The Unintuitive Power Laws of Giving

Note that Givewell thinks there are errors in DCP2's cost effectiveness estimate for deworming, which they say is "the only DCP2 estimate that we have enough detail on to be able to fully understand and reconstruct." I don't know how reliable DCP2's estimates are in general. Naively, I'd trust Givewell's analyses more.

But, Givewell probably expects a power law distribution for charity cost-effectiveness, too.

The Unintuitive Power Laws of Giving

Unintuitive? Are the intuitions of your expected audience really so poorly calibrated?

(I was expecting something different from the title.)

This argumentation neglects secondary effects. Sure it is easy to quantify medicine but assume you have an intervention that doubles people's income by some means. What are the effects of the additional income? Do they buy medicine, increase hygienic standards? I don't know, but I suppose there are impactful second-order effects at play.

It is worth mentioning that Wealth is particularly worse distributed than income. As if a giant kneed over that income distribution and squished it even more.

I'm skeptical of the accuracy of the income distribution chart. The Wikipedia page linked to below shows GDP per capita for every country. Many countries that we think of as "poor" are actually "middle income". For example, Malaysia is at 16K, Colombia is at 10K, Thailand is at 9K, and China is at 8K. Obviously these mean values are somewhat misleading because of inequality, but still. I lived for many years (in grad school) at an income level of only about 2x the average income of a person living in Thailand, so I think the fact that I don't feel rich is well-grounded in reality.

http://tinyurl.com/d5n87

Edit: there is an issue with the LW markup and Wikipedia's URL naming convention, so I included a TinyUrl instead.

what about other ways of helping people? Political advocacy, development, literacy, human rights, why not them?

Also, in politics (human rights, etc.) you are fighting against powerful organizations, which is dangerous and can reduce the impact of your contributions. In healthcare, there usually aren't big vested interests fighting against you.

Rationally I have to question whether giving money to charities for use in third world countries is a rational decision at all. While there are obvious benefits to, say, exterminating diseases such as polio, measles, ect. I have to question whether many of these charities are even worth investing in at all. We may claim we are looking at X many years of better life, but we have to consider:

1) Does that take into account the fact that these people are now more likely to have OTHER problems, seeing as they aren't dying from this one?

2) Are these numbers totally made up? (The answer appears to be yes)

3) Does this take into account that some lives are considerably less valuable than others?

If I am rescuing people in Africa, their median economic output is going to be far below what I would get for rescuing but a single person in the US, and moreover, the person in Africa is going to accrue additional expenses; their economic activity is unlikely to vastly outweigh the cost of sustaining them, while the person in the US is far more likely to generate a great deal of additional economic activity beyond what is necessary to sustain them.

While it may sound cynical, if there are fewer people in Africa, then that means there are fewer people who are living in poverty; if more people there starve to death today, there will be less people starving to death there in twenty years if we save them and allow them to reproduce. Moreover, if you save one person in the US and make them self sufficient, that is a huge boost. Additionally from a personal standpoint, helping out someone locally is far more likely to bring me benefits than helping out someone in Timbuktu, and, rationally, if I'm spending money and have the option of seeing benefits myself, isn't it more rational for me to spend the money in that way, because then I can actually appreciate the benefits of my personal generosity? Doesn't that also encourage me to be more generous in the future, and allow others to be more generous as well? Someone who can't even make ends meet is not going to be of the same generosity as someone who is making $60k/year.