Joel Tan🔸
Bio
I run CEARCH, a research and grantmaking organization; we try to find and fund cost-effective philanthropic ideas.
Posts 31
Comments204
Topic contributions1
Yep, and that's about 5x existing GiveWell top charities. Also, GiveWell has made a 700k grant to Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) for their salt reduction work in China; CEARCH previously recommended and evaluated RTSL for their salt policy work in Southeast & South Asia, and I'm very excited to see GiveWell make this exploratory grant.
One minor suggestion I have is to do annual donations (i.e. sit down at the end of the year / whenever you do your taxes, and decide how much disposable income you have and how much you want to give). It feels more special this way, you get more invested (if you spend time looking at potential charities recommended by GiveWell and charity evaluators), and of course it's less of a hassle than deciding monthly.
The tractability on this will be terrible - you'll be trying to persuade poor countries to limit quality/quantity/variety of food availability to their own people, and you can imagine how that will go. Additionally, there may be potential human costs in terms of nutrition and economic growth.
If you do want to affect AW in LMICs, Innovate Animal Agriculture style work trying to affect the kind of industrial animal agriculture seems far more tractable (in fact it's probably more tractable than in HICs, since e.g. there are no sunk costs in terms of equipment and capital).
Hi Vasco,
We have standard GCR discounts when estimating long term impact, but for AI - we're generally more sceptical, both on paperclipping and on extremely rosy projections of economic growth. In any case, while there might be a theoretical case for discounting income-based interventions (if you really believe GDP growth is going jump to 10% per annum, we're obviously moving up the DMR curve more rapidly), there's much less direct impact on health (in fact, if you think income is going to drastically increase, that makes consumption greater, and the DALY burden of diseases of affluence much worse, and hence preventing them more cost-effective).
The percentage of EAs earning to give is too low
Money is the major bottleneck for high impact charities, at least in GHD and AW (and some GCR causes). Meanwhile, there's an excess in demand for EA jobs relative to the supply (everyone knows it's extremely competitive). Hence, the marginal value of getting more money in via earning to give (loosely defined - not everyone needs to be in finance or tech) is probably higher than trying to squeeze into a direct role where replaceability is extremely high.
There's very strong empirical evidence that taxes reduce alcohol consumption (price elasticity is about -0.5, so a 10% increase in price reduces consumption by 5%), and the evidence that alcohol harms health is well-established enough that I won't belabour the point
It's probably also cost-effective. Rough rule of thumb is that policy interventions are highly cost-effective due to large scale of impact (policy has national level reach, while is hard to beat), and low cost per capita (particularly due to leveraging less impactful government spending). GiveWell estimates that alcohol policy may be more cost-effective than its top charities, and Charity Entrepreneurship estimates that it's potentially competitive with GiveWell top charities. Uncertainty is very high, of course.
The other posters have also rightly pointed out the conflict-of-interest reasons you should distrust this Snowdon fellow, but also the fact of the matter is that the scientific consensus is what it is for a reason, and even without conflict-of-interest reasons you shouldn't put too much stock in what some rando says over what experts as a whole say.