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ike comments on Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (177)
I'd like a quick peer review of some low-hanging fruit in the area of effective altruism.
I see that donating blood is rarely talked about in effective altruism articles; in fact, I've only found one reference to it on Less Wrong.
I am also told by those organizations that want me to donate blood that each donation (one pint) will save "up to three lives". For all I know all sites are parroting information provided by the Red Cross, and of course the Red Cross is highly motivated to exaggerate the benefit of donating blood; "up to three" is probably usually closer to "one" in practice.
But even so, if you can save one life by donating blood, and can donate essentially for free (or nearly so), and can donate up to 6.5 times per year...
...and if the expected ROI for monetary donation is in the thousands of dollars for each life, then giving blood is a great deal.
Am I missing anything?
And as a corollary, should I move my charitable giving to bribing people to donate blood whenever there is a shortage?
http://acesounderglass.com/2015/04/07/is-blood-donation-effective-yes/
Right...
How would you usually go about calculating marginal effectiveness?
In this case it seems like the marginal value of blood donation should be roughly what the organizations like the red cross are willing to pay to get additional blood donations.
You could look at how often patients get less blood because of supply issues.
From the Freakonomics blog: "FDA prohibits any gifts to blood donors in excess of $25 in cumulative value".
Various articles give different amounts for the price per pint that hospitals pay, but it looks like it's in the range of $125 in most cases.
Basically that means that the FDA thinks that putting that limit on blood donations won't reduce the amount of blood donation in critical way that results in people dying as a result.
That is briefly mentioned in the post, and in more detail in the comments.
It does depend on certain efficiency assumptions about the Red Cross, though.
If you don't believe that the Red Cross is doing a good job on this then research it's actual practice and openly criticising it could be high leverage. There enough money in the medical system to pay a reasonable price for the blood that's needed.