I would use this! I go back and forth on whether I should give money to beggars. Whilst I think the answer to this question depends on the specific location and context, this app would make the “but I should rather give that discretionary money to an effective charity” option a lot more realistic.
The idea makes a lot of sense, but my guess is that the circumstance where the cost is driven by the intervention itself isn’t that common: In the context of charities, we’re thinking about applying RCTs to test whether an intervention works. Generally the intervention is happening anyway. The cost of RCTs then doesn’t come from applying the intervention to the treatment group - it comes from establishing the experimental conditions where you have a randomised group of participants and the ability to collect data on them.
Very pleased to see this! I'd love to see more focus from EA orgs (and others of course) on the fundamentals of being an effective nonprofit (e.g. having a strong, well-evidenced theory of change, and using M&E to test the weakest links in that theory of change and measure impact).
In particular, on theory of change, I'd like to add the following impassioned rant:
A non-profit’s theory of change is analogous to a business model in the for-profit world. Just as you wouldn’t found a company without a clear business model (and nobody would fund you), one shouldn’t found or fund a charity without a strong theory of change.
In fact, theory of change is more important for charities than business models are for businesses, because businesses have better feedback loops. If a for-profit is based on a bad idea, or has bad execution, it will see poor revenue and profits and it will soon go out of business. If a charity is ineffective on the other hand, it may limp along for years without having any impact, squandering limited funding and talent in the process.
Thanks so much for this interesting post - this framing of wellbeing had never occurred to me before. On the first example you use to explain why you find the capabilities framing to be more intuitive than a preference framing: can't we square your intuition that the second child's wellbeing is better with preference satisfaction by noting that people often have a preference to have the option to do things they don't currently prefer? I think this preference comes from (a) the fact that preferences can change, so the option value is instrumentally useful, and (b) it feels better to do what you'd prefer freely than to do so with no other option. You can account for the second example the same way.
The example of women reporting to be happier in the 70s (which lets take to be true for the sake of argument) is interesting, but for me that's a point against hedonic accounts of wellbeing, not preference accounts of wellbeing: our happiness is just one (albeit very very important!) thing we care about. So whilst women might have been happier in the US in the 70s, they may well have had preferences thwarted by discrimination... and even if their preferences were satisfied as in your first two examples (e.g. suppose they preferred playing the economic role they were forced by discrimination to play) they presumably would have preferred to have more options, and to choose freely.
I don't purport to have shown why the capabilities account of wellbeing is wrong, but rather to show why I’m not convinced that the holes (in the preference account of wellbeing) it's supposed to fill, exist in the first place.
[Sorry for the scrappy writing - written on my phone whilst walking]
Thanks for the thoughtful question Joel!
I'll take this question in three parts:
(1) Why not just give the money to strong existing foundations whose values match your own?
(2) Shouldn't we be skeptical of smaller/newer grantmaking organizations because it's hard to compete with the likes of GiveWell on accuracy?
(3) Shouldn't people who have ended up in the position of disbursing funds by random chance (e.g. through inheritance) just defer to others to make the grantmaking decisions?
Thank you! I totally agree. There is something to be said for taking a weekend to step back and think about EA topics outside the specific things you think about day to day. I get the sense that some people feel pressured to book as many 1-1s as possible and many of these end up being low value.