I've been talking with my hospital about donating my kidney and it's been going rather well. However, one piece of unfortunate news they told me is that I can't donate both my kidney and a piece of my liver (and that I can't do this in another hospital either). So people that want to donate are faced with a dilemma of which one to choose. I asked the doctors whether they had literature on this, but unfortunately they didn't know of any that compared the two.
I've looked at some papers, and the side effects for both kidney donation and liver donation seem to be negligible for the donor (way less than 1 QALY).
That leaves us with the question of what has the bigger impact for the recipient.
I've looked for papers that compared them directly, but couldn't really find anything.
It seems like for kidneys:
The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years.
Liver donation seems to generate less QALYs, though the estimates vary a lot.
So I'm currently leaning towards donating my kidney. Does anyone have any more insights into this? Does anyone know of an analysis that compares the two? (If someone is/wants to write one, I'd be glad to help) Please share your thoughts.
Hi Vasco,
I already do work for an animal welfare organization. I looked at the study and it's not about Belgian hospitals, so it doesn't really apply to me. Some of the listed costs aren't present (I don't have a wage so no wage loss), those that are present are mostly paid for by the state (travel, accommodation, medical...) and those that aren't are paid for by my parents (housework). The only one that applies is "Small cash payments for grocery items (eg, tissue paper)" which is negligible, so the expected DALY per dollar is extremely high.
In Belgium you can leave a message to the person you're donating to, so I had planned to leave a message about veganism and effective altruism. I think this will be a very powerful reason to change behavior, seeing as it comes from their altruistic donor.
Also, donating will help with persuading people to be more altruistic in general. In psychology you have this concept of a costly signal, which causes people to take your (related) ideas much more seriously.
- I don't think we can just equate 15 QALY's to 15 DALY's, these are different metrics. I tried to find a converter online but it looks like there is no consensus on how to do that.
- Additional benefits of making someone an EA include: doing part-time/volunteer work (e.g. currently everyone at effectief geven is a volunteer), and them making other people EAs (spreading the generated expected QALY's further).
- Same things could be said for veganism, which is less likely with a one time donation since people don't make that part of their identity. But the cost-effectiveness is a good point. Maybe many small donations over time could achieve those same things while being more cost-effective? But then again the funding landscape might change. I'll think a bit more about this.
- I think the recipient is much more likely than that to sign the pledge, since the average person who has heard of EA associates it with SBF-types while this person is a direct life-changing beneficiary.
- I also noticed you didn't add the 'costly signal factor' to your analysis. I think we EAs tend to fall for the McNamara trap of basing our decisions only on quantitative observations and ignoring the rest. A lot of the fac
... (read more)I think downvoting comments like the above is harmful:
For what it's worth, I upvoted and disagree-voted, because I think I think you're wrong and because you clearly put thought and effort into your writing, and produced the sort of content I think we should generally have more of, even though I'm annoyed locally that "don't do either" is a much easier comment to write than "here's the analysis you asked for", leading to the only serious comments on the post being people stating your view.