Why the downvotes for this? (Note: ThisSpaceAvailable is not the only person who initially misinterpreted JonahSinick's "no more than 3x lower" construction in the same way; elharo did too, and was -- I think -- more offended than he need have been as a consequence.)
In my last post I wrote about how Peter Singer’s implicit past claim that [one can save a child’s life for the cost of a pair of shoes] is misleading.
Having said that, it’s important to highlight that if one ignores indirect effects, funding bed net distribution to save lives is an extremely good opportunity for people in the developed world to increase the number of valuable years of life that people experience.
The situation is probably completely different when one considers indirect effects. I’ll postpone discussion of indirect effects to a later date.
Consider the question of what the quality of life is in the developing world. The GiveWell blog post Quality of life in the developing world reads:
The reader can draw his or her own conclusion from this. It seems likely to me that the average life in the developing world is worth living, and that the value of an average year of life in the developing world is no more than 3x lower than the value of an average year of life in the developed world.
In my last post, I wrote about how the explicit estimate for Against Malaria Foundation’s marginal cost per life saved is $2k, and the fact that the actual cost could be significantly higher owing to Bayesian regression.
Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell. All views are my own.