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JoshuaZ comments on Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach - Less Wrong Discussion
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Another consideration is whether or not the Village Reach will actually let them live to adulthood. Saving people as infants doesn't mean that they will live to adulthood.
If I remember correctly, infant mortality rate in sub-Saharan Africa is around 10%; by way of contrast with that of ~ 1% in the United States. I think (but am not sure) that the bulk of this difference is due to vaccinations. I can dig up a citation if you'd like me to.
Even if the 10% infant mortality remained with vaccinations, in absence of evidence to the contrary one should expect that saving ten infants will allow nine of them to live past infancy.
According to GiveWell's page on standard of living in the developing world sub-Saharan Africans have about a 50% chance of living to age 65.
The rate in the US is 6.3 per 1000 live births, according to Wikipedia. Mozambique (where VillageReach appears to focus their efforts) has a rate of 95.9 per 1000.
Eyeballing this GiveWell graph gives sub-Saharan Africans about a 50% chance of living to age 50. I suspect dodgy statistics.
This is a good point that I hadn't noticed before; the graph linked gives a figure of around 35% of living to age 65; so there's something wrong with the data or analysis from at least one of the two sources.
This is Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell. I just wanted to clear up any confusion about GiveWell's charts. The difference between the two charts is the region they cover. The chart on our standard of living in the developing world page shows life expectancy across all of the WHO's low-income countries. The chart on our page on life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa is only for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Thanks for coming along and clarifying things!
Possibly it is just an older graph. The one I linked to says data from "2001", while yours says data from "2006".
If so, 15 years difference in life expectancy in 5 years is impressive progress!
It's worth noting that standard life expectancy figures include infant mortality, etc. and thus already account for this. I believe the average life expectancy is actually ~65 years if you correct for infant mortality.