact, but for AIāweāre generally more sceptical, both on paperclipping and on extremely rosy projections of economic growth. In any case, while there might be a theoretical case for discounting income-based interventions (if you really believe GDP growth is going jump to 10% per annum, weāre obviously moving up the DMR curve more rapidly), thereās much less direct impact on health (in fact, if you think income is going to drastically increase, that makes consumption greater, and the DALY burden of diseases of affluence much worse, and hence preventing them more cost-effective).
The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low
Money is the major bottleneck for high impact charities, at least in GHD and AW (and some GCR causes). Meanwhile, thereās an excess in demand for EA jobs relative to the supply (everyone knows itās extremely competitive). Hence, the marginal value of getting more money in via earning to give (loosely definedānot everyone needs to be in finance or tech) is probably higher than trying to squeeze into a direct role where replaceability is extremely high.
This isnāt even an EA vs non-EA thing. I assure you that randomly touching women, whether female colleagues or strangers, in a normal corporate or government or non-profit job will deservedly get you fired for sexual harrassment.
You may wish to talk to Health Progress Hub.
Itās true that there are diminishing marginal returns, and with less funding and fewer projects/āpeople around, there is now a bunch of opportunities for impact which you can exploit (where previously someone else would have done it anyway).
However, thereās also a countervailing reduction in marginal value of labour due to reduced availability of capital and non-labour input, especially since cuts arenāt necessarily well targeted (e.g. keeping staff while capital investment is slashed). Loss of infrastructure field-wide is also a critical problem (e.g. all those interventions and programmes piggybacking on AIDS clinics)
Hi Vasco,
It would be hard to say without diving deeper into the literatureāthe way we did it was to look at the number of diabetes DALYs that is causally attributable to SSB consumption, and then just taking consumption and the DALY burden to vary linearly.
The virtue of this approach is its greater simplicity, particularly because itās complicated to get from higher mortality risk to DALY (you have to do a bunch of additional calculations and transformations to get from relative risk and baseline rates and average years of life remaining to years of life loss, and failure to disaggregate into age and sex specific stuff at each stage introduces issues iirc), so might as well just do the population-level analysis.
I think the most plausible meta-ethical view grounds objective moral value in preferences (which presuppose people/āsentient creatures with preferences), so thereās no non-circular way of solving the non-identity problem (and I would bite the bullet). The corollary is that mere addition isnāt atemporally good.
In other words, the benefits/ācosts of depopulation is entirely in the impact of the people who would exist anyway, and thereās a pretty clear economic case (e.g. need to maintain a stable working age to dependent ratio, and to avoid vicious cycles relating to escalating pension costs and gerontocracy)
I think thereās something to be said that if the qualitative stuff looks bad (e.g. experts are negative, studies are bunch of non-randomized stuff susceptible to endogeneity concerns), you always have the option of just implementing aggressive discounts to the CEA, and the fact that it looks too good means the CEA is done poorly, not that the CEA-focused approach is unreliable.
CEAs are always very uncertain and fragile, and I generally wouldnāt put too much stock on the precise multiple relative to GiveWell. For us, we only really care if itās >GW, and we use >=10x as a nominal threshold to account for the fact that GiveWell generally spends a lot more time and effort discounting, relative to ourselves or Foudners Pledge or other researchers.
Overally, health policy interventions are uniquely cost-effective simply because of (a) large scale of impact (policies affect people across the whole country, or at least region or city); (b) low cost per capita (due to economies of scale), and this tends to outweigh the risk of failure (typically, weāre looking at 10% success rates, though better charities in promising countries are closer to 30-50% maybe). Still, itās enormously risky, and remember that the median outcome is zero impact
Every charity that uses Players Philanthropy Fund as a 501c3 fiscal sponsor in the US (so CEARCH, most Charity Entrepreneurship incubatees, plus some other EA organizations) is capable of accepting crypto donations through Engiven.
However, the charity will need to get set up an Engiven page first, which can be done fairly quickly (e.g. see CEARCHās Engiven page for illustration).