Mo Putera

Karma: 1,472

I’ll be at EAG London in June, come say hi :)

I currently work with CE/AIM-incubated charity ARMoR on research distillation, quantitative modelling, consulting, and general org-boosting to support policy advocacy for market-shaping tools to incentivise innovation and ensure access to antibiotics to help combat AMR.

I previously did AIM’s Research Training Program, was supported by a FTX Future Fund regrant and later Open Philanthropy’s affected grantees program, and before that I spent 6 years doing data analytics, business intelligence and knowledge + project management in various industries (airlines, e-commerce) and departments (commercial, marketing), after majoring in physics at UCLA and changing my mind about becoming a physicist. I’ve also initiated some local priorities research efforts, e.g. a charity evaluation initiative with the moonshot aim of reorienting my home country Malaysia’s giving landscape towards effectiveness, albeit with mixed results.

I first learned about effective altruism circa 2014 via A Modest Proposal, Scott Alexander’s polemic on using dead children as units of currency to force readers to grapple with the opportunity costs of subpar resource allocation under triage. I have never stopped thinking about it since, although my relationship to it has changed quite a bit; I related to Tyler’s personal story (which unsurprisingly also references A Modest Proposal as a life-changing polemic):

I thought my own story might be more relatable for friends with a history of devotion – unusual people who’ve found themselves dedicating their lives to a particular moral vision, whether it was (or is) Buddhism, Christianity, social justice, or climate activism. When these visions gobble up all other meaning in the life of their devotees, well, that sucks. I go through my own history of devotion to effective altruism. It’s the story of [wanting to help] turning into [needing to help] turning into [living to help] turning into [wanting to die] turning into [wanting to help again, because helping is part of a rich life].

Mo Putera May 2, 2025, 7:31 AM
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph’s comment on: Joseph Lemien’s Shortform
Adam’s tests, quoted:
1. The Bluetooth test: “when you’re given the smallest amount of power, do you use it to make things nice for everybody, or just yourself?”
2. The Circle of Hell test: “when you see someone writhing in social damnation, do you grab their hand, or do you let ’em burn?”
3. The Gottman test: “do you expect to influence others, but refuse to be influenced yourself?”
4. The codependent problems test: “do you actually want to solve your problem, or are you secretly depending on its continued existence? If you showed up to fight the dragon and found it already slain, would you be elated or disappointed?”
5. The match your freak test: “If I’m a little bit weird, will you be a little bit weird too?”
6. The pointless status test: “whenever there’s some way you could consider myself better than other people, no matter how stupid or arbitrary it is, do you feel compelled to compete?”
7. The too busy to care test: “Are you too busy to care about the other people in your life?”
(Adam is an engaging writer who often leaves me feeling enriched, but his meandering style sometimes makes me lose track of what he’s talking about, which is why I pulled them out here)
I appreciated this quote from him too:
… becoming kinder and gentler is mainly the act of noticing—realizing that some small decision has moral weight, acting accordingly, and repeating that pattern over and over again.

Mo Putera Apr 24, 2025, 6:09 PM
11 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: NickLaing’s Quick takes
I’m admittedly a bit more confused by your fleshed-out example with random guesses than I was when I read your opening sentence, as it went in a different direction than I expected (using multipliers instead of subtracting the value of the next-best alternative use of funds), so maybe we’re thinking about different things. I also didn’t understand what you meant by this when I tried to flesh it out myself with some (made-up) numbers:
Who knows, for-profit investment dollars could be 10x −100x more counterfactually impactful than GiveWell, which could mean a for-profit company trying to do something good could plausibly be 10-100x less effective than a charity and still doing as much counterfactual good overall?
If it helps, GiveWell has a spreadsheet summarising their analysis of the counterfactual value of other actors’ spending. From there and a bit of arithmetic, you can figure out their estimates of the value generated by $1 million in spending from the following sources, expressed in units of doubling consumption for one person for a year:
- Government social security spending: 2,625 units
- Government education spending: 2,834 units
- Donating to GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program (1x cash for reference): 3,355 units
- Government spending on deworming: 3,525 units
- Government spending on malaria, VAS, and immunization programs: 5,057 units (this is also what GW uses as their counterfactual value by domestic governments in assessing SMC)
- Government health spending: 5,639 units (this is also GW’s assumed value generated by philanthropic actors’s spending on VAS and vitamin A capsule procurement in other countries)
- Gavi spending (US allocations to Gavi and Maternal and Child Health): 6,952 units
- Global Fund (calculations here): 15,433 units
- HKI spending on vitamin A supplementation in Kenya, before final adjustments: ~19,000 units
- GW’s 10x cash bar for reference: 33,545 units
- AMF spending on ITN distribution in DRC, before final adjustments: ~36,800 units
- Open Phil’s current 2,100x bar: very naively ~70,000 units (21x GiveDirectly to oversimplify, using OP’s 100x ≈ 1x cash to GD)
Suppose there’s an org (“EffectiveHealth”) that could create 50k units worth of benefits given $1M in funding. If it came from GW with their 33.5k units counterfactual value, then a grant to EffectiveHealth from GW would be creating 16.5k more units of benefits than otherwise, while if it came from domestic govt spending (7.5x lower value at 5k per $1M) it’d create 45k more units of benefits. A hypothetical for-profit investor whose funding generates 10x less good than domestic govt spending (500 units) would get you not 10 x 45k = 450k more units of benefits, but 49.5k units. And if EffectiveHealth got funding from OP it would actually be net-negative by −20k units.
(maybe you meant something completely different, in which case apologies!)

Mo Putera Apr 24, 2025, 8:19 AM
5 points
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on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
Thought these quotes from Holden’s old (2011) GW blog posts were thought-provoking, unsure to what extent I agree. In In defense of the streetlight effect he argued that
If we focus evaluations on what can be evaluated well, is there a risk that we’ll also focus on executing programs that can be evaluated well? Yes and no.
- Some programs may be so obviously beneficial that they are good investments even without high-quality evaluations available; in these cases we should execute such programs and not evaluate them.
- But when it comes to programs that where evaluation seems both necessary and infeasible, I think it’s fair to simply de-emphasize these sorts of programs, even if they might be helpful and even if they address important problems. This reflects my basic attitude toward aid as “supplementing people’s efforts to address their own problems” rather than “taking responsibility for every problem clients face, whether or not such problems are tractable to outside donors.” I think there are some problems that outside donors can be very helpful on and others that they’re not well suited to helping on; thus, “helping with the most important problem” and “helping as much as possible” are not at all the same to me.
(I appreciate the bolded part, especially as something baked into GW’s approach and top recs by $ moved.)
That last link is to The most important problem may not be the best charitable cause. Quote that caught my eye:
[Project AK-47′s emotionally appealing pitch to donors is] an extreme example of a style of argument common to nonprofits: point to a problem so large and severe (and the world has many such problems) that donors immediately focus on that problem – feeling compelled to give to the organization working on addressing it – without giving equal attention to the proposed solution, how much it costs, and how likely it is to work. …
Many of the donors we hear from are passionately committed to fighting global warming because it’s the “most pressing problem,” or to a particular disease because it affected them personally – even while freely admitting that they know nothing about the most promising potential solutions. I ask these donors to consider the experience related by William Easterly:
I am among the many who have tried hard to find the answer to the question of what the end of poverty requires of foreign aid. I realized only belatedly that I was asking the question backward … the right way around [is]: What can foreign aid do for poor people? (White Man’s Burden pg 11)
As a single human being, your powers are limited. As a donor, you’re even more limited – you’re not giving your talent or your creativity, just your money. This creates a fundamentally different challenge from identifying the problem you care most about, and can lead to a completely different answer.
In my case: I would rather close the achievement gap than fight developing-world disease, but my giving goes to the latter because it’s a problem that I can do much more to address.
The truth is that you may not be able to do anything to help address the root causes of poverty or cure cancer or solve the global energy crisis.* But you probably can save a life, and insisting on giving to the “biggest problem” could be passing up that chance.

Mo Putera Apr 24, 2025, 7:59 AM
4 points
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on: New podcast episode: Making cost-effective grants amid uncertainty
I thought the USAID Funding Cuts webpage buried the lede a bit given the stated purpose of the page is to “answer the most common question we’re hearing right now: How can donors help?”, so in case it helps, GW’s answer is “If you want to help respond to this situation, donating to our funds based on your giving preference remains our recommendation.”
(Bit tangential, but I noticed the karma on this post drop from 17 to 9 within 3 minutes and wondered why the strong(?) downvote—a single downvote seems more plausible in 3 mins than a sudden flurry. Curious if strong-downvoters can say why.)

Mo Putera Apr 22, 2025, 6:47 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Rethinking the 10% Giving Pledge: Questions from a Recent Grad
Tangentially, my own introduction to the EA 10% pledge was via Scott Alexander’s old (2014) essay Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable, in particular this passage, albeit aimed at a very particular audience:
And Cliff Pervocracy’s concern of “Even if I do a lot of politics, am I still a bad person for not doing all the politics?” is superseded by “Even if I give a lot of charity, am I a bad person for not doing all the charity? And then a bad person in an additional way, about 1% as large, for not doing all the politics as well?”
There’s no good answer to this question. If you want to feel anxiety and self-loathing for not giving 100% of your income, minus living expenses, to charity, then no one can stop you.
I, on the other hand, would prefer to call that “not being perfect”. I would prefer to say that if you feel like you will live in anxiety and self-loathing until you have given a certain amount of money to charity, you should make that certain amount ten percent.
Why ten percent?
It’s ten percent because that’s the standard decreed by Giving What We Can and the effective altruist community. Why should we believe their standard? I think we should believe it because if we reject it in favor of “No, you are a bad person unless you give all of it,” then everyone will just sit around feeling very guilty and doing nothing. But if we very clearly say “You have discharged your moral duty if you give ten percent or more,” then many people will give ten percent or more. The most important thing is having a Schelling point, and ten percent is nice, round, divinely ordained, and – crucially – the Schelling point upon which we have already settled. It is an active Schelling point. If you give ten percent, you can have your name on a nice list and get access to a secret forum on the Giving What We Can site which is actually pretty boring.
It’s ten percent because definitions were made for Man, not Man for definitions, and if we define “good person” in a way such that everyone is sitting around miserable because they can’t reach an unobtainable standard, we are stupid definition-makers. If we are smart definition-makers, we will define it in whichever way which makes it the most effective tool to convince people to give at least that much.
Finally, it’s ten percent because if you believe in something like universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permamently save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in Year 2.
(by contrast, if everybody in the world retweeted the latest hashtag campaign, Twitter would break.)
Charity is in some sense the perfect unincentivized action. If you think the most important thing to do is to cure malaria, then a charitable donation is deliberately throwing the power of your brain and muscle behind the cause of curing malaria. If, as I’ve argued, the reason we can’t solve world poverty and disease and so on is the capture of our financial resources by the undirected dance of incentives, then what better way to fight back than by saying “Thanks but no thanks, I’m taking this abstract representation of my resources and using it exactly how I think it should most be used”?
If you give 10% per year, you have done your part in making that world a reality.

Mo Putera Apr 22, 2025, 6:41 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Rethinking the 10% Giving Pledge: Questions from a Recent Grad
I think GWWC would primarily explain the use of a flat percentage ask as based on something other than it being the fairest / most philosophically sound ask in an ideal world.
Just to expand on this, GWWC say
We chose 10% of income for the 🔸10% Pledge because we think it’s a good balance of significant and achievable: It is both a significant proportion of one’s income, in recognition of the importance of the world’s problems and the need to take real action, while also remaining within reach of most people in wealthy countries.
Ten percent also carries with it a strong historical connection to the idea of tithing, a tradition in Judaism and Christianity of giving 10% of your income to charity or the church. Islam has a similar practice, Zakat, in which those who are able give between 2.5% and 20% of their wealth to those who are less well-off.
That said, 10% is just a minimum. Many of our members donate a lot more than their pledged amount, and other members pledge a higher starting percentage (contact us if you’d like to do this) or even take The Further Pledge — a pledge to give everything earned above a specified living allowance. And if 10% doesn’t yet seem achievable, consider starting with a 🔹Trial Pledge (where you choose a custom amount of 1% or more and your own time commitment), or donate to effective charities without taking a pledge.

Mo Putera Apr 22, 2025, 2:50 AM
7 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: Consider starting a for-profit company instead
Maybe I should write this up as a full post someday.
I hope so! This was a super-illuminating comment, thanks for writing it up.

Mo Putera Apr 18, 2025, 4:32 AM
2 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
The modelling study has a “costs” section (quoted below), but for what it’s worth GiveWell said they “were unable to quickly assess how key parameters like program costs… were being estimated” so I don’t think this quote will satisfy you:
Given the Ghana Health Service (GHS)‘s dominant role, the government perspective in this analysis included healthcare treatment costs and incremental last mile delivery (LMD) costs. The societal perspective also accounted for externalities such as caregivers’ wage loss and transport costs.
To calculate the total cost for aerial LMD of vaccines, we analyzed Zipline’s monthly operational costs and the depreciation of capital expenditures for the GH4 distribution center in the Western North Region. These were adjusted to 2023 US dollar values, and the corresponding portion attributed to vaccine delivery was determined, resulting in a cost per dose of $0.27.
To estimate the incremental cost of the intervention, we took into account that the impact of aerial logistics on vaccination rates can be explained through either a pure expansion of access (ie, health facilities receiving vaccine doses that they otherwise would not have) or more efficient access (ie, health facilities receiving the same number of vaccine doses they would have otherwise received but in a more timely manner, leading to fewer missed opportunities of vaccination). Anecdotal evidence suggests that the impact is likely a combination of both factors. The distinction is significant when computing costs in an ICER: in the former, aerial logistics LMD cost is an additional expense to the existing supply chain cost for the government, whereas, in the latter, aerial logistics LMD replaces the traditional supply chain cost for transporting those vaccines. …
Due to the absence of detailed data on traditional LMD, we were unable to differentiate between incremental and replaced doses within the number of doses delivered with aerial logistics during the intervention period. To mitigate the impact of this uncertainty on our estimations, for our primary ICER calculation, we proceeded with the conservative assumption that all doses delivered by aerial logistics during this period were incremental. This approach may inflate our incremental cost estimates but ensures the solidity of our findings amid the well-known ambiguous quality and high variance of the traditional LMD data that were used for illustrative purposes in the sensitivity analysis.
But no input numbers, just methods and a dash of conservatism.
I share your annoyance re: modelling studies. Garbage in garbage out as they say (not accusing Zipline of putting garbage data into their model of course!)
Re: NGOs using trucks and cars unnecessarily, I’m just speculating here but I wonder if it’s got a bit to do with the NGOs wanting to attract “top talent” (salary difference being the main attractor but also “you get to ride in a car instead of on a bike” being implicitly part of the “comp package”, sort of like how top talent in higher-income countries are lured to prestigious industries by not just pay but “comped stays in nice hotels” or whatever). This paper I read awhile back made me think of that: The unintended consequences of NGO-provided aid on government services in Uganda. It argues that NGOs sometimes “poach” scarce local skilled government workers via higher pay, resulting in various adverse effects, although I guess it’s a bit different in this case because the adverse effects happen as a result of the pay structure (NGO workers who would’ve otherwise distributed health products instead sell household products like soap and fortified oil because they get paid on a per-piece basis).

Mo Putera Apr 18, 2025, 3:53 AM
5 points
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in reply to: Ulf Graf 🔹’s comment on: Big if true: Three health interventions worth a closer look
Ah, I missed this, thanks! And I appreciate the pointer to EarthEnable in particular. Although it looks like their analysis stopped at the shallow level, so maybe no future report…
EarthEnable looks quite impressive by their own lights: 35,000+ “housing solution projects” completed or in progress benefiting 200,000+ people, and over 1,000 jobs created in East Africa (they “developed training curriculum for masons to learn to build our products to earn a livelihood of 2-3x the median income”). I also appreciate how most of their senior team seems local at a glance.
Just posting HLI’s chart here for others’ benefit:
Quoting their qualifier too:
Note that our task was to bring together all the work that had already been done. All the research had the same output (WELLBYs per dollar) but the inputs were ‘lumpy’: some analyses were much deeper than others. It was out of scope to re-analyse and update all the pre-existing estimates. So take this as the first word on the topic, not the last!

Mo Putera Apr 17, 2025, 5:08 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Big if true: Three health interventions worth a closer look
I think you’re right in general, you’re just pointing to a different thing than Deena is, so maybe tabooing “biodiversity” might be useful here. They’re at OP GHD so unsurprisingly the part of conservation loss they care about is human mortality impact.
A more biodiversity-as-you-said line of thinking fleshed out would probably look like this:
We are orienting to this issue at the ‘local systems’ level (see below). We acknowledge that many organizations are tackling related issues at the earth systems level (climate change) and individual level (animal welfare). We feel there are important, tractable and neglected strategies that emerge when operating at this level.
This table visualizes the relationships between ecosystems and other aspects of our world and core systems we speak to throughout this proposal.
Quantifying species diversity is an interesting mathematical problem in its own right. Tom Leinster’s slides make the case that the three popular measures of species diversity (species richness, Shannon entropy, Gini–Simpson index) all problematically diverge from intuitively-desired behavior in edge cases of consequence, so the formalisation you really want is Hill numbers, which depend on a so-called “viewpoint parameter” q that changes how the former are sensitive to rare species. (Your professed stance corresponds to low q; it’d be useful to know if your interlocutors prefer high q; Tom’s charts visualise this.) You can then extend this line of reasoning in ways that affect actual conservation policy.

Mo Putera Apr 17, 2025, 4:42 AM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers🔸’s comment on: Are People Happier Than Before? I Tested for “Rescaling” & Found Little Evidence
It could in theory, but OWID’s summary of the evidence mostly persuades me otherwise. Again I’m mostly thinking about how the Easterlin paradox would explain this OWID chart:
I’m guessing Easterlin et al would probably counter that OWID didn’t look at a long-enough timeframe (a decade is too short), and I can’t immediately see what the timeframe is in this chart, so there’s that.

Mo Putera Apr 17, 2025, 4:35 AM
4 points
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in reply to: Sam Anschell’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
Thanks for the links! And for the pics, makes me feel like I’m glimpsing the future, but it’s already here, just unevenly distributed. Everything you say jives with both what GiveWell said about Zipline in their grant writeup
Though this is our first engagement with Zipline, there are some early signals that we might be well-aligned as partners. Zipline’s proposal specifically calls out a few elements that are important to GiveWell: a) emphasis on cost-effectiveness , b) plans to establish an M&E framework early on for any potential pilots, and c) interest in evaluation and learning
as well as the vibe I get from their about page, stuff like
Zipline is on a mission to build the world’s first logistics system that serves all people equally. …
Our customers rely on Zipline to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide new logistics services at scale. …
and 3 out of their 4 most prominent “output statistic” claims being health-oriented
51% fewer deaths from postpartum hemorrhaging in hospitals Zipline serves
4,000+ hospitals and health centers served by Zipline
96% of providers report increased access to vaccinations in their area
Yeah the pointer to snakebite antivenom delivery feels useful, you reminded me of how big a problem it is.

Mo Putera Apr 17, 2025, 4:24 AM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
Interesting, I got the opposite impression from their about page (“4,000+ hospitals and health centers served, 51% fewer deaths from postpartum hemorrhaging in hospitals Zipline serves, 96% of providers report increased access to vaccinations in their area” which I assume means they’re already targeting those hard-to-access areas), but of course they’d want to paint themselves in a good light and I’d be inclined to trust your in the field experience far more (plus general skepticism just being a sensible starting point).
Actually your point about a cheap bike being able to carry a lot more stuff makes obvious sense, and so me wonder how Zipline’s modelling study in Ghana can claim that their cost per incremental fully immunised child was cheaper than “monthly immunization by mobile teams” which I assume includes dirt bikes.

Mo Putera Apr 17, 2025, 4:13 AM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
That’s really kind of you Angelina :) I think top-level posting makes me feel like I need to put in a lot of work to pass some imagined quality bar, while quick takes feel more “free and easy”? Also I hesitate to call any of my takes “analyses”, they’re more like “here’s a surprising thing I just learned, what do y’all think?”

Mo Putera Apr 16, 2025, 9:09 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Big if true: Three health interventions worth a closer look
I’m not seeing where Deena wrote that biodiversity in general was important?
Both studies suggest that protecting certain animal populations might have large, direct effects on human health that we’re overlooking. But there are good reasons to be cautious. These are outlier results; there isn’t much else in the way of evidence for estimates of this magnitude for the impact of biodiversity loss on human mortality. There’s also the possibility of publication bias. In particular, since both papers come from the same author, this may be driven by a file drawer effect, where a researcher looks at many potential similar cases but the null findings are less likely to see the light of day.
Still, if these effects are real, they could change how we think about conservation. Saving vultures or bats wouldn’t just be about biodiversity—it could also be a form of public health policy.

Mo Putera Apr 16, 2025, 9:06 AM
4 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Big if true: Three health interventions worth a closer look
Deena’s post only mentioned “of at least one large RCT underway, with results expected in a few years” without further reference, but on cursory googling it might be the CRADLE trial?
The Cement-based flooRs AnD chiLd hEalth trial is an individually randomised trial in Sirajganj and Tangail districts, Bangladesh. Households with a pregnant woman, a soil floor, walls that are not made of mud and no plan to relocate for 3 years will be eligible. We will randomise 800 households to intervention or control (1:1) within geographical blocks of 10 households to account for strong geographical clustering of enteric infection. Laboratory staff and data analysts will be blinded; participants will be unblinded. We will instal concrete floors when the birth cohort is in utero and measure outcomes at child ages 3, 6, 12, 18 and 24 months.
The primary outcome is prevalence of any STH infection (Ascaris lumbricoides, Necator americanus or Trichuris trichiura) detected by quantitative PCR at 6, 12, 18 or 24 months follow-up in the birth cohort. Secondary outcomes include household floor and child hand contamination with Escherichia coli, extended-spectrum beta-lactamase producing E. coli and STH DNA; child diarrhoea, growth and cognitive development; and maternal stress and depression.
We will report findings on ClinicalTrials.gov, in peer-reviewed publications and in stakeholder workshops in Bangladesh.
While GiveWell doesn’t seem to have looked into this specifically, this 2015 review of GiveDirectly mentioned that lack of cement floors was in one of GiveDirectly’s two sets of eligibility criteria for its standard campaigns:
Thatched roofs: To date, GiveDirectly has used housing materials to select recipients in all of its standard campaigns, enrolling households who live in a house made of organic materials (thatched roof, mud walls, and a mud floor) and excluding households with iron roofs, cement walls, or cement floors.170 In GiveDirectly’s campaigns in Kenya, about 35-45% of households have been eligible based on these criteria, while in Uganda about 80% of households have been found to be eligible.171 …
Happier Lives Institute’s 2021 annual review did mention cement flooring among the “micro-interventions” they wanted to look into (alongside deworming, cataract surgery, digital mental health interventions, etc), but I haven’t seen anything by them since on this, so I assume it didn’t pass their internal review for further analysis.

Mo Putera Apr 16, 2025, 7:49 AM
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Are People Happier Than Before? I Tested for “Rescaling” & Found Little Evidence
Always enjoy your posts, you tend to have fresh takes and clear analyses on topics that feel well-trodden.
That said, I think I’m mainly confused if the Easterlin paradox is even a thing, and hence whether there’s anything to explain. On the one hand there are writeups like Michael Plant’s summarising the evidence for it, which you referenced. On the other hand, my introduction to Easterlin’s paradox was via Our World in Data’s happiness and life satisfaction article, which summarised the evidence for happiness rising over time in most countries here and explain away the Easterlin paradox here as being due to either survey questions changing over time (in Japan’s case, chart below) or to inequality making growth not benefit the majority of people (in the US’s case).
Plant’s writeup says that
The reply that Easterlin and O’Connor (2022) make is that Stevenson, Wolfers, and co. are looking over too short a time horizon. They point out that the critique looks at segments of ten years and to really test the paradox requires looking over a longer time period, which is what Easterlin and O’Connor (2022) do themselves. Easterlin and O’Connor (2022) write that they don’t really understand why Stevenson and Wolfers are using these short time segments rather than the longer ones.
But the chart for Japan above, which is from Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), spans half a century, not ten years, so Easterlin and O’Connor’s objection is irrelevant to the chart.
This OWID chart (which is also the first one you see on Wikipedia) is the one I always think about when people bring up the Easterlin paradox:
But Plant’s writeup references the book Origins of Happiness (Clark et al., 2019) which has this chart instead:
So is the Easterlin paradox really a thing or not? Why do the data seem to contradict each other? Is it all mainly changing survey questions and rising inequality? On priors I highly doubt it’s that trivially resolvable, but I don’t have a good sense of what’s going on.
I wish there was an adversarial collaboration on this between folks who think it’s a thing and those who think it isn’t.

Mo Putera Apr 15, 2025, 4:19 PM
43 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
I just learned about Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery system, from YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee’s recent video, so I was surprised to see Zipline pop up in a GiveWell grant writeup of all places. I admittedly had the intuition that if you’re optimising for cost-effectiveness as hard as GW do, and that your prior is as skeptical as theirs is, then the “coolness factor” would’ve been stripped clean off whatever interventions pass the bar, and Brownlee’s demo both blew my mind with its coolness (he placed an order on mobile for a power bank and it arrived by air in thirty seconds flat, yeesh) and also seemed the complete opposite of cost-effective (caveating that I know nothing about drone delivery economics). Quoting their “in a nutshell” section:
In December 2024, GiveWell recommended a $54,620 grant to Zipline for a six-month scoping project. Zipline will use this time to review ways that they could use drones to increase vaccination uptake, especially in hard-to-reach areas with low vaccination coverage and high rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. …
We recommended this grant because:
- Drones are an intuitive way to bring vaccines closer to communities with low coverage rates, especially when demand for vaccination exists, but conditions like difficult terrain, poor infrastructure, weak cold chain, or insecurity make it difficult for families to access immunizations.
- This grant aligns with our strategy of making several scoping grants to high-potential organizations to source promising ideas for solving bottlenecks in the routine immunization system, and then testing these concepts.
Okay, but what about cost-effectiveness? Their “main reservations” section says
Evidence on cost-effectiveness of drones for vaccine delivery is limited, and we have not modeled the cost-effectiveness of the types of programs that Zipline plans to consider, nor the value of information for this scoping grant.
An internal review conducted in 2023 focused on drones for health was generally skeptical about there being many opportunities in this area that would meet GiveWell’s bar, although this scoping grant will focus on the most promising scenario (remote areas with high rates of vaccine-preventable diseases and low vaccination coverage rates).
Is there any evidence of cost-effectiveness at all then? According to Zipline, yes — e.g. quoting the abstract from their own 2025 modelling study:
Objectives: In mid-2020, the Ghana Health Service introduced Zipline’s aerial logistics (centralized storage and delivery by drones) in the Western North Region to enhance health supply chain resilience. This intervention led to improved vaccination coverage in high-utilization districts. This study assessed the cost-effectiveness of aerial logistics as an intervention to improve immunization coverage.
Methods: An attack rate model, adjusted for vaccination coverage and vaccine efficacy, was used to estimate disease incidence among vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, focusing on 17 022 infants. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios of US dollar per averted disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) were evaluated from societal and government perspectives, using real-world operations data. …
Results: In 2021, aerial logistics averted 688 disease cases. Incremental cost-effectiveness ratios were $41 and $58 per averted DALY from the societal and government perspectives, respectively. The intervention was cost-saving when at least 20% of vaccines delivered by aerial logistics replaced those that would have been delivered by ground transportation, with potential government savings of up to $250 per averted DALY. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of these findings.
That’s super cost-effective. For context, the standard willingness-to-pay to avert a DALY is 1x per capita GDP or $2,100 in Ghana, so 35-50x higher. Also:
… we calculated that aerial logistics facilitated the completion of an additional 14 979 full immunization courses… We estimated that 4 children’s lives (95% CI 2–7) were saved in these districts during 2021. … the intervention averted a total of $20 324 in treatment costs and $2819 for caregivers between lost wages and transport.
At a cost of $0.66 per incremental FIC (fully immunized child), this approach outperforms other delivery methods analyzed in the review, including the most cost-effective category of interventions identified, namely “Delivery Approach” interventions, such as monthly immunization by mobile teams in villages and the enhancement of satellite clinic immunization practices.
(GW notes that they’d given Zipline’s study a look and “were unable to quickly assess how key parameters like program costs and the impact of the program on vaccination uptake and disease were being estimated”. Neither can I. Still pretty exciting)

Mo Putera Apr 11, 2025, 9:51 AM
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Announcing our 2025 strategy
As a side note,
Over the coming years, we expect to test various growth pathways and interventions that could get us to our BHAG, including digital marketing, partnerships with aligned organisations, community advocacy, media/PR, and direct outreach to potential pledgers. We think it’s likely that multiple of them will be needed to achieve our ambitious goal and that they will complement and strengthen each other if implemented well.
I’d be curious to learn going forward how you model growth pathway credit attribution and interaction effects (synergy vs cannibalisation) to figure out how to optimise the growth channel “portfolio mix”. I used to work in e-commerce marketing analytics and this was both critical to budgeting and also quite nontrivial, and that was with far more granular data and quicker clearer feedback loops than I expect GWWC will need to work with.

Mo Putera Apr 11, 2025, 9:38 AM
16 points
1 ∶ 3
on: Announcing our 2025 strategy
Just wanted to say I really appreciate GWWC’s focus on pledger count instead of just donation total; picking the right organisational “north star” metric matters a lot. In this vein I’d like to signal-boost abrahamrowe’s A robust earning to give ecosystem is better for EA, and in particular this visual (just to clarify, the “too hard” distribution is ~$25 per person).