EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular) “Are our Top Charities saving the same lives each year?” by GiveWell
Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate
In a nutshell
We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These programs provide health interventions to the same children under 5 years old annually or every 3 years. Our cost-effectiveness models currently assume that different lives are saved each year from these interventions. We think it's possible the programs are actually saving the same, high-risk children over and over. In a worst-case scenario, this could mean the programs are saving 80% fewer cumulative lives than we thought.
Based on a shallow review of empirical evidence and talking to experts, our best guess is that we're only overstating the total lives saved by these programs by around 10%, because:
- Under-5 deaths [...]
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Outline:
(00:12) In a nutshell
(02:46) What's the issue?
(06:44) What did we find?
(11:53) How could we be wrong?
(14:31) What's the issue?
(17:35) Why we don’t think this is a big concern
(18:22) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk
(20:42) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population
(25:12) Modeling these drivers
(34:08) Sensitivity checks
(35:35) Outside the model checks
(37:34) How could we be wrong?
(40:28) Are we returning children to normal life expectancy?
(42:34) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk across the life cycle
(43:43) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population
(48:13) Moral difficulties raised by the life expectancy question
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First published:
June 18th, 2024
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.