leecrawfurd

Karma: 17

leecrawfurd 13 Dec 2023 20:34 UTC
8 points
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on: AMA: Founder and CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation, Rob Mather
Are AMF looking into being involved with malaria vaccine distribution?

leecrawfurd 27 Jul 2023 8:52 UTC
10 points
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on: Are education interventions as cost effective as the top health interventions? Five separate lines of evidence for the income effects of better education [Founders Pledge]
Interesting stuff. At CGD we’re hoping to follow-up with some old RCTs to find the ideal evidence on this question—what actually happened to incomes of people who have experimentally induced higher early grade test scores: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/will-raising-test-scores-developing-countries-produce-more-health-wealth-and-happiness-later
I think you’ve missed the best existing study on this question which is Glewwe et al using longitudinal panel data to track kids through to adulthood and look observationally at the wage gains from better early test scores https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268121004947. They find 13% higher earnings from 1 SD better scores.

leecrawfurd 14 Nov 2013 0:59 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: Nick_Beckstead’s comment on: A Long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy
Let me explain my position—first, I agree with rejecting a pure time preference, and instead doing discounting based primarily on expected growth in incomes.
For me, the expectation that in 50 years the average person could easily be twice as wealthy, leads to quite heavy discounting of investment to improve their welfare vs spending to alleviate suffering from extreme poverty right now.
It’s possible I haven’t thought this through thoroughly, and am explaining away my lack of enthusiasm for your choice of 5 causes to the neglect of the classic Givewell/GWWC choices. Perhaps there is something to do with efficacy there—that I’m unsure of the likely impact of funding immigration advocacy, forecasting, and more research.

leecrawfurd 10 Nov 2013 3:39 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Nick_Beckstead’s comment on: A Long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy
I think your choice of discount rate is going to fundamentally alter your investment decision, it’s not just some kind of marginal technical tweak.
In practice either you discount fairly heavily, as most public projects do, and end up putting most of your money into solving short-term suffering (as I think you should), or you discount lightly, and put most of your money into possible future catastrophic risk mitigation.
I don’t see how this is “computational convenience”—it’s fundamental.

leecrawfurd 10 Nov 2013 1:07 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Nick_Beckstead’s comment on: A Long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy
What do you mean by “using discount rates on a case-by-case basis as a convenience for calculation”?
I don’t find your dissertation discussion very convincing (but then I’m an economist). I worry a lot more about the existing real children with glass in their feet right now (or intestinal worms or malaria or malnutrition or whatever) than the hypothetical potential children of the future who don’t exist yet, and in any case when they do will live in a substantially wealthier society in which everyone has access to good quality footwear.

leecrawfurd 9 Nov 2013 23:31 UTC
0 points
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on: A Long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy
Interesting stuff, but disappointed you don’t talk about discount rates.