A late comment to say that I don’t think RP takes the view that any given cause area is more important than another, either philosophically or in practice. Our GHD team produces a steady stream of-I think-interesting and helpful reports. Perhaps this perception stems from the fact that a lot of our GHD work is not public (for various reasons), or simply that people don’t engage with it as much as they might have in the past.
Tom Vargas
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This was a fun read, thanks for sharing!
I agree with you that cash benchmarking is a helpful, relatively intuitive metric. But I also think that all benchmarks in our space sometimes provide a veneer of precision, when ultimately there are a bunch of non-trivial subjective beliefs that help build out even a quantitative-looking cash benchmark. Concretely, how much do we weigh a life relative to hard cash? This is not an easy question, and I worry sometimes that cash benchmarking makes people believe it is some kind of purely objective metric.
Thanks Nick, helpful!
Hi Nick, Thanks for engaging! I’ll engage with one bit of your comment in return :) As you can imagine, cost-effectiveness is very important to us, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in our approach. One of the issues we’ve tried to highlight is that even if your estimate of the number of cost-effective programs funded by the US is accurate, we still won’t be able to close all the funding gaps. If that’s the case, cost-effectiveness alone might not allow us to substantially narrow down on opportunities. In these situations, we believe it might be important to consider some of the things we’ve pointed out. For example, how many future opportunities will we lose to run cost-effective programs if some organizations cease to exist? (Maybe a lot!) There might also be a weaker, but plausible, case for supporting organizations implementing work below a certain cost-effectiveness threshold, when we consider some of those implications we outline.
Thanks again for reading!
Thanks Tyler, super helpful. I agree with your logic. I’ve been thinking a lot about projects that deliver aid specifically and that have been cut-off, and how to think about the cost-effectiveness for funders if their additional dollars go directly to delivery. Seems like it would be high.
Thanks for your thoughts Nick, helpful. I think being skeptical of rushing to fund everything that USAID was funding is the right instinct, and it sound like you have a strong prior regarding the resilience of some projects—at least in SSA. Would you generalize broadly, across cause area and geography? It seems to me that significant reductions in the stability of American foreign aid, and the infrastructure that it provides, will hobble some efforts. The key, therefore, is to do some quick work—hopefully public facing—that identifies those causes and areas that are most likely to suffer from uncertainty in the short term.
Thanks for jumping in Nick. I appreciate the distinction.
To be clear, what I meant by “in practice” is the actual amount of effort, time, and resources RP dedicates to GHD internally, which is distinct from its public footprint and its ultimate impact. My point is simply that characterizing RP as having “shifted” to animal welfare doesn’t capture my sense of internal resource allocation and the external impact of our GHD work (some of which may be not in the public domain), even if that’s how it appears externally.