All of Rory Fenton's Comments + Replies

Love the clarity of the post but I agree with Geoffrey that the $ impact/household seems extremely low and I also don't follow how you get to $1k+/HH (which would be like doubling household income).

Back calculating to estimate benefits/household:

• $1.5m national savings over 5 years = $300k/year
• Number of adopters:
  • 50m people in Uganda
  • 5 people/household means 10m households
  • 1/3 of households use charcoal: 10m/3 = ~3m households use charcoal
  • 1% adopt: 3m * 1% = 30k adopting households
• Benefits/household: $300k/year over 30k adopting households = $10/household/ yea

Thanks Chris, that's a cool idea. I will give it a go (in a few days, I have an EAG to recover from...)

One thing I should note is that other comments on this post are suggesting this is well known and applied, which doesn't knock the idea but would reduce the value of doing more promotion. Conversely, my super quick, low-N look into cash RCTs (in my reply below to David Reinstein) suggests it is not so common. Since the approach you suggest would partly involve listing a bunch of RCTs and their treatment/control sizes (so we can see whether they are cost-o... (read more)

As a quick data point I just checked the 6 RCTs GiveDirectly list on their website. I figure cash is pretty expensive so it's the kind of intervention where this makes sense. 

It looks like most cash studies, certainly with just 1 treatment arm, aren't optimising for cost: 

Hi Christian-- agreed but my argument here is really for fewer  treatment participants, not smaller treatment doses

Ah, that's helpful data. My experience in RCTs mostly comes from One Acre Fund, where we ran lots of RCTs internally on experimental programs, or just A/B tests, but that might not be very typical!

Hey Aidan-- that's a good point. I think it will probably apply to different extents for different cases, but probably not to all cases. Some scenarios I can imagine:

1. A charity uses its own funds to run an RCT of a program it already runs at scale: 
   • In this case, you are right that treatment is happening "anyway" and in a sense the $ saved in having a smaller treatment group will just end up being spent on more "treatment",  just not in the RCT. 
   • Even in this case I think the charity would prefer to fund its intervention in a non-RCT context: p

Hi Nick-- thanks for the thoughtful post! 

I think cash arms make a lot of intuitive sense, my main pushback would be a practical one: cash and intervention X will likely have different impact timelines (e.g. psychotherapy takes a few months to work but delivers sustained benefits, perhaps cash has massive welfare benefits immediately but they diminish quickly over time). This makes the timing of your endline study super important, to the point that when you run the endline is really what determines which intervention comes out on top, rather than the ... (read more)

I really appreciated this short, clear post. Thank you!

Hey!

LEEP is indeed working on this -- I mentioned them in my original comment but I have no connection to them. I was thinking of a campaign on the $100M/year scale, comparable to Bloomberg's work on tobacco. That could definitely be  LEEP,  my sense (from quick Googling and based purely on the small size of their reported team) is they would have to grow a lot to take on that kind of funding, so there could also be a place for a large existing advocacy org pivoting to lead elimination. I have not at all thought through the implementation side of things here. 

How does the time and monetary cost of buying these products compare to the time and monetary cost of giving cash?

The total value of the bundle ($120) includes all staffing (modelled at scale with 100k recipients), including procurement staff, shipping, etc. This trial was a part of a very large nonprofit, which has very accurate costs for those kinds of things.

But obviously the researchers didn't know beforehand that the programs would fail. So this isn't an argument against cash benchmarking.

That's true, I don't think I made my point well/clearly with th... (read more)

I really like the idea of asking people what assets they would like. We did do a version of this to determine what products to offer, using qualitative interviews where people ranked ~30 products in order of preference. This caused us to add more chickens and only offer maize inputs to people who already grew maize. But participants had to choose from a narrow list of products (those with RCT evidence that we could procure), I'd love have given them freedom to suggest anything. 

We did also consider letting households determine which products they rece... (read more)

Thanks for the interesting reflections. 

I agree that longer term data collection can help here in principle, if the initial differences in impact timing wash out over the years. One reason we didn't do that was statistical power: we expected our impact to decrease over time, so longer term surveys would require a larger sample to detect this smaller impact. I think we were powered to measure something like a $12/month difference in household consumption. I think I'd still call a program that cost $120 and increased consumption by, say, $3/month 10 yea... (read more)

Thanks for sharing! 

My initial sense is that China's method is focused on controlling rainfall, which might mitigate some of the effects of climate change (e.g. reduce drought in some areas, reduce hurricane strength) but not actually prevent it. The ideas I had in mind were more emergency approaches to actually stopping climate change either by rapidly removing carbon (e.g. algae in oceans) or reducing solar radiation absorbs on the Earth's surface (making clouds/oceans more reflective, space mirrors). 

Will all funding applications be made public? If so, is it possible for ask for specific application not to be public?  No problem if actual funding will be publicized, I'm just wondering about the applications themselves. Thanks!

Eliminate all mosquito-borne viruses by permanently immunizing mosquitoes 

Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe

Billions of people are at risk from mosquito-borne viruses, including the threat of new viruses emerging. Over a century of large-scale attempts to eradicate mosquitoes as virus vectors has changed little: there could be significant value in demonstrating large-scale, permanent vector control for both general deployment and rapid response to novel viruses. Recent research has shown that infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacterium, out-co... (read more)

Campaign to eliminate lead globally

Economic Growth

Lead exposure limits IQ, takes over 1M lives every year and costs Africa alone $130B annually, 4% of GDP: an extraordinary limit on human potential. Most lead exposure is through paint in buildings and toys. The US banned lead paint in 1978 but 60% of countries still permit it. We would like to see ideas for a global policy campaign, perhaps similar to Bloomberg’s $1B tobacco advocacy campaign (estimated to have saved ~30M lives), to push for regulations and industry monitoring.

Epistemic status: The “prize”... (read more)

Pilot emergency geoengineering solutions for catastrophic climate change

Research That Can Help Us Improve

Toby Ord puts the risk of runaway climate change causing the extinction of humanity by 2100 at 1/1000, a staggering expected loss. Emergency solutions, such as seeding oceans with carbon-absorbing algae or creating more reflective clouds, may be our last chance to prevent catastrophic warming but are extraordinarily operationally complex and may have unforeseen negative side-effects. Governments are highly unlikely to invest in massive geoengineering so... (read more)