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Michelle Hutchinson

The end of 2012 was a busy time for Giving What We Can - we ran our first sixth-monthly review process. This involved presenting a progress report and a plan for the future to our advisory committee (composed of GWWC members from a variety of backgrounds) and to the trustees. Following on from that, I'd like to share with you a bit about our plans for the upcoming months, and the advisory committee's feedback. We've already 

, so I'll be concentrating on other areas. If you'd like to see more detailed versions of our plans, retrospective review, and advisors' assessment, please 

GWWC is a community of people who care deeply about helping those in the developing world as much as possible. Therefore, GWWC's ultimate aim is to make sure that as much money as possible is given to the most cost-effective charities we can find. Our plan for the coming year has attempted to specify the ways in which we intend to do this in broad outline, as well as describe more precise plans for the next few months.

In fulfilling our ultimate aims, we have two key sub-goals:

1. To provide a complete resource for those seeking to help people in the developing world as much as possible …

… by providing high-quality information about poverty, and the most cost-effective ways of alleviating it, through our website, lectures, and publications.

… by creating a supportive community of givers.

… by providing a fast and reliable means of donating to the best poverty-related charities.

2. To get more people using this resource in guiding their giving …

… by increasing the number of members in gwwc, the number of chapters, the amount of money pledged, and the amount moved.

… by raising awareness of effective giving amongst the general public, governments, and NGOs.

We also want to support other organisations focussed on effective giving and effective altruism. This includes our sister organisations, 

The research team will continue to provide high quality information on charitable interventions and methodology, which we'll regularly share on the blog and the main website. We'll initiate a members' survey, to find out what information our members would most like to see on the website, and in what form. We will also be asking about how they first got involved, and any obstacles they faced, so that we can help others overcome similar problems.

Our web team is working on updating the members' forum. When the new forum is up and running, the research team will use it as their primary place for sharing drafts and discussing projects. As well as being handy for the research team, this will allow members to read about what we're working on, give comments, and suggest topics.

We recently polled our members to see whether they would be interested in GWWC running a donor advised fund, and since they were, we are currently looking at how to set one up. This will allow people to donate regularly and indefinitely to the same fund, which will then pay out to whichever charity is currently considered to be the most cost-effective. For busy people, we hope this would be useful because they wouldn't have to regularly check to see if our recommended charities have changed. It will also make it easier for people to leave money in their will to whichever charities are in future the most cost-effective.

GWWC is still in the fairly early stages of trying to find the best ways to spread the message of effective giving. So in the coming months we'll be doing some "market research", to try to find out how best to interest people in the idea. We'll also be studying the paths readers take through the website and working out in more detail which pages interest people, and lead to them reading on. That information will help us to improve the website such that more of the people who find it stay to learn more. For example, the charity quotations page gets a large number of hits from Google searches, and therefore we'll be experimenting with different ways to make it more engaging, and make it clear where to navigate to from there. Teams from Oxford Student Consultants will help us with this research.

The communications team has been working on using social media to make people aware of how much good they could do. For example, producing interesting infographics, which can be easily shared with others on Twitter and Facebook.

GWWC chapters, meanwhile, will be trying out different kinds of events. They will monitor how well each event works, and what resources can be provided centrally in order to help other Chapters run such an event.

The advisors felt that GWWC was growing rapidly, and that the 6 month plan contained a rather ambitious number of activities. They worried that having too many projects might mean losing sight of our overall goals. To avoid these dangers, we'll concentrate on prioritising carefully between activities, and working out how each of our actions links with our goals.

GWWC's roots lie in the University of Oxford, and, as such, many of our members are students, and many of our chapters are student chapters. The advisors were concerned about that leading to too much emphasis being placed on appealing to students. To address this, we will be concentrating on ensuring that we provide adequate and appropriate support for our non-student chapters, and to all our members.

The advisors discussed the relation between GWWC and similar organisations such as GiveWell. They questioned where GWWC would position itself relative to such organisations, in order to avoid duplication of work, and to do as much good as possible. This is a difficult question, which we are still in the process of answering. In research we're planning to focus to a greater degree on methodological considerations in the coming months, since that's where our comparative advantage lies. In a couple of months we will reassess whether this seems to be the best approach. We'll continue to think carefully about the best ways to work alongside other organisations, to make sure we're helping each other rather than competing.

In all our activities, we'll aim to monitor progress and to find out to what extent particular activities increase the amount of money going to the best charities. We're keen to keep evolving, and trying to do as much good as we can. If you'd like to help us in this endeavour, whether for 

Giving What We Can in the new year

Bastian Stern

In the first post, I discussed how we can be misled when we compare improvements in cost-effectiveness between organisations whose cost-effectiveness is reported in $/DALY.

The $/DALY-DALY/$-contrast also becomes important when we start talking about averages. For instance, suppose that you want to consider how much better it is donate to, say, charity D, compared to spending equal proportions of one's money on charities C and D(1). In this case, you would want to compare C and D's average cost-effectiveness to the cost-effectiveness of D.

To obtain C and D's average cost-effectiveness, it is tempting to simply take the familiar arithmetic mean(2) (which is what we typically mean by "the" average) of the figures for C and D's cost-effectiveness in $/DALY reported in the table in the previous post (20 $/DALY and 10$/DALY respectively), to obtain (20 $/DALY+10 $/DALY)/2= 15 $/DALY

However, this would deliver the wrong result. To see why, suppose I donate $10 dollar to each of C and D. I would thereby avert $10/(10 $/DALY)+$10/(20 $/DALY)=1.5 DALY . Given that I donated $20 in total, the average cost-effectiveness of my donations would be (15 DALY)/$20=0.075 DALY/$, or, reported in $/DALY, ~13 $/DALY.

The reason for this in general is this: Suppose we want to average ratios (e.g. cost-effectiveness reported in $/DALY) across a number of instances (e.g. different charities, whose cost-effectiveness the ratios measure). In that case, the arithmetic mean must be used to average the ratios only when the denominator is held constant and the numerator variable across the different instances. For instance, this is the case when the ratios are reported in $/DALY, the amount of DALYs averted by each charity is meant to be held constant and the amount of $ donated to each charity variable . Accordingly, when we naively took the arithmetic mean between C's and D's cost-effectiveness reported in $/DALY, we were effectively calculating the effectiveness of splitting one's money between C and D in such a way that the amounts of DALYs that are averted by our donations to each of these charities are held constant (which is clearly not something we are typically interested in). But what we instead wanted to hold constant across instances was the amount of money that flows into the charities .

This problem can be remedied by taking the harmonic mean(3) rather than the arithmetic mean of C's and D's cost-effectiveness reported in $/DALY, i.e. 2/(1/(20 $/DALY)+1/(10 $/DALY))=~13 $/DALY.

In general, when we are averaging ratios across a number of instances, we have to use the harmonic mean exactly when the numerator is held constant and the denominator variable across the instances, e.g. when, as in our case above, the ratios are reported in $/DALY, the amount of $ donated to each charity is meant to be held constant across instances and the amount of DALYs averted by each charity is variable.

Note that effectively, taking the harmonic mean amounts to converting the cost-effectiveness estimates for C and D into DALY/$, taking their arithmetic mean, and then converting back into $/DALY. Accordingly, had we reported C's and D's cost-effectiveness in terms of DALY/$ at the outset, we would not have been misled in using the straightforward arithmetic mean.

What the considerations in post I and this post suggest is that it is usually wise to report cost-effectiveness in terms of DALY/$ rather than $/DALY, because then

the comparison of differences in cost-effectiveness that we are about are more conspicuous, as the differences could be obtained by simple subtraction and;

the most often relevant averages of cost-effectiveness could be reached simply by taking the familiar arithmetic mean, rather than the more cumbersome harmonic mean.

Accordingly, it would be helpful if it became conventional to report cost-effectiveness in terms of DALY/$ rather than $/DALY. Until this is the norm, we must take care not to be misled when averaging and comparing differences in cost-effectiveness estimates.

(1) Or similarly, that you are interested how much better D is then choosing between C and D at random, with an equal probability of choosing either. (2) The arithmetic mean of n values a1, a2, a3, … is given by ((a1+a2+⋯+an))/n. (3) The harmonic mean of n values a1, a2, …, an is given by n/(1/a1+1/a2…+1/an).

The $/DALY Illusion: Part II - Averaging

Julia Wise

I've heard the argument that we should "think globally, act locally" because we understand the needs of our own communities best. I'm willing to accept this for some situations.

I think it boils down to where your special help would be useful. If you pass a car accident, yes, your physical presence means you have a unique ability to help.

Likewise, when it comes to personal interactions, people are not interchangeable. Getting a card or letter from a stranger is not so comforting as hearing from someone you love. We evolved to interact with people we know in real life, and this still satisfies us more than some abstract kindness from a stranger.

So recognize the areas where you can be uniquely helpful: being kind with your family and friends. Sudden emergencies where you are physically present. Being a good neighbor.

But here's where I think people go askew with this logic: they feel that financial help should also work this way. After all, don't I understand the needs in my own community better than anyone? So I should fund projects in my own community, and other people should take care of theirs.

But rich people live in communities with other rich people, and poor people live near poor people. Your average American probably has several relatives or neighbors who have a few thousand dollars in their bank accounts. Your average Nigerian does not know any such people. When both rich and poor people give within their own communities, the opera gets a lot more funding than the maternal health clinic in Nigeria.

Of course, lots of first-worlders have given misguided aid because they misunderstood the needs of people in other countries. But you can misunderstand the needs even in your own community.

Last summer when I was studying in Ecuador, several of my fellow travellers volunteered in a local orphanage. The place was in bad shape, and it was hard to see the kids living in deprivation without wanting to do something. So some Americans decided to raise money for the orphanage from their friends at home. After all, they saw these kids every day and had seen the need first-hand.

Except they found out the reason the place was falling to pieces was that the owner was embezzling money. Those donations would probably never have reached the kids. Americans weren't alone in being duped by this guy. Every Christmas he had a big fundraiser and lots of Ecuadorans gave money, clothes, and toys. The locals were just as misinformed, despite it being in their own community, because they hadn't seen the financials.

This can happen in any country. At home in the US, I saw a lot of misguided community help during the summer I worked in a domestic violence shelter. We had a garage overflowing with blankets, because people had this idea that battered women need blankets. What they actually needed was a child's car seat so the children could safely ride to doctors' visits. The fact that donors were local didn't give them special insider knowledge about the residents' needs. It would have been better for them to donate cash so that we could use it for what was most needed (the car seat, not more blankets).

There are good and bad charities working in all parts of the world. Find ones that will use your money well, and that are doing important work. (And if you live in a rich part of the world, the greatest need probably isn't local.) Then donate money, which will help more than your blankets, old clothes, or volunteering.

And then find someone you love and give them the hug or the kind word that only you can give.

When is your help special?

Rob Wiblin

Giving What We Can recently produced a strategic plan for the next six months, including for its research. This plan has been discussed and improved after meetings with an external advisory committee and our trustees.

We are blessed with a wide range of promising research questions, which means the challenge has been picking out the best ones. Those we considered properly are listed in full at the bottom of this post.

Some highlights for what we hope to achieve over the next two to four months are:

 to coordinate and build our growing research team, and encourage greater autonomy among participants. This will complement a new discussion board for members.

Produce and run several training sessions for volunteers to help them understand the approach we use, including its strengths and weaknesses.

the strengths and weaknesses of existing analyses of climate change

making estimates when you are uncertain about many things

why we don't think we should have any 'pure time preference'

the expected returns on financial investment, and others valuable additions to our advice on 'giving now vs giving later' (yet to be determined)

the kinds of strategies that provide 'leverage', their likely strengths and weaknesses, and how they can be identified.

write on whether we should place less weight on the death of infants relative to older children

finish, or at least start, a survey of the meta-charities, like GWWC, that exist including their methodologies and recommendations

Revise our education, TB, hygiene and sanitation, migration, climate change and maternal health pages, and upload new pages on biomedical research and meta-charity.

Update the data and method used in our 'how rich are you' calculator to accommodate the latest research.

Maintain the flow of at least 1 research focussed blog post each week.

Come to a conclusion on whether to recommend 

, and Hilleman Laboratories, or another two organisations who are willing to participate.

Explore how we could help find funding for WHO-CHOICE, should they require it to complete a major piece of research, and also explore a possible collaboration with 

As this list suggests, GWWC has decided to experiment with fewer in-depth evaluations of charities over the next 3-6 months. There are several considerations behind this:

Such projects are highly time consuming and difficult to do 'part time';

We have identified a number of crucial methodological or theoretical questions which we expect will provide a higher return for each hour we invest in them, and which are more suited to our skills;

Thanks to the extensive work done by GiveWell in investigating two of our current recommendations, it will be challenging to find a charity that is reliably better with our current resources.

Nonetheless, a significant number of charities which use potentially high-leverage approaches have still never been analysed for cost effectiveness or room for more funding, so we intend to continue surveying these options. Having done so, we could either investigate further ourselves should a very compelling option showed up, or encourage another organisation to do so. Within four months we will reassess whether this reorientation is delivering the results we hope.

I hope this provides some insight into where we hope to go in the medium term. These plans remain flexible depending on what seems valuable and possible, so get in touch if you would like to offer feedback.

And with that, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a rambunctious New Year's celebration. I look forward to returning full of energy for further fascinating research and I hope you also look forward to either participating in or reading it!

Some extra details on the projects we considered

We talked through 11 different research areas, and rated them on the following criteria:

How valuable is the resulting information?

How difficult will it be to make progress?

How much will working on this topic help to grow Giving What We Can, and other projects in the effective altruist movement?

How personally interested are we in this topic?

Is this a prerequisite for other research we want to do?

Given the above, do we think we should be working on this topic now?

The topics are below, with those we rated in 

 in neglected areas such as we have attempting with ACTION and others.

simple analysis of previously unconsidered charities

 in order to see if they are worth us or someone else investigating in more detail (similar to Back of the Envelope Guide to Philanthropy)

What spillovers are there from policies in rich countries to poor countries?

Long term impacts and the astronomical waste

Requires thinking about the internal rate of return on time from various kinds of spending (social return, financial return, movement building return, information gathering return)

Short paper: Discount rate issues - write a paper on this with a view to influencing DCP3

Meta: How valuable is meta-charity, or even meta-meta-charity, research? Do any such organisations have room for more funding (RFMF).

Look around for evidence of whether this work is influential

How can we weigh e.g. getting a better education against health; or more money versus education; or having to move due to climate change to health; etc. What do we know about the utility impacts of these things?

Short paper: How to value life at different ages, in particular around infancy?

Meta-meta: How to identify awesome projects

Where should we expect to find groups with RFMF?

Dealing with cumulative uncertainty and regression to the mean (with a view to influencing DCP3)

Pascal's mugging, fat tails and 'weirdness theory'

What forms of leverage exist and are they illusory?

Any other issues associated with how to identify causes out on the far right tail of effectiveness that otherwise wouldn't get done

Meta-meta: Write a report into meta-charities, evaluating their methodology and quality of their recommendations

Market research to increase recruitment of new volunteers/interns/members

What could make the public more receptive to our message?

Our research goals for the next few months

William MacAskill

Note: This article hasn't been updated recently. We're keeping it up for the historic record of the debate, and because people still seem to refer to the arguments.

In a previous post, I explained why I was surprised by GiveWell's recent recommendation of GiveDirectly. In this post, I'll take the opportunity to explain some other general concerns I have with GiveWell. As before, I'll note that these just represent my view, rather than those of GWWC as a whole, and that such criticism should be taken as a sign of respect for an organisation which I generally think very highly of. We are making these suggestions in part because we draw heavily on GiveWell's own research and want it to be as compelling as possible.

I'll also note that many of these concerns can also be applied to GWWC itself. This list therefore also represents a list of improvements we would like to make to our own research and publications in future.

Different countries vary dramatically in their rate of economic growth. In 

, India's economy grew by 7.8%, whereas Namibia's economy grew by just 3.8%. In the long-run, insofar as your donation generates some jump in the productivity of the labour force, compounding effects will cause it to snowball into substantially more income if used in India than in Namibia. On this basis one might argue that donations to India constitute a better 'investment' than donations to Namibia. On the other hand, one might reason that, because we should expect people to be richer in India in the future, they will get less benefit from any extra income in the future. The economic trajectory of the country that you try to help could potentially be a 'crucial consideration' concerning which charity you should give to, but it hasn't yet been addressed by GiveWell.

This is not even considering the magnitude and persistence of an intervention's impact on economic productivity. This is another crucial consideration which we understand GiveWell has looked into and found very difficult to answer.

As far as I know, GiveWell haven't commissioned a thorough 

 of their recommendations. (GiveWell have done some external evaluations in the past, but mainly in 2010 or 2011, and mainly done by volunteer undergraduates or recent graduates.) This surprises me. Whereas businesses have a natural feedback mechanism, namely profit or loss, research often doesn't, hence the need for peer-review within academia. This concern, when it comes to 

, is even greater. If GiveWell's analysis and recommendations had major flaws, or were systematically biased in some way, it would be challenging for outsiders to work this out without a thorough independent evaluation. Fortunately, GiveWell has the resources to, for example, employ two top development economists to each do an independent review of their recommendations and the supporting research. This would make their recommendations more robust at a reasonable cost.

To put it simply: If GiveWell's top recommended charities are so good, why hasn't their room for more funding been used up?

, because the best ones tend to be snapped up quite quickly. But they have provided very public information on their top-recommended causes, some of which have been on the list for years. And we know that major philanthropic foundations (such as the Gates Foundation, and CIFF) are aware of their research. So it's surprising, in their view, that the room for more funding for their top-recommended organisations wasn't used up rather more rapidly. This either suggests that their model of how philanthropy works is wrong, or that their recommendations aren't believed by the big players in the 'philanthropic market'.

Even if we accept that their model of an efficient market in philanthropy is inaccurate, and so could attribute the failure of big foundations to fund their recommended charities to irrationality or different values, there remains cause for concern. GiveWell functions in an advisory capacity to GoodVentures, which has very similar aims and attitudes to those of GiveWell. GoodVentures' endowment could easily use up the room for more funding at GiveWell's top charities. So it raises the question why GoodVentures doesn't donate to GiveWell's top charities: even if not exhausting their room for more funding, at least using up a considerable proportion of it. The most plausible explanation in my mind is that GiveWell thinks that GoodVentures can better spend its money at a later date after further research. In which case, it's hard to see why individual donors shouldn't save and donate later, or even try to give to GoodVentures. Perhaps that's wrong, but it's worthy of discussion.

GiveWell claim that they want to maximise good done per dollar invested, but they haven't explained what they think 'good' consists in and why. Do future people count? If so, how much, and how far into the future? Do they have a discount rate? How much priority should they give to the worst off? Is an infant death worse, or better, than the death of a 20 year old? How do they weigh improvements in health against extensions in health? What do they think is the relationship between economic growth and wellbeing?

These are just of theoretical interest - varying any of the parameters could lead to different charitable recommendations. For example, when they discuss AMF's cost-effectiveness, they focus on under-5 mortality. But they don't discuss the fact that most people think that an infant death is not as great a loss as a young adult death; an intuitive view that has good theoretical grounds. (This is something that will likely be taken into account in the next generation of the DALY metric, in the third edition of the Disease Control Priorities Project.) Depending on how, exactly, one thinks one should weigh saving infant lives against saving adult lives, this issue could make AMF several times less cost-effective relative to SCI than it is currently judged to be. This one methodological issue could therefore dramatically alter their recommendations.

To their credit, GiveWell has moved towards helping people to tailor their choice to their values, by comparing the cost of bed nets delivered, children dewormed, and cash delivered. This can be done using spreadsheets and explanations provided in some recent 

Blog

Giving What We Can in the new year

The $/DALY Illusion: Part II - Averaging

When is your help special?

Our research goals for the next few months

Some General Concerns About GiveWell

The $/DALY Illusion: Part I - Comparing Improvements

The Way It Was

Can we evaluate political advocacy?

Letting Myself Care

Christmas gifts, goats and cash-transfer charities