Week 2 - Differences in Impact

• Benefits of ITN Tool

  • Helps decide which area is most cost-effective

    • Deciding in which area to invest one's resources in may be the most significant factor for your moral impact

    • Differences in impact e.g.,

      • Investing a year of time volunteering walking dogs vs marketing effective charities

    • Provides 'Expected Good per unit of resource'

      • or 'If I work on this, how much good will it do?'

        • 'Good'

          • e.g., Reduction of X-risk, QALY, etc.

        • 'Resources'

          • e.g,. money, years of labor, etc.

  • Helps compare between areas

    • Quantitative e.g., 10 lives saved vs 5 lives

• Disadvantages of ITN

  • Neglect of non-quantifiable

    • Can't measure harm done due to selfishness versus due to cancer

  • Difficult to compare between different 'values'

    • e.g. years of education versus lives saved

  • What is 'valuable' is subjective for most

    • e.g,. Human life vs non-human animal life

  • Uncertainty

    • Scoring on the ITN includes judgement calls

    • Deciding the score is not based on complete data

      • e.g., long-term effects, spill-over effects

The components of the ITN Framework

• Importance (Scale)

  • Benefit

    • Showing the potential good caused

  • Defined as

    • Good done / % of problem solved

    • 'if we solved the problem, how good would it be?'

  • Example

    • Solving Cancer (8% of QALY lost/year)

    • Malaria (2.7% QALY lost/year)

  • Measurement 'Yardsticks'

    • One can choose whatever one deems valuable

      • It is recommended to choose those that are

        • measurable

        • change in the measure influences positive impact

    • e.g,. reduction in x-risk, GDP growth, QALY

    • e.g., collaboration, critical thinking, good intent, capacity building

  • 
• Tractability (Solvability)

  • Benefit

    • Showing the potential of progress in solving the problem

  • Defined as

    • % of a problem solved / % increase in resources

    • 'if we doubled the resources dedicated to solving this problem, what fraction of the problem would we expect to solve?'

  • Why is this factor important?

    • Even if problem is important + neglected does not mean it is important to focus on it:

      • If you can't solve it

      • Very difficult to solve / impossible for now

        • e.g., All matter is sentient (experiences pain & happiness)

        • e.g,. Ageing vs symptoms of ageing

      • Solvable

        • e.g. Bednets / vaccine for malaria

  • Measurement 'Yardsticks'

    • 'if we doubled the resources dedicated to solving this problem, what fraction of the problem would we expect to solve?'

  • How to Score

    • Existence of

      • proven cost-effective interventions exist

      • unproven cost-effective interventions

      • good track record

        • e.g., medicine has a good track record of solving problems i.e., has potential

      • low probability but high potential impact

        • e.g., lottery jackpot

  • 
• Neglectedness (Crowdedness)

  • Benefit

    • Showing high marginal return

      • The more resources go into an area, due to diminishing returns, the less marginal return you have per extra resource added

  • Defined as

    • % increase in resources / extra person or $

    • 'how many resources are already going towards solving this problem?'

  • Example

    • Global Health receives 300bn/a vs 100 million for factory farming

    • Investments for the benefit of short-term vs long-term

  • Measurement 'Yardsticks'

    • Money invested / year

    • Staff working on it

  • How to Score

    • Based on existing data

    • Based on future expectations

      • Any reasons this will not solved by forces of

        • economic market

        • governments

        • hedonistic treadmill of individuals

  • 

• Choosing YOUR area to focus on - Personal Fit

  • Match your skills with skills beneficial for high-scoring ITN areas

Potential to increase your impact vastly (~100x)

• By giving to charities that achieve more per dollar spent

Donors

• Misperception

  • It does not matter which charity (good cause) you choose to focus on - as long as you cause some good

  • Vastly underestimate how much charities vary in impact

• 3% donate based on performance

• 25% do any research before donating

Why the Impact of Charities is Different

• What they do

• How much it costs them to do it

• How far your dollar goes when you support them

• Similarity to the Business World

  • e.g., Best selling author earns multiple times that of an average author

• Difference to the Business World

  • Companies go bankrupt if they don't deliver value (usually)

  • Charities can continue to exist even if they don't cause much of an impact

    • As they depend mostly on marketing & fundraising

  • The Charity market is hence a lot more inefficient, hence you might find even greater difference than in the business world when it comes to 'profit' / 'Impact'

How to Choose?

• Choose programs supported by an independent, impact-focused evaluation

  • What and how cost-effectively their actions

• Help where you can help the most

  • Vast income difference between countries allows your money to go a lot further

  • doubling your income when you live on $5 a day is as (or even more) meaningful as doubling your income when you live on $500 a day

• Find the most cost-effective programs working on a problem

  • Charity evaluators e.g., Giving What We Can

• Look for Leverage Points

  • Direct Impact i.e., buying malaria nets

  • Indirect Impact by influencing others

    • Getting governments to reliably and equitably fund net programs

    • e.g., LEEP (Lead Exposure Elimination Project) leverages government resources in its effort to eliminate childhood lead exposure by helping governments implement lead paint regulation.

    • e.g., The Humane League, through its corporate campaign program, leverages the resources of corporations — redirecting them through commitments to buy only cage-free products.

    • e.g., Giving multipliers — organisations that do outreach and education about effective giving in order to drive more money to particularly high-impact causes — are another example.

• Expand your Circle of Concern

  • Reflecting upon one's values

  • Potential realization of caring about the suffering of many more beings

    • All Humans: People far away

    • Sentience: All sentient beings

    • Time: Future Sentient Beings

Personal Reflections

• Focuses on immediate & narrow impact and does not provide data on longterm & wider impact

Marginal Impact Definition

• Additional difference your specific investment makes.

• Rather than focusing on the total impact of an organization or movement, it’s about recognizing how much your contribution adds to what’s already being done.

Diminishing Marginal Return Definition

• When the first dollars spent are worth more than additional investments.

Advice

• Aware of Biases

  • feel drawn to big movements with a lot of momentum

• Avoid trap of relying on total or average impact when deciding how to allocate your resources

• Steer clear of overinvesting in areas where past success overshadows future potential

• Identify opportunities where your contribution will have the greatest effect.

Example Toaster

• Toaster manufacturer deciding whether to produce one more toaster.

• The business might be highly profitable overall, but if the market is already saturated with toasters, making one more may result in a loss.

• In this case, while the company’s total profits remain large, the marginal profit (the profit from that one extra toaster) is negative—so it’s not worth doing.

Example Wikipedia/media

• Technical infrastructure costs around $36 million a year

  • Wikipedia provides this value at a cost of less than one cent a month per individual

• Receives well over $100 million every year.

  • Unclear about what the extra's money impact is for

Fermi Estimate = Back of the envelope calculation (BOTEC)

What?

• Rough calculation

• To be right within about an order of magnitude

• Getting an answer good enough to be useful without putting large amount of resources in to attain greater accuracy

How?

• Making various simplifying assumptions

• Decomposing the problem into smaller tractable units

Who uses it?

• Open Philanthropy and other organizations in the effective altruism community routinely use BOTECs for impact assessment and cause prioritization.

Practice Opportunity

https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/estimation-game

• 1 kg of plastic is emitted to the ocean per capita per year

  • The plastic emitted to the ocean in 2010 was 8 million tonnes according to OWID (PEO = 8 Mt).

• 0.0001 seabirds and 0.00001 sea mammals are killed by marine plastic pollution per capita per year.

  • Marine plastic debris kills up to 1 million seabirds and 100 thousand sea mammals each year according to the United Nations (SB = 1 M, and SM = 100 k).

• 200 wild fish are caught per capita per year.

  • The catch of wild fish is 0.97 to 2.7 trillion/year according to fishcount.org (WFL = 0.97 T/year to WFH = 2.7 T/year).

• The catch of wild fish is 2 M times as large as the number of seabirds, and 20 M times as large as the number of sea mammals killed by marine plastic pollution.

Most important for how healthy, wealthy, and educated you are:

• not who you are

  • knowledge and hard work, matter too, but much less than the one factor that is entirely outside anyone’s control: whether you happen to be born into a

• where you are.

  • born

    • The vast majority of the world population [97%] live in the country they were born in

    • And so for most people in the world, it is not only the country they live in that determines their income, but it is the country they were born in.

  • productive, industrialized economy or not..

    • Economic Inequality is only one dimension of inequality however a significant one for many aspects people care about

Global Income Distribution

If you live on $30 a day you are part of the richest 15% of the world ($30 a day roughly corresponds to the poverty lines set in high-income countries).

Income Inequality within and between countries

Action Steps

Redistribution

• Government

  • Redistribution through the state plays a large role in reducing inequality within countries and could also reduce global inequality.

  • However, it is domestic not international redistribution.

• Personal

  • If you want to reduce global inequality and support poorer people, you do however have this opportunity. You can donate some of your money.

Economic Growth

• Ending poverty not possible without additional growth

  • Redistribution alone would still mean that billions of people would live in very poor material conditions. The world is far too poor to end poverty without large growth.

Your donation can change someone's life.

The wrong donation can accomplish nothing.

• Fundraisers often rely on social connections or emotional pleas, and almost never make fact-based demonstrations of programs' effectiveness

• Many charities may not be accomplishing anything at all

Your dollar goes further overseas.

• impact you can have with your donation varies greatly between causes

• Education in New York City, it costs over $100,000 to educate a student throughout 12 years of school.

• When supporting international aid, you can save a person's life for a few thousand dollars or so.

Good health is fundamental for a high quality of life, as it influences our ability to enjoy life and participate in daily activities.

Importance

Life Expectancy

• What?

  • For a given year, it represents the average lifespan for a hypothetical group of people, if they experienced the same age-specific death rates throughout their whole lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year.

• 
• Child mortality played a substantial role in increasing overall life expectancy, historically

Child Mortality

• What?

  • Child mortality measures the share of newborns who would not survive to their fifth birthday, given death rates at young ages in a population.

• Why?

  • child mortality rates is vital for understanding the overall health of a country because the early years of life involve numerous health challenges

• 
• 

Maternal Mortality

• What?

  • deaths of women during pregnancy, or within 42 days of ending the pregnancy

• 

Burden of Disease

• What?

  • take into account the morbidity – the impact of disease on people alive

  • 1 DALY represents one lost year of healthy life — it is the equivalent of losing one year in good health because of either premature death or disease or disability

• 

Tractability

This suggests that appropriately targeted and managed international health aid can significantly reduce global health inequalities, and improve living standards worldwide.

Life Expectancy & Health Spending

Health Spending & GDP per Capita

Vaccination of One-Year Olds

Mission

• reduce lead poisoning, which causes significant disease burden worldwide

How?

• advocating for lead paint regulation in countries with large and growing burdens of lead poisoning from paint

Importance

• Disability

  • one in three children are currently affected by lead poisoning to some degree

  • mental disability and IQ loss,

  • increased rates of mental illness and psychopathology

  • significantly reduced lifetime earnings capacity

  • large impact on the prevalence of violent crime

  • Adults & lifetime lead exposure

    • renal disease and cardiovascular disease, including hypertension and coronary artery disease

    • Higher levels of exposure can affect all organ systems, and even result in respiratory difficulties, seizure, coma

• Death

  • causes 1 million deaths per year

• 22 million DALYs every year

  • approximately 1% of the global disease burden

• Economy

  • loss of 1.2% of world GDP

Tractability

• uncertainty around the success of policy change interventions

• Experts suggest that lead paint may be the most tractable source of exposure to address and the easiest to regulate. Lead paint is a major source of exposure to lead, but other sources include batteries, mining, foodstuffs, pipes, and cookware

• Switching to unleaded paints is technically and economically viable for manufacturers

• NGOs have so far been successful in introducing new lead paint laws in 21 low and middle-income countries, demonstrating a precedent for feasibility

• The presence of opposition can often make policies harder to pass

  • One of the strengths of lead paint regulation as an intervention is that it exists in a virtually unopposed political environment. There is no significant lead paint lobby that might oppose regulation, and in some cases the paint industry has even supported the introduction of regulation.

• Lead paint is typically a non-partisan issue, making political opposition less likely

Neglectedness

• 61% of countries have no lead paint regulations whatsoever

• More for low-middle income countries

• Some organisations working to address this issue in low and middle-income countries, including IPEN, ToxicsLink, and Pure Earth

  • Many countries with significant lead burdens remain neglected by other actors. LEEP aims to fill this gap, and target these neglected countries.

Action Plan for LEEP

• Country selection

  • Ensure we target tractable, high-burden, and neglected countries

• Malawi

  • Testing the levels of lead in new paints on the market in Malawi

  • Building relationships with stakeholders and decision-makers.

  • Depending on findings and progress from this stage

    • Either pilot our advocacy campaign in Malawi to introduce lead paint regulation

    • Pivot to another promising country.

• Publish our full findings on our website

  • So that they can be used by other organizations or individuals working on lead poisoning (or policy change more broadly)

• long-term goal

  • Introduce lead regulation in a number of high-burden countries, and reduce lead poisoning at an international scale