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 this tool to estimate your future income and Givewell’s reports on their top charities, 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 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, writing down your answer like, e.g.:
Malaria Consortium: X cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of N deaths averted
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?
Now write down your answer to the following questions:
Which charity do you pick to donate to? Why?
Part C (Optional, 10 mins.)
What are other decisions in your life that you might consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for?
As well as counting the number of lives saved and protected (from malaria, vitamin A deficiency and vaccine immunity) for 1000 dollars, I think it is also important to consider the long-term effects. For example, malaria chemoprevention and vitamin A supplementation are temporary and require continuous administration to remain effective. In the case of the mosquito nets, it would be useful to know how long they last on average. In contrast, the recommended childhood vaccines, although some may require booster doses, are the option that provides greater assurance of long-term protection.
In addition, the Give Well Top Charities' evaluation of effectiveness is within a two-year period (2021-2023). Unlike the other options, the recommended childhood vaccinations are given only once per person and therefore protect new individuals without redundancy, avoiding the problem of double counting in the estimates. All the other options can (and should) be given to the same person, reducing the total number of different people benefited or saved.
So today I would choose to donate the extra 1000 Dolars to New Incentives.
However, when considering a constant and long-term donation, we should also consider that vaccination has a natural limit once the entire population is fully vaccinated (related to thinking on the margin), whereas for the malaria and vitamin A deficiency initiatives, every dollar counts as it should be continuously supplied. In this sense, it would be valuable to know how close we are to saturation in order to decide how to allocate my annual income.