I love this wisdom and agree that most charities' cost effectiveness will be less than they claim. I include our assessment of my own charity in that, and GiveWell's assessments. Especially as causes become more saturated and less neglected. And yes like you say with Animal charities there are more assumptions made and far wider error bars than with human assessment.

I haven't (and won't) look into this in detail but I hope some relatively unmotivated people will compare these analysis in detail.

That argument is weak to me because you could take any intervention we are clueless about and it would look better than global health interventions within most of the interval. If our interval spans zero to close to infinity  then global health interventions are going to be a speck near the bottom of that interval. 

Jesse I don't think your example is correct because did the GiveWell error bars don't overlap with food kitchen ones. We can be 99+ percent sure malaria nets are more cost effective than soup kitchens. That just isn't the case here. Comparing the certainly of human intervention effectiveness vs. animals is like chalk and cheese

I don't agree with Henry that the huge error bars make RPs welfare ranges useless, probably because I value certainty a bit less than him. But I do think if we value certainly to any degree that can reasonably make us de-value animal welfare point estimates as RP demonstrate themselves in their moral parliament tool.

Love that this has been curated. Underrated argument making nice bold claims understandable to all us plebs. Nice one.

Thanks for this write up. I had no idea about any of this! I'm as bit disturbed by Makary's response to your "change your mind" question. Character, integrity, balance, and ability to compromise really matters when it comes to leading institutions, not just being smart and having good ideas.

Making new discoveries is often helped by some contarianism yes, but I'm not sure it's the best trait for running an institution. 

Like you I hope they will do well!

Although it's an interesting question, I'm not sure that gaming out scenarios is that useful in many cases. I think putting energy into responding to the funding reality changes as they appear may be more important. There are just so many scenarios possible in the next few months. 

PEPFAR might be the exception to that, as if it gets permanently cut then there just has to be a prompt and thought through response. Other programs might be able to be responded to in the fly, but if The US do pull out of HUV funding there needs to be a contingency plan in place. Maybe gaming scenarios is useful there, but only if whoever is gaming it actually has the influence either to fund scenarios that do arise, or informed those that fund. Maybe the WHO is doing this but they aren't very agile and don't communicate much on the fly so it's hard to know 

I think pepfar and malaria tests and treatment donations are among the most important and large scale funding gaps that need to be considered responded to in the short term. Even if stocks remain for the next few months, if they aren't delivered because those organizing their delivery didn't have jobs then that's a big problem.

I do think that governments need to take some responsibility too. If you have the medications you probably can switch manpower to delivering them, even if you hadn't budgeted for it because you expected USAID was going to fund that indefinitely. This is the situation for malaria and HIV commodities which are often there in decent quantities but sometimes aren't being distributed effectively right now.

The vast majority of other USAID programs I don't believe are super cost effective, so as super sad as it is that they are gone and no longer helping people, I don't think it's wise to consider covering their funding in most cases as that money would be better spent on more cost effective charities. 

"The poor should be thanking the rich, not resenting them. The rich are the reason why the poor are getting by at all. Many of the poor are not pulling their own weight, while the wealthy are pulling much more than their weight."

Unfortunately this comment (rightly or wrongly) has made me somewhat doubt the integrity of some of your other arguments and comments. I feel like its important to say that I strongly disagree with this line of thinking and find it a horrble way to look at the world, and people who are far worse of than us. 

I see no reason why my super poor friends here in the village in Uganda should be "thanking the rich". The world has developed around them, and their quality of life has not improved to the extent that it should have, given how many resources there are in this world. Their educational opportunities and healthcare remains unnecessarily terrible.

 I was thinking of arguing against your points line by line, but I think that will do more harm than good.

The reason for this global trend is because Global income inequality has decreased globally (mainly because of India and China's development), whereas within individual countries in general inequality has been increasing over the last 50 years - which is what matters most in people's perception. At the level of the nation state, which is what matter socially, inequality has drastically increased - especially right at the top end of wealth.

I agree with Pinker that inequality is not quite as bad as a lot of people think, but wanted to get the facts right here.

Thanks Tom! No I wouldn't generalise that broadly, I'm sure there will be some cases where it might be cost effective to get some bridging funding in there. For me it's less about the nature of the program, and more about whether there's are tipping points in the vulnerability of the people being cared for.

If we take top GiveWell charities as an example, in situations like mosquito nets, vitamin A, distribution, deworming if those stopped for a year they could probably be started again fairly easily in a year without disproportionate harm. The lives lost would mostly be just because there were less nets delivered (the same as is they had less funding in the first place), not because of some disastrous vulnerability exposed.

A counterexample which might have merit to fund might be something like a malnutrition program where you are halfway through giving rutf to 100,000 kids. Maybe you have enough RUTF to feed the kids but USAID has cut funding for staff. Lots of benefit from the first half of the program would be lost of you didn't fund staff for the second half. Maybe this would be worth paying the staff to finish the program - assuming it's a relatively good malnutrition program without hugely bloated salaries as USAID projects often have. In saying this you could probably offer the staff half their USAID pay to come back and finish the program and nearly all would - even more cost effective (this might sound callous but I have discussed it here before)

Or something like a highly effective gender based violence program that was halfway through - you might have very little benefit for people if the program remained unfinished, so finishing it might really be worth it.

I'm not saying most projects are "resilient" as such - without funding they will stop. Just that most could be restarted again relatively easily in future without huge extra expense.

The problem is you can't trust NGOs to tell you the truth on this - almost all are hardwired to use disasters in any way they can to raise more money. You'd have to investigate the real situation on the ground pretty hard. I was horrified during covid how many NGOs unrelated to health managed to make spurious arguments why they needed way more money. 

By the way if anyone is considering funding stuff on a big scale in East Africa, in happy to get on a call and give you my 10 cents ("my 2 cents is free")