Director of Strategy for the Centre for Effective Altruism. I previously ran new programs at Innovate Animal Ag and led the research team at a nonprofit focused on building $1B+ philanthropic initiatives/megaprojects. Before that I lived in Tanzania and ran some RCTs there.
Rory Fenton
Karma: 783
Sounds like you have a super relevant background! Some quick thoughts:
Try ~replicating some of GiveWell’s output, such as a cost-effectiveness model. Not entirely from scratch, that would take forever, but perhaps go through it and test your own ability to explain each step, which might help you identify gaps in your knowledge (e.g. some of the moral weights thinking can be counter-intuitive in my experience)
Try picking a Charity Entrepreneurship graduate charity and write your own GW-style evaluation. CE stands out as their charities will likely publish a lot of the data you might need, but they also might not have public GW evaluations yet
Both of those might just help you realize which parts of GW’s process you don’t really “get”, so you know what to work on.
But I have never worked at GW, so take all of this as “one guy’s opinion” :)
Interesting suggestion! I think the example you outline makes sense. I’d guess part of why you don’t see this kind of thing in EA might include:
It might not be a very neglected field: there are already a lot of scholarships and student loan companies/government policies. That might reduce the counterfactual value of the loan if the person might have gotten funding elsewhere.
The logistics of setting up a system to evaluate these opportunities could be significant, especially relative to the size of the loans. You might need to thoroughly investigate each borrower to be confident that they will not only repay but also are sincere in their donation plans.
Building on my 2nd point: I think it would be super easy to game a program like this and say “Of course I plan to donate $1m+ once I become a doctor” just so you get the loan. While the repayments might be legally binding, the obligation to donate will not be, so the impact side could weaken.
Anyway, just some quick thoughts, very open to counter takes and thank you for suggesting this idea! I do think there is a good place for some smart finance type stuff in EA for sure, such as loans for social enterprises to kick off, or other clever things like advance market commitments.
Wow this is so well done. I’m really excited to see what else you have in the pipeline, and more generally for high quality EA content!
Thanks Vasco! I think it depends on how well your particular system is a strict A > B> C> Done flow. If it’s as linear as car production, then it is indeed that case that if you make 100 wheels, 20 front axles and 40 windshields per day, you have made 20 cars (your bottleneck is the axles). And making 400 wheels the next day without changing your axle output has zero effect on the number of cars produced, the additional “productivity” is entirely wasted.
Not every process will be quite so linear, but at least for the elements that are, I do think that increasing the output of non-bottlenecks will have zero effect on the output you care about.
In that case it was just waiting for USDA approval of a pilot of the vaccine (it was a vaccine for chickens). Our best guess was that the approval was another, say, 2 months out, so we could just let the vaccine pilot batch take a bit longer to make and it wouldn’t affect when the pilot itself started (we could make the vaccine before it was approved, we just couldn’t actually use it).
It might seem strange but there are many choices that poor people make that could save tens of dollars a year, that people don’t take advantage of. I would weakly disagree that poor people are good at saving money, especially if it requires a small investment first.
I think part, but not all of that, is due to rationally putting a high premium on avoiding catastrophe, with poor families often operating barely above the limits of survival. You want to wait to sell your crops in 2 months when the market is better but what if your crops get eaten by pests, or the market actually collapses? For a poor family, that could spell total disaster, whereas at least by selling the crops today, at the low harvest season prices, you are guaranteed to get something. (That doesn’t explain the TV though! But I think cash transfer studies suggest that marginal funds are normally spent more wisely than on TVs)
That points to the value of interventions that reduce that risk, e.g. “I’ll lend you money at harvest time and you only pay me back if you can sell your crops at a higher price in the low season” type deals.
I have no particular take on LG, I was mostly focused on your question about the market failure. I’ve no reason to think LG couldn’t do a great job, this sounds very much like their area of expertise!
I can’t speak to this product in particular but my experience at One Acre Fund in Tanzania was that it’s often just really hard to physically distribute products to rural Africa without super high costs or damage. The practicalities of distribution are hard to solve, which I guess is more what Nick is looking to do here. Once you find a way to get the product in front of users and it saves them money, they’ll often buy it, I agree that it might not need to be given for free (not withstanding another practical note: if you need to charge, that also generates a bunch of logistics!)
Ah I am so jealous, you only get that first The Goal reading experience once :). I have recommended it more than any other book I’ve read, I think. I hope you enjoyed it even 10% as much as I did!
Nice, agreed. I could totally see cups being superior, I mostly was thinking of OAF from the perspective of having shareable lessons on e.g. marketing, impact measurement, stuff that might make ODH’s work a little easier. Will share what I hear!
The outsized benefits of removing bottlenecks: some personal experiences
Interesting idea. I know One Acre Fund had a (possibly just pilot) program distributing Afripads in Kenya (https://www.afripadsfoundation.org/the-challenge/). I happen to be chatting with old colleagues from the Kenya program soon, will share any lessons + connect you if useful.
Hey Vasco, I just joined CEA last month to start building out an internal monitoring and evaluation function. Getting into our impact in terms of things like career changes + donations is a top priority. For now, I’m still in learning mode, but I hope to have some defensible ideas on this soon!
Totally agreed! I very much assumed my audience was very EA and already stepping back on cause-prio + intervention choice every so often. You are right that that often isn’t the case, and the way I’ve framed things here might encourage some folks to just plough on and not ask important questions on whether they are working on the right thing, in the right way.
You probably won’t solve malaria or x-risk, and that’s ok
Love the clarity of the post but I agree with Geoffrey that the $ impact/household seems extremely low and I also don’t follow how you get to $1k+/HH (which would be like doubling household income).
Back calculating to estimate benefits/household:
$1.5m national savings over 5 years = $300k/year
Number of adopters:
50m people in Uganda
5 people/household means 10m households
1⁄3 of households use charcoal: 10m/3 = ~3m households use charcoal
1% adopt: 3m * 1% = 30k adopting households
Benefits/household: $300k/year over 30k adopting households = $10/household/ year (or just $1/person/year), which seems super low to me
I’d guess that’s at least part of why you don’t see more bean soaking already, the savings are just so modest, unless I’ve missed something in my calculation.
As you note, behaviour change around cooking practices is also super hard. When I worked at One Acre Fund Tanzania, our 2 biggest failures were introducing clean cookstoves and high-iron beans, both of which people just didn’t want to use because of how they conflicted existing norms, e.g. color of the new bean variety “bled” into ugali, making it look dirty.
So the $ benefits would make me skeptical of this as promising but I’m hoping I missed something big in my calculation!
Thanks Chris, that’s a cool idea. I will give it a go (in a few days, I have an EAG to recover from...)
One thing I should note is that other comments on this post are suggesting this is well known and applied, which doesn’t knock the idea but would reduce the value of doing more promotion. Conversely, my super quick, low-N look into cash RCTs (in my reply below to David Reinstein) suggests it is not so common. Since the approach you suggest would partly involve listing a bunch of RCTs and their treatment/control sizes (so we can see whether they are cost-optimised), it could also serve as a nice check of just how often this adjustment is/isn’t applied in RCTs
For bio, that’s way outside of my field, I defer to Joshua’s comment here on limited participant numbers, which makes sense. Though in a situation like early COVID vaccine trials, where perhaps you had limited treatment doses and potentially lots of willing volunteers, perhaps it would be more applicable? I guess pharma companies are heavily incentivised to optimise trial costs tho, if they don’t do it there’ll be a reason!
As a quick data point I just checked the 6 RCTs GiveDirectly list on their website. I figure cash is pretty expensive so it’s the kind of intervention where this makes sense.
It looks like most cash studies, certainly with just 1 treatment arm, aren’t optimising for cost:
Study Control Treatment The short-term impact of unconditional cash transfers to the poor: experimental evidence from Kenya 432 503 BENCHMARKING A CHILD NUTRITION PROGRAM
AGAINST CASH: EVIDENCE FROM RWANDA74 villages 74 villages (nutrition program)
100 (cash)Cash crop: evaluating large cash transfers to coffee
farming communities in Uganda1894 1894 Using Household Grants to Benchmark the Cost Effectiveness of a
USAID Workforce Readiness Program488 485 NGO program
762 cash
203 cash + NGOGeneral equilibrium effects of cash transfers:
experimental evidence from Kenya325 villages 328 villages Effects of a Universal Basic Income during the pandemic 100 villages 44 longterm UBI
80 shortterm UBI
71 lump sumSuggests either 1) there’s some value in sharing this idea more or 2) there’s a good reason these economists aren’t making this adjustment. Someone on Twitter suggested “problems caused by unbalanced samples and heteroskedasticity” but that was beyond my poor epidemiologist’s understanding and they didn’t clarify further.
Hi Christian—agreed but my argument here is really for fewer treatment participants, not smaller treatment doses
Congrats on the great sign up results! Do you mind giving some more examples of what you did differently? Those could be helpful for other groups to learn from.
For instance, you noted “For example: you walk past a table and someone goes “Hey! Do you want to join the EA club?” ” as an example of what you wouldn’t to—what would you do to get attention when tabling?