I run CEARCH, a research and grantmaking organization; we try to find and fund cost-effective philanthropic ideas.
Joel Tanšø
Karma: 2,127
Hi Kristof, if the steelman case is that autonomy is valuable and we should be averse to using coercion unless there is strong justification, then I do agree. However, I would add that Iāand many othersāsee public health (i.e. saving lives and preventing unnecessarily disability/āpain) as pretty good justification. Also, in this case, weāre talking about taxation and regulatory interventions; people arenāt banned from e.g. eating salty good or drinking sugary drinks. A key point too is that because our tastes are adaptive, people donāt even notice reduced sodium/āsugar content if done slowly; thereās also empirical evidence of this from studies on reformulation (i.e. the consumer literally doesnāt notice), in which case itās not even clear one has reduced freedom in terms of ābeing able to eat/ādrink food that tastes X to a certain extentā.
I authored CEARCHās deep report on hypertension, which informs both our own grantmaking in GHD and Charity Entrepreneurshipās recommendation of salt reduction policy as a promising idea to be incubated. CEARCHās report was cited by the OP Kristof in his post. Kristof says āThe survey was administered to EAs, who were then noted to be disproportionately libertarian due to their high education levels, and their autonomy concerns are discounted on those grounds. The framework ends up treating the strength of someoneās concern about autonomy as a reason to give that concern less weight.ā
(1) To address to Kristofās criticism of CEARCHās methodologyāApplying a discount to the estimate obtained from surveying EAs is necessary because we arenāt concerned with how EAs value freedom of choice, but how the average human values freedom of choice. And because EAs are disproportionately highly-educated relative to the global average, and education correlates with liberal values, that means the valuation of freedom of choice here as elicited from EAs is going to be higher than (and biased above) the global averageāhence necessitating adjustment. To elaborate, Iāll just copy-paste Stubagerās (2008) summary:
āIn this regard, previous analyses (see e.g. Van de Werfhorst and de Graaf 2004) have pointed to the important role played by education as a determinant of authoritarianālibertarian values. The unequivocal finding of these analyses has been that high education groups tend towards the libertarian pole while low education groups tend towards the authoritarian pole. Indeed, this finding seems one of the most resilient results in analyses of this value domain (for older studies, see Nunn, Crockett, and Williams 1978; Hyman and Wright 1979; Lipset 1981; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991)ā
Additionally, even if you controlled for education, EAs are very likely to to be disproportionately high scoring on openness to experience, which is another empirical predictor (if not conceptually linked) to liberalism.
(2) More broadly, on whether we should have an autonomy prior, as opposed to treating it like any other benefit or cost in a CEA: Iām liberal, and have strong libertarian instincts on certain things (e.g. freedom of speech; I donāt even think libel or slander should necessarily be illegal), but Iām highly sceptical of an autonomy priorāthat seems to privilege one value above others, particular life/āhealth, which doesnāt seem defensible to me a priori.
Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldnāt choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, youāll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre peopleās preferences, you have to take that into account.
Hi Lorenzo,
(1) The 100k figure from GWWC is unadjusted; once you apply the per annum discounts, GWWC estimates a pledge to be worth USD 15k. So CEARCHās estimate is higher, but not by much.
(2) Similarly, GWWCās 35.1 is unadjusted; in comparison, when we report a 16 year giving lifespan, that adjusting for various temporal discounts (e.g. attrition amongst pledgers).
(3) The 0.35 counterfactual adjustment (and all the estimates from that bulletpoint list) are for the global average /ā predominantly western pledger. The Asia-specific estimates are different; we donāt go into detail here, but we expect the counterfactual coefficient for Asian pledgers to be 0.62, or almost twice as much.
Hope thatās helpful.
Hi Sanjay!
Impactful Giving was incubated by CE, and its founders Chetan & Jesse are currently working on effective giving promotion in India. I understand that itās been challenging, and getting the general public to give has been particularly difficult, though the HNWI side of things has shown more promise.
We introduced them to Upadhyaya Foundation earlier in 2025, and theyāve worked together (with India Animal Fund) to start a new India Animal Welfare Funding Circle, which brings donors together to promote both evidence-based giving in AW and also more coordination/āinformation sharing between grantmakers. Iām fairly excited to see how things develop from here.
I will say that the difficulty of promoting effective giving to the (relatively poorer) public in India informed our decision to focus on high-income East Asia, where itās plausible that the man on the street (if sold on the ideas of effective giving) is able and willing to give a few thousand a year.
Cheers,
Joel
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).
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).
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)
To clarify, centering peopleās preferences here refer to centering their telic desires /ā fundamental moral weights, the implications of which (when used in a CEA to assess various individual actions/āphilanthropic interventions/āgovernment policies) may imply that peopleās actions are irrational or non-maximizing.