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Curated and popular this week
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Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way.
Summary
While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise:
1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015.
2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010.
3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.
I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.
Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.
Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.
Introduction
In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000:
Giving What We Can said that
> The reduction in malaria has be
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> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals
By Martin Gould
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
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This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is from Martin. I’ll be back next month. - Lewis
In 2024, Denmark announced plans to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on cow, sheep, and pig farming. Climate advocates celebrated, but animal advocates should be much more cautious. When Denmark’s Aarhus municipality tested a similar tax in 2022, beef purchases dropped by 40% while demand for chicken and pork increased.
Beef is the most emissions-intensive meat, so carbon taxes hit it hardest — and Denmark’s policies don’t even cover chicken or fish. When the price of beef rises, consumers mostly shift to other meats like chicken. And replacing beef with chicken means more animals suffer in worse conditions — about 190 chickens are needed to match the meat from one cow, and chickens are raised in much worse conditions.
It may be possible to design carbon taxes which avoid this outcome; a recent paper argues that a broad carbon tax would reduce all meat production (although it omits impacts on egg or dairy production). But with cows ten times more emissions-intensive than chicken per kilogram of meat, other governments may follow Denmark’s lead — focusing taxes on the highest emitters while ignoring the welfare implications.
Beef is easily the most emissions-intensive meat, but also requires the fewest animals for a given amount. The graph shows climate emissions per tonne of meat on the right-hand side, and the number of animals needed to produce a kilogram of meat on the left. The fish “lives lost” number varies significantly by
Thinking about what I’d do if I was a grantmaker that others wouldn’t do (inspired by https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AvwgADnkdxynknYRR/issues-with-centralised-grantmaking). One course of action I’d strongly consider is to reach out to my non-EA friends—most of whom are fairly poor, are artists/game developers whose ideas/philosophies I consider high value, and who live around the world—and fund them to do independent research/work on EA cause areas instead of the minimum-wage day jobs many of them currently have. I’d expect some of them to be interested (though some would decline), and they’d likely be coming from a very different angle than most people in this space. This may not be the most efficient use of money, but making use of my peculiar/unique network of friends is something only I can do, and may be of value.
I need to book plane tickets for EAGx Prague before they get prohibitively expensive, but I’ve never done this before and haven’t been able to get myself to actually go through the process for some reason. Any advice for what to do when you get “stuck” on something that you know will be pretty easy once you actually do it?
Sounds like an ugh field. Spencer Greenberg also had a podcast episode on motivation recently, including backchaining to your ultimate motivations through a series of "why" questions in order to access more motivating feelings.
My random advice would be to book a friend or maybe some EA whose done it before to walk you through the process and provide their flight-booking wisdom (a pretense or useful or both) like "you have to pay for a checked bag both ways so maybe it's better to upgrade to the seat with a free checked bag".
Some people I know have found that committing to a friend that they'd donate $X to an ineffective charity to be a sufficient motivator. I've had mixed results myself.
It's a pretty easy process - You could also just get someone else to do it for you