What is the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top life-saving charities under total utilitarianism?

Vasco Grilo🔸

Comments 5

Sorted by

New & upvoted

This isn't an answer to the question, but two additional considerations I think you're missing that point the opposite direction and I think would make AMF look even better than GiveWell counts it as, on the total view:

There's some evidence that bednets lead to higher fertility and that channels sound somewhat intuitively plausible.
Roodman's report is only counting the first generation. If preventing two under-5 deaths leads to ~one fewer birth, that's still one more kid net making it to adulthood and being able to have kids of their own. Given fertility rates in the places where AMF works, I think that would more than offset the Roodman adjustment in just a few decades.

I haven't seen any concerted public attempts to grapple with these factors or to think about how to bound the considerations in #2 in a way that would lead to a numerical answer to your question. I would be curious if people have other references to point to on this.

Vasco Grilo🔸

Thanks for the feedback! Some thoughts:

That evidence supports an increase in fertility, but only in the very short term. From the abstract:
- Abstract: "The effect on fertility is positive only temporarily – lasting only 1-3 years after the beginning of the ITN distribution programs – and then becomes negative. Taken together, these results suggest the ITN distribution campaigns may have caused fertility to increase unexpectedly and temporarily, or that these increases may just be a tempo effect – changes in fertility timing which do not lead to increased completed fertility".
- Conclusion: "In contrast, our findings do not support the contention that erosion of international funding for malaria control, specifically of ITNs, would lead to higher fertility rates in the short-run. While our results are suggestive that this may be the case for long-run fertility, we show the exact opposite for the short-run".
  - If the results are suggestive that decreasing ITNs leads to higher long-run fertility, AMF would tend to decrease longterm fertility.
Yes, I wrote "neglecting longterm effects" above to signal that Roodman's report did not refer to the longterm effects on population size, but thanks for clarifying!
Besides modelling the longterm effects on population size, it would also be important to determine how harmful/beneficial is a given change in population size (e.g. as a function of the country).

Alexander_Berger

Agree that the paper leaves open the ultimate impact on completed fertility and on your #3. On #2 - I think it would be a mistake to try to adjust for this and neglect long run effects, as in your estimate in fn1.

Vasco Grilo🔸

I agree, and have adjusted the text and footnote accordingly.

Vasco Grilo🔸

Carl Shulman has discussed the Flow-through effects of saving a life through the ages on life-years lived.

Comments

More from the author

The Goodhart Singularity

Vasco Grilo🔸·1mo ago·15m read

105

Unfalsifiable stories of doom

Vasco Grilo🔸·5mo ago·13m read

Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture

Vasco Grilo🔸·2mo ago·14m read

Curated and popular this week

Was Partisanship Good for the Environmental Movement?

Jeffrey Heninger·2y ago·Curated 5d ago·6m read

This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? Summary Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions. Public Opinion...

135

Possible mistake EAs are making and shout out to Pause AI UK

Michelle_Hutchinson·6d ago·4m read

I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...

GWWC's 2025 impact evaluation (executive summary)

Aidan Whitfield🔸, Giving What We Can🔸·1d ago·2m read

This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...

Recent opportunities to take action

$1M AI x-risk grant round is live on grantmaking.ai - apply for funding, review applicants, or fund projects

Matt Brooks·2d ago·3m read

135

Possible mistake EAs are making and shout out to Pause AI UK

Michelle_Hutchinson·6d ago·4m read

Build a flourishing EA group at the University of Toronto

Joseph Kostousov, Sophia Wan (navarhontes)·1w ago·1m read

^{^}

Estimated as follows:

GiveWell top life-saving charities avert one death for about 4.5 k$.
According to this post from Open Philanthropy, "GiveWell uses moral weights for child deaths that would be consistent with assuming 51 years of foregone life in the DALY framework (though that is not how they reach the conclusion)".
Consequently, the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell top life-saving charities is 51 DALY / 4.5 k$ = 0.01 DALY/$.