“Any costing of a 25-year eradication effort is speculative and involves uncertainties that increase over time. Nonetheless, initial modeling suggests that the costs of eradicating malaria could be $90–$120 billion between 2015 and 2040.”
Is funding the main bottleneck for eradicating Malaria using the current most cost-effective interventions? If so, I'm curious about how much additional funding is needed for this goal. Thanks!
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
I’ve been feeling pretty shaken since the METR report about the Hugging Face incident came out last week. Over the weekend, I wrote up some thoughts on how lonely the AI situation sometimes feels to me. It’s more personal than what I’d usually share publicly, but I thought I’d post it here in case it resonates with anyone else.
I’m very grateful to the man...
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
$90 to $120 billion:
“Any costing of a 25-year eradication effort is speculative and involves uncertainties that increase over time. Nonetheless, initial modeling suggests that the costs of eradicating malaria could be $90–$120 billion between 2015 and 2040.”
From Aspiration to Action (2015)
Is that any particular confidence interval? It seems implausible that it would be so tight.
None mentioned in the report. It refers to the Methods section of an online appendix but the appendix doesn't appear to be on the website.
From a quick skim, this doesn't seem to account for the poleward movement of malaria vectors that is likely to occur under climate change (https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/climate-change-and-malaria-complex-relationship), which seems like it would increase eradication costs substantially.
WHO published a report on malaria eradication (2020) that covers megatrends like climate change.
It is similar to other reports in recommending over $6 billion per year to meet targets.
The Lancet Commission on Malaria Eradication (2019) : "Malaria eradication is likely to cost over $6 billion per year. The world is already spending around $4.3 billion."
If eradication is achieved by 2040, that would be about $120 billion in total.