vaishnav92

GiveWell, and the EA community at large, often emphasize the "cost of saving a life" as a key metric, $5,000 being the most commonly cited approximation. At first glance, GiveWell might seem to be in the business of finding the cheapest lives that can be saved, and then saving them. More precisely, GiveWell is in the business of finding the cheapest DALY it can buy. But implicit in that is the assumption that all DALYs are equal, or that disability or health effects are the only factors that we need to adjust for while assessing the value of a life year.. However, If DALYs vary significantly in quality (as I’ll argue and GiveWell acknowledges we have substantial evidence for), then simply minimizing the cost of buying a DALY risks adverse selection. It’s indisputable that each dollar goes much further in the poorest parts of the world. But it goes further towards saving lives in one the poorest parts of the world, often countries with terrible political institutions, fewer individual freedoms and oppressive social norms. More importantly, these conditions are not exogenous to the cost of saving a life. They are precisely what drive that cost down. Most EAs won’t need convincing of the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, those of us who donate to GiveDirectly do so precisely because this is the case. Extreme poverty and the suffering it entails is worth alleviating, wherever it can be found. But acknowledging this contradicts the notion that while saving lives, philanthropists are suddenly in no position to make judgements on how anything but physical disability affects the value/quality of life. To be clear, GiveWell won’t be shocked by anything I’ve said so far. They’ve commissioned work and published reports on this. But as you might expect, these quality of life adjustments wouldnt feature in GiveWell’s calculations anyway, since the pitch to donors is about the pr