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Week 2: Differences in Impact

Around 700 million people still live in poverty, mostly in low-income countries. Efforts to help them - by policy reform, cash transfers, or provision of health services - can be incredibly effective.

Alongside investigating this issue, we also discuss how much more effective some interventions are than others, and we introduce a simple tool for estimating important figures.

Key concepts from this session include:

Differences in impact: It appears that some of our options to help do many times more good than others. People generally don’t appreciate this, and so miss out on significant opportunities to help.
Fermi estimates: When you’re trying to make a decision, it can be useful to make a rough calculation for which option is best. Even if there’s a lot of uncertainty, this can give you a rough answer, and can tell you which things are most important to estimate next.

Required Materials

Differences in impact:

Comparing charities: How big is the difference? (5 mins.)
The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness (10 mins.)

Fermi estimation:

A brief explanation of Fermi estimation (1 min.)
An example Fermi estimate (1 min.)

Background data on global health and poverty:

Global economic inequality (Our World in Data, 15 mins.)
Global health (Our World in Data, 20 mins.)

“Classic” EA strategies for addressing global poverty:

GiveWell’s “Giving 101” guide (click through to “next” at the bottom of each page, about 15 mins., but feel free to explore the rest of the site).
Health in poor countries problem profile (10 mins.)

Some newer EA strategies for improving the wellbeing of humans living in poverty:

South Asian Air Quality Cause Investigation (18 mins.)
Introducing the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (7 mins.)
Note that these are just two examples of interventions that EAs have been working on - there are many more in the further reading section.

Exercise (40 mins.)

Part A (20 mins.)

In this exercise, we’ll imagine that you’re planning to donate to a charity to improve global health, and explore how much you could do with that donation.

GiveWell is an effective altruism-inspired organization which attempts to identify outstanding donation opportunities in global health and development. Using their reports on their top charities and your earlier estimate of your future income, try and work out what you could achieve if you donated 10% of your lifetime income to one of these charities.

If you’re short on time, here’s a cheat sheet with information about three top GiveWell charities. If you’d like to explore further, check out GiveWell’s cost effectiveness models.

Complete this exercise for three GiveWell charities.

Part B (10 mins.)

In the last section, you ended up with a few different options. Now imagine you were given $1,000 to donate to only one of these charities.

There's a difficult judgment to be made now: since you have to pick, which charity would you donate to to do the most good?

Optional (10 mins.)

What are other decisions in your life that you might consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for?

More to explore

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy are sister organizations in the effective altruism community. Both seek to identify outstanding giving opportunities, but they use different criteria and processes.

GiveWell has an emphasis on evidence-backed organizations within the global health and wellbeing space, while Open Philanthropy also supports high-risk, high-reward work, as well as work that could take a long time to pay off, in a variety of cause areas. We think this illustrates interesting methodological differences between attempts to answer the question “How can we do the most good?”.

Our Criteria - GiveWell and Process for Identifying Top Charities - GiveWell (20 mins.)
Alexander Berger on Global health and wellbeing (3 hours)
Hits-based Giving - Open Philanthropy (45 mins.)

Cost-effectiveness methodology:

Prospecting for Gold - An overview of potential methodological tools we can use to find and evaluate high-impact opportunities. (Video - 55 mins.)
Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell does it. (Podcast - 1 hour 45 mins.)
Why we can't take expected value estimates literally (even when they're unbiased)
List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading - A checklist of things to keep in mind when using cost-effectiveness estimates. (25 mins.)
One approach to comparing global problems in terms of expected impact - 80,000 Hours - An outline of a more precise and quantitative version of the importance, neglectedness, and tractability framework; and details on how to apply it yourself (30 mins.)
A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact - 80,000 Hours (25 mins.)
Subjective Confidence Intervals - Animal Charity Evaluators (10 mins.)
RCTs in Development economics, their critics and their evolution (18 mins.)
How to Measure Anything, Chapter 1 and 2 (50 mins.)

Mental health rather than physical health?

Donating money, buying happiness and Happiness for the whole household - (30 mins. between them) A cost effectiveness analysis that suggests that psychotherapy may be 9 times more effective than cash transfers (and thus competitive with GiveWell’s top charities).
Using Subjective Well-Being to Estimate the Moral Weights of Averting Deaths and Reducing Poverty (52 mins.) - Argument that subjective well-being is a better metric for determining value than physical health or wealth.

Other newer strategies for improving human wellbeing:

Wave is a startup that is now the largest mobile money service in Senegal. Some of Wave’s founders and early employees worked on it because they believe that it’s an extremely effective way to improve the world.
Ben Kuhn, Wave’s CTO makes the case for founding a startup that serves emerging markets generally being an effective way of improving people’s lives.
Many people in the developing world commit suicide by drinking pesticide. It seems that we can significantly reduce suicide rates if we ban the more dangerous sorts of pesticide.
Charity Entrepreneurship has incubated a number of charities in this space, focused on interventions that they think could be highly effective. These include:

Effective aid:

The lack of controversy over well-targeted aid - GiveWell (10 mins.)
Growth and the case against randomista development - An argument that research on and advocacy for economic growth in low- and middle-income countries is more cost-effective than the things funded by proponents of randomized controlled trials development. (1 hour - if you’re short on time, read Sections 1-3)
Save a life or receive cash? Which do recipients want? - IDinsight - Explores the preferences and values of individuals and communities in Ghana and Kenya to inform funding allocations. (10 mins.)

Criticisms of the use of cost-effectiveness estimates:

Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term - Evidence covers only the more immediate effects of any intervention, and it's highly likely the vast majority of the value is thereby omitted from the calculation. (30 mins.)
Charity Cost-Effectiveness in an Uncertain World – Center on Long-Term Risk - Another way to deal with prioritization under uncertainty is to focus on actions that seem likely to have generally positive effects across many scenarios, rather than focusing on clear, quantifiable metrics. (30 mins.)
How not to be a “white in shining armor” - How GiveWell (as of 2012) tries to avoid “developed-world savior” interventions that don’t take into account local context (3 mins.)
Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness - An argument about how those in the effective altruism movement might overestimate the extent to which charities differ in their expected marginal cost-effectiveness. (40 mins.)