This is a special post for quick takes by SaraAzubuike. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Comment Permalink
A life saved in a rich country is generally considered more valuable than one saved in a poor country because the value of a statistical life (VSL) rises with wealth. However, transferring a dollar to a rich country is less beneficial than transferring a dollar to a poor country because marginal utility decreases as wealth increases.
So, using [$ / lives saved] is the wrong approach. We should use [$ / (lives saved * VSL)] instead. This means GiveDirectly might be undervalued compared to other programs that save lives. Can someone confirm if this makes sense?
Generally considered by who? If you polled the general population, I think the position that rich lives are more important to save than poor lives would be highly unpopular. I certainly don't believe it.
One factor is that rich people have more resources and ability to save themselves. If a millionaire and an impoverished person both need a ten thousand dollar treatment to live, obviously you should donate to the impoverished person!
VSL isn't directly comparable across countries. It's a measure of how much money people in a given country would be willing to spend to save their own lives. For example, if someone would be willing to pay up to $125,000 to reduce the chance of them dying by 1%, then their VSL is $12.5 million. These amounts are lower in poor countries simply because the people there have less money, and it has nothing to do with whether their lives are more or less valuable.
The point that it's better to save people with better lives than people with worse lives, all else equal, does make sense (at least from a utilitarian perspective). So you're right that [$ / lives saved] is not a perfect approach. I do think it's worth acknowledging this...!
But the right correction isn't to use VSLs. The way I'd put it is: a person's VSL--assuming it's been ideally calculated for each individual, putting aside issues about how governments estimate it in practice--is how many dollars they value as much as slightly lowering their chance of death. So the fact that VSLs differ across people mixes together two things: a rich person might have a higher VSL than a poor person (1) because the rich person values their life more, or (2) because the rich person values a dollar less. The first thing is right to correct for (from a utilitarian perspective), but as other commenters have noted, the second isn't.
My guess is that the second factor baked into the VSL is bigger in most real-world comparisons we might want to make, so that it's less of a mistake to just try to maximize [$ / lives saved] than to try to maximize [$ / (lives saved * VSL)].
Curated and popular this week
·
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
·
Cross-posted from my blog.
Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small.
Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%.
That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me.
You are only ever making small dents in important problems
I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems.
Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do:
* I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed.
* I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
·
> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals
By Martin Gould
----------------------------------------
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.
----------------------------------------
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
I don't think lives of rich people should be more valuable than lives of poor people.
I strongly disagree with that.