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Rob Wiblin

GiveWell interview: on causes outside global health, GiveWell Labs and fundraising

Research Director Robert Wiblin interviewed GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld on a range of issues suggested by volunteers and members of Giving What We Can. This is the third post, which covers causes beyond global health, GiveWell Labs, and charity fundraising. An unabridged transcript of the interview is available 

RW: You said that you thought that most of the increase in cost-effectiveness - or your hopes of finding charities that are more cost-effective - came from different sorts of causes, such as scientific research, catastrophic risk and migration. What are some of the top priorities at the moment?

EH: They are areas about which we currently know very little: the broad area of funding scientific research and the broad area of advocacy. An example of the latter would be lobbying for increased foreign aid or better allocated foreign aid or advocating for something related to immigration regulations across countries. These are areas that we find appealing. So far, we’ve published a page on 

 - both of those would fall into the catastrophic risk category. We’ve also published a page on 

 in low-income countries. Basically, we see these big areas to look into. Broadly, we’re open to pretty-much anything that could have a significant impact on humanitarian outcomes. We’re trying to come up with a systematic process to briefly investigate different areas, share what we’ve learned, and then be in a position to decide which programs deserve increased attention from GiveWell. The area we’ve actually spent the most time on is meta-research - primarily medical meta-research. This means trying to improve the replicability and reproducibility of medical trials, which to me, somewhat surprisingly, is a field that could use some support.

RW: So I imagine in a lot of these other causes that you’re hoping to investigate and get recommendations from in the future, it’s going to be harder to get firm evidence of impact in the same way that was possible in global health. Are you going to, to some extent, lower the standards or be willing to accept greater risk in those recommendations?

EH: It’s definitely going to be totally different. I think a nice quality of the research and recommendations is that they’re about as quantifiable and measurable as I think charity can be, and even then I think there’s a large aspect of the conclusions that we’ve reached that are not based entirely on quantifiable information. As we move onto new areas, they’re obviously much less measurable, quantifiable, objective, and so therefore our standards are going to remain high. Our standards of critical analysis, transparency, open discussion will be as high as ever. In some ways, I think we will need to have an even higher focus on our critical analysis, because it’s so much easier to go down a bad path when you don’t have that quantifiable outcome or that very measurable bottom-line to hold yourself accountable to. It is risky and it is difficult, but we want to do this - we feel the need to do it - because if they could be more impactful than the organisations we’ve found today, then we have to look at them. GiveWell is not about minimising risk or finding high-probability-of-impact charities. What we broadly care about is having the most humanitarian impact per dollar, and if that means having more risk, there is absolutely no reason that we would stay away from it, I mean we intend to be very bold.

 to try to get new and exciting projects off the ground – how's that going? What kinds of things are you funding, if any, and how much money is in the pot?

EH: We're open to getting new organizations off the ground, providing partnership to existing organizations, open to writing a blank check outside of global health and development that doesn't have the same type of evidence. All that is included in GiveWell Labs. The biggest focus that we see now for GiveWell Labs is figuring out which causes we want to be involved in. Do I want to focus in on global health? Is that the place GW Labs can have the most impact? Or should it be a particular causes such as advocacy? That's the project that we're undertaking. This is all at very preliminary stages, so what is out there so far are the shorter investigations of new causes that we've published, some conversations we've had with various experts in different areas, and then our research meeting audio and transcripts. But broadly GiveWell Labs today is sort of where GiveWell itself was in the fall of 2007, beginning of 2008. Preliminary stage of trying to figure out how we should go about doing the work.

RW: What difficulties with giving unrestricted funding to charities were you trying to address by starting GiveWell Labs? Do you want to have more control over the projects or do things that no existing organization was working on?

EH: There are a few different aspects of GiveWell vs. GiveWell Labs. GiveWell direct aid is what the current GiveWell was up until the creation of GiveWell Labs. We were looking for proven cost-effective organizations that can take in more money and do more good. What we were looking for was programs that had strong evidence of effectiveness, organizations that could take in an arbitrary amount of money (we recommend them, they could get $250,000 or $5 million) and they would accomplish more good. When we moved to GiveWell Labs we want to be able to do something else, consider causes that don't have the same evidence of effectiveness. There's no way one could make an argument for the cause of meta-research using the same criteria that we have used for GiveWell direct aid. Bed nets are a very different animal than funding literature reviews or reproducing existing studies. We want to look into those areas, this is something different, therefore we want to call it something different and see it as a different activity. There is this other change that goes from providing unrestricted to project funding. I think the biggest driver is that as you move into these other areas, the most common way organizations work is through the provision of project-related funding - the unrestricted vs. project distinction is not major. If we have a particular focus and we find relevant organizations, then sure, unrestricted funding works. On the other hand, we might want to play a more active role in the funding process. Major philanthropists could say that they want to create these organizations or that they want a set of organizations to focus on these particular issues that they may not have otherwise focused on. That is also a diversion from what we've done in the past, from being more passive and funding existing organizations to do the things they already want to do, to being more of a driving force behind the activities.

 suggesting that it should be possible to beat the cost-effectiveness of GW's top recommended organizations by instead giving to an organization that would fundraise for those charities. It seems like each dollar spent on fundraising raises $4+ for whichever organization - even using fairly mundane fundraising methods like having people speak to strangers on the street. Do you think this argument makes sense? If so, does it have any consequences for what our members or anyone else should be doing?

EH: I wonder what led you to the conclusion that a dollar on fundraising creates more than an additional dollar of donations? If it were true, charities should spend significantly more on fundraising, that would make them successful. The major question is, do you feel that is the case?

RW: My impressions are that it’s something that is generally accepted among fundraisers that they can pay people to do this and raise more money than what it costs them. Your main doubt is around the empirics of that? If there were strong evidence, would it potentially change your recommendations, or attract more attention from you?

EH: It could. I'm pretty skeptical that that's the case. A lot of organizations out there could easily increase the amount of money they spent on fundraising. I don't have specific knowledge, but Doctors Without Borders is a gigantic organization. They're credited with potentially creating direct-mail fundraising. Very successful. They also have a relatively low fundraising ratio. They could increase the fundraising ratio – why don't they? If it were as simple as that case make out, you should see charities behaving differently.

RW: That's the big question, why wouldn't they just spend more money on fundraising? Donors are really averse to organizations with a large overhead - this is a large obsession. If a charity was spending too much on fundraising, that would deter people from giving in the first place. Do you think that's a possible explanation?

EH: I'm skeptical that it's the main driver of what's going on here. Fundraising is hard. At GiveWell, I don't feel like we could spend an additional dollar and raise two additional dollars for our top charities. We just don't see the curve of what happens as we scale up money spent on fundraising driving more money to our top charities. I think there's a lot of charities out there – why don't they spend more? Or you're making an argument for why they don't. I think there's all these organizations out there that are incredibly successful, professional, talented at raising money, and they give their fundraising ratios a relatively low amount. If it were as simple as this argument implies, it doesn't make sense that they would do this.

RW: What if you were a small charity like AMF? If you're a large organization, everybody already knows you, it's possible you could speak or send something to everyone who would be likely to donate. But there are many people out there that haven't heard of AMF – do you think there might be more low-hanging fruit yet?

EH: Maybe. They're getting letters from MSF, from Nothing But Nets, I think it's a more competitive, more challenging space than is implied. I think the bigger picture is, it doesn't quite sync up that this should be obvious, and therefore I would assess this case on the basis of a specific organization demonstrating that it would be able to do this. It's a competitive field, there are incentives for people to go into this and be successful, so all of those are reasons that the theoretical case is not particularly compelling to me. If someone said, “I am able to do this,” and address all the questions, particularly on whether they were just reallocating funds, which is challenging to determine, that would be interesting. But it doesn't strike me as one of the more promising endeavors.

Look out for the last part of the interview on this blog soon.

Image credit: NASA/ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Peter Hurford

Just how rich are you?

Sure, you might not feel all that rich compared to the mansions and millionaires around you, but what if you compared yourself to the global poor?

If you’ve played around with Giving What We Can’s 

, you may have found that you’re much richer than you thought. For example, a family of four in the United States earning the typical (median) amount of income (about $50,000) is actually 7.7x richer than the typical person worldwide.

But what you might not know is that Giving What We Can recently updated the calculator with the latest research into worldwide income distribution. 

, an economist and researcher at the World Bank, updated the figures. Previously, the calculator had used 2002 data, but is now updated to 2008 numbers, the latest year for which there are surveys for most countries. Furthermore, all calculations are adjusted for inflation and also now adjust for 'purchasing power parity', or the fact that goods are more expensive in some countries than others. Milanovic’s research and approach can be found in his book '

This new data also shows that the typical global income has risen since 2002 because of solid economic growth across much of the developing world over that period. People in the developed world who previously found themselves in the 99th percentile might now find themselves in the 98th or 97th percentile instead. This is a great thing! Nonetheless, such a person would still have an income more than 30 times higher than the bottom third of Indians. The typical person globally is still living on what just $4.10 would buy you in the US each day.

One should note that the calculator will not display data for people below the 80th percentile of earnings worldwide (i.e., individuals earning less than $7,000, or a four person household earning a combined income under $27,000). Those who would like the full distribution for each country should use the World Bank's 

However, with this new update, the 'How Rich Am I?' calculator is the most accurate simple income calculator on the web, and should be a useful tool for those wanting to place yourself on the distribution. So 

 and see how truly rich you are, compared to the rest of the world!

Siyi Hao

Don't be shy, donate to SCI!

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) attempts to tackle some of the most socioeconomically devastating diseases in sub-Saharan Africa. Through their work in countries such as Burundi and Ethiopia, SCI fights to stem epidemics of schistosomiasis and intestinal worms, both parasitic diseases spread by contaminated water. SCI is one of Giving What We Can’s high-confidence recommendations, as well as being among GiveWell’s top recommendations. In this post we take a look at SCI as they make inroads into new operational areas.

Although they have low mortality rates, schistosomiasis and intestinal worms impair the growth and cognitive development of millions, particularly children. The knock-on effects from this are obviously huge, and tackling these parasitic diseases poses one of the greatest challenges in addressing sub-Saharan Africa’s developmental problems.

SCI conducts mass deworming programs, treating large cohorts of people with deworming drugs at a cost of around $0.79 per treatment. SCI works on getting grants, identifying recipients and offering support to stricken regions.

Predominantly, because of its strong track record and high cost-efficiency. SCI has completed many national deworming programs. Indeed, with SCI’s support, serious schistosomiasis morbidity was eliminated in Uganda through 2003 to 2010. Furthermore, SCI’s treatments only cost 50 pence per person per year, and according to WHO, treating Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) is a ‘best buy’ in public health. At the end of April, SCI reached a milestone by offering the 100 millionth treatment for bilharzia.

SCI will now be contributing to funding the launch of the National Master Plan on Neglected Tropical Disease in Ethiopia, and has agreed to provide funds for operations in both Tigray and Zege regions in Ethiopia. SCI will also be injecting money into expanding their operations in Mozambique, Senegal, and Uganda through to October 2013. Furthermore, as of 2013, SCI is expanding its operations into Mauritania and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Historically, in the face of a lack of publicity and funding, SCI has worked to treat NTDs and has generated substantial results. You now have an opportunity to contribute to an organisation expanding its operations within established target zones, and into new areas of sub-Saharan Africa. A donation to SCI therefore represents a donation to an organisation which has a huge amount of ambition, and is backed by a strong track-record in treating NTDs. Furthermore, the implications of SCI’s work for sub-Saharan development mean that the effects of 

every donation will be felt for decades to come.

Giving What We Can

We're hiring!

In just three years, Giving What We Can has grown to over 300 members in 25 countries worldwide. The community has pledged over $130m towards ending poverty.

We're now looking to step up our efforts. We're looking to build a dynamic, inspiring team to help spread the word, grow the community and produce rock-solid research.

We're recruiting for a Director of Communications/Community, a Director of Research and a Research Fellow in Global Prioritisation. And we're always on the look out for graduate volunteers and interns. Details below - or 

. Do you know anyone that might be interested? Share this post with them!

Are you ready to take Giving What We Can forward? We've just authored our communications strategy for 2013-2014 and we're looking for someone to deliver our message to our target audience and create thousands of leads to follow up. You'll help to shift public debate so that everyone who's anyone will be talking about effective altruism. Thanks to your efforts, giving 10% will increasingly be seen as the social norm.

You'll have online and offline marketing experience. You'll be able to tap into networks of early adopters and organise brilliant, creative events for which word spreads virally. And you'll know how good content gets produced - in video, web and print formats - and be willing to get stuck in where you can. Bonus points for knowledge of Adobe CS or equivalents, Drupal and HTML/CSS.

You'll be able to draw on a small team of volunteers based in Oxford and remotely, and you'll work hand-in-hand with the Director of Community - or, for the right candidate, we will combine the two roles. You'll report to the Executive Director.

Do you love the idea of building a movement? Can you hold seventeen email conversations while also speaking on the phone and writing sparkling, engaging member newsletters? In this role you'll grow our community at a faster rate than ever before - and with every new member you'll be saving lives.

You'll provide one-to-one guidance to members and potential members - helping inspire members to reach out to their social networks to grow the community. You'll have a track record of building or strengthening a community and bringing new members on board. You'll understand the value of CRM systems and learn CiviCRM in no time - if you don't know it already.

You'll have a team of volunteers to draw on and you'll work hand-in-hand with the Director of Communications - or, for the right candidate, we'll combine the two roles. You'll report to the Executive Director.

In this role, you'll help change the way people think about charity, shifting hundreds of thousands of pounds to better causes. You'll directly improve the lives of thousands.

Your main role will be to identify the next level of world-beating charities. And with slick presentation skills you'll be able to translate the detailed quantitative analysis and research methods you use to a wide audience via speaking events, workshops and conferences, as well as through blog posts and social media. Another area of research is in 'cause selection', trying to identify the best metrics to target in order to most improve the world in the long run.

You'll be an inspiring manager of a passionate group of interns and volunteers working both in Oxford and remotely. You'll report to the Executive Director.

In this role your overall aim would be to do high-level research into which approaches for improving the world are likely to have the best long-term expected impact. As a full-time member of the CEA team you would play an important role in finding the best ways to do good and moving resources into them. The specifics of this role are still to be determined and would be negotiated with a successful candidate.

An undergraduate degree in a subject such as development or global health, economics, econometrics, statistics, political science, ethics, mathematics, physics, philosophy or a field that offers relevant training is essential. The ideal candidate would also have several years of work or postgraduate experience, a thorough understanding of the key ideas of 'effective altruism' and a strong academic background, though we will consider candidates without all of these characteristics.

A lot of charities will tell you that you can make a difference. Here we actually calculate that difference and we are driven by improving the measurable results of this organisation.

Offices don't come much more intellectually stimulating than ours. Based in offices shared with the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, you'll be part of a team that dedicates itself to understanding how we can do the most good - and actually delivering on those ideas.

All three positions offer fantastic personal development opportunities. We're looking for talent as well as experience - and you'll have opportunities to learn on the job, supported by a community dedicated to boosting their personal effectiveness.

Follow the link to the application form in any of the full job description documents.

Our sister organisation, 80,000 Hours, is 

The Worst Way of Picking the Worst Charities

. Here, they ranked non-profit organizations by the amount of money they paid solicitors, or fundraisers, and the amount those fundraisers returned. They mention that “watchdog groups say no more than 35 percent of donations should go to fundraising costs” and suggest that these organizations are basically nothing more than scams designed to get fundraisers rich. Perhaps these charities listed here actually are some of the worst. Perhaps they’re even outright scams. However, the amount of money they spend on fundraising isn’t going to let you know whether the organization is one not worth your donations.

 — three organizations that regularly rank non-profits — came together and wrote a 

"The percent of charity expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly referred to as ‘overhead’ — is a poor measure of a charity’s performance.”

Actually, focusing exclusively on the amount of fundraising when considering how bad a non-profit is is actually very dangerous to philanthropy. Why? As Dan Pallotta mentions in his TED Talk, entitled 

The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong

, non-profits need to spend money on overhead to grow and expand. Organizations need to spend money on fundraising in order to spread awareness and get more people to contribute to their organization.

For example, consider a for-profit car company. When they get money in from sales, they don’t spend all of it to immediately produce new cars. Instead, they spend money on advertising, market research, safety research, testing, etc. Yet, in the world of non-profits, all of this is labeled “overhead” and demonized. If a non-profit could take $1 million that it raised and re-invest it in fundraising to get $10 million, then they’ve grown a lot as an organization and can now afford to help many more people than it could before. Yet, non-profits frequently don’t do this, because donors see it as a negative thing. Therefore, the way we think about charity has to change.

“In fact, many charities should spend more on overhead. Overhead costs include important investments charities make to improve their work. [...] These expenses allow a charity to sustain itself (the way a family has to pay the electric bill) or to improve itself (the way a family might invest in college tuition).” So when we want to decide if a charity is good or not, what should we focus on instead? The CEOs of Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and the Wise Giving Alliance suggest focusing on “transparency, governance, leadership, and results”.

I agree. What really matters is a non-profit you can trust to get things done. For example, would you rather have a non-profit that takes your $100 donation, uses it to raise $1000, and then help ten people? Or would you rather have a non-profit that takes your $100 donation and only ends up helping one person? Or would you rather have a non-profit that is just more cost-effective, able to help one hundred people on $100 instead of $1000? Or, the best of both worlds, an organization that takes your $100, raises $1000, and then helps 1000 people?

Sure, those on the list of America’s Worst Charities aren’t getting much out of their fundraising budgets. But other organizations — the ones that get results — do. And they provide you the opportunity to get a lot of bang for your buck. We should focus our efforts on figuring out which organizations are capable of being effective and support them, no matter how much they fundraise or spend on other overhead costs.

Deworm The World: an investment in global development

Deworm the World (DtW) delivers school-based deworming treatment to over 37 million children in 27 countries worldwide. It is one of our recommended charities, and is listed under 'opportunities for leverage'. In this post we recap on DtW as they shift their geographical focus towards India.

Parasitic worms pose one of the most serious health and development problems for underdeveloped nations, as they put millions at risk of reduced health and productivity. However, through DtW the outlook for relief and development is very optimistic. Indeed, it is estimated that school absenteeism could be reduced by 25% and adult earnings can be increased by 20% by effective deworming.

In terms of their approach, DtW's targeting of schools makes them a particularly effective organisation. Teachers are given training in deworming, and pupils receive treatment in school. In this way, their work touches the lives of a far greater number of children, as there are far more schools and teachers than there are clinics and doctors.

According to a GiveWell talk with DtW's Alix Zwane, the organisation will focus increasingly on India, and reduce its work in Africa to mainly that in Kenya. At the moment, DtW operates in three areas in Bihar, Rajasthan and Delhi in India. It offered treatments to 40 million children in India last year, and is looking to offer the same to 100 million more. DtW already has the funding for around 60-70% of that number, but now needs funding to cover the rest. In Kenya, DtW already has funding for the operation through 2015-16, and the government has been supportive towards DtW's work.

 by Giving What We Can for several reasons. First of all, it is one of very few charities which focus on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), another donor-fundable charity Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) being a further rare example. Secondly, it has experienced staff who are responsive to evidence. Moreover, in the case of DtW, governments bear most of the cost of treatment, and so they may be able to leverage that spending for a larger impact.

In Bihar, India, the local government is hoping to undertake the next round of deworming in September this year. DtW's Karen Levy told us that DtW is pledging for a new round of funding in order to keep up the success of the deworming program in Bihar. A donation to GtW therefore offers a rare opportunity to fund effective development as well as targeted relief. 

 and your money will contribute to a programme that is genuinely able to count lives improved in the millions rather thousands.

Roxanne Heston

What if Nate Silver ran a charity evaluator?

As we enthusiastically announced in April, Giving What We Can has partnered with 

, “a new organization which does meta-analyses of impact evaluations on charitable interventions.” (1) But what exactly are these meta-analyses and impact evaluations? What role can AidGrade play in improving Giving What We Can and, conversely, what can they gain from us? Miguel Almunia, one of the founding researchers of the organisation, offers some insight into the formation, work and goals of AidGrade and how their aims coincide with ours.

Founder Eva Vivalt formed AidGrade when she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an Economics Ph.D. in 2011. (2) Working at the World Bank, Vivalt saw the utility of an organisation that would quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of charitable initiatives, an idea she had harbored since 2004. Finding interested parties at both her university and her work, Vivalt involved classmates and professionals alike in the project, adding, among others, Willa Friedman and Miguel Almunia to her team. AidGrade has since added members from other institutions, such as three new staff members from the Washington, D.C area. (3)

AidGrade’s approach is to take the data of numerous studies and draw comprehensive conclusions by combining their results. Almunia describes their methodology as an “agnostic approach,” meaning that the researchers are willing to look at any study that might demonstrate a correlation between programme and a particular outcome. Currently, AidGrade is putting its efforts into the first half of the 40 programmes it intends to evaluate, and has the first ten - bed nets, microfinance, etc. – already accessible on the site.

In order to give potential donors information about what is most likely to have an impact, AidGrade works to obtain access to all existing studies related to the given areas. To improve the validity of the results, the researchers have a preference for quantitative studies, although some qualitative ones can be incorporated if they were rigorously executed. They then perform a meta-analysis to combine the studies’ results. (3)

The numerous studies conducted are, of course, not identical; each has its own set of variables such as trial length or programme size. The researchers collect these kinds of variables so the papers can be divided into subsets according to what one wants to look at. But how, then, do they make sense of the data without simply totaling the number of studies that found a positive effect, or “vote counting”? Almunia offers Nate Silver, publisher of the New York Times’ 

 election prediction blog, as a model example. (4) Before the election, Silver did not just compile the numerous polls by tallying the number that put the Democratic or Republican Party in the lead, but instead gave each poll a weight based on its previous strength and current sample size. By doing a statistical evaluation of each poll relative to the entire body of polls, Silver – or in AidGrade’s case, the researchers - can then calculate a more accurate representation of the result and their margin of error. Although it is difficult to guide people towards the “right” target issues, AidGrade hopes to give informed advice on which interventions work within each area.

Based on this description, how is AidGrade any different from GiveWell? If their goals are both to evaluate for effectiveness, why not merge? Almunia sees the purposes of the two as distinct. Part of the motivation to set up AidGrade, he says, was that they saw the limitations in the way GiveWell operates with a seeming emphasis on inciting interest. Instead of recommending certain organisations like GiveWell does, AidGrade focuses more on general intervention types and producing rigorous data to back their results. While some may see them as competitors, Almunia believes donors view them as complementary.

Almunia recognises that a problem in academic research is that researchers do not often explain their findings well enough to the public, when he feels they should be generally accessible. He hopes AidGrade can offer an improvement on this through their website, which has a tool that allows people to analyse the data. AidGrade is also in touch with other academics, large international organisations, and non-profits that they see as complementary to their work. While Almunia “can’t say whether people are paying attention or not” to their findings yet, he notes that the “development community has demand for this kind of research” and will continue to work toward that end.

Giving What We Can and AidGrade are pleased to have formed this partnership, sharing mutual interests in helping people choose how to be most effective through investments in personal education and efforts in developing regions. Almunia is excited by the opportunity to disseminate results and influence those who want to donate. “When I told people who are interested in development, both academically and as practitioners, everyone was excited; they saw it as something that was missing and they were glad we were doing it.” (3)

Hutchinson, Michelle. "Giving What We Can: April 2013." Message to the author. 1 Apr. 2013. E-mail.

"Who We Are." AidGrade. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2013.

Almunia, Miguel. Personal interview. 15 Apr. 2013.

Silver, Nate. "FiveThirtyEight to Partner with New York Times." FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right. N.p., 3 June 2010. Web. 10 June 2013.

Yuan Yang

How to present statistics to donors (Part III: International Dollars vs Real Dollars)

 program ("Choosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective") presents DALYs saved per international dollar - most commonly the "Geary-Khamis" dollar. In short, an international dollar is an imaginary unit of currency that has the equivalent purchasing power parity of a US Dollar at some specified date. For example, a 2000 Geary-Khamis dollar is a unit of currency that buys you as many goods and services as a US dollar would have bought you in the US in the year 2000.

The WHO uses the Geary-Khamis dollar because it is an international organisation giving information to a range of donors who use different currencies, who are also choosing between investments in different countries with different goods and price levels; a Geary-Khamis dollar compacts all of the variation in nominal currency and in price level into one measure of real currency, i.e. currency that buys a certain amount of goods and services.

Now, there are many problems with the Geary-Khamis dollar from the point of view of economic theory and international justice. Thomas Pogge and Sanjay Reddy argue (in their paper 

) that the use of international purchasing power metrics such as the Geary-Khamis dollar obscures economic reality and leads one to overweight the importance of aiding some countries over others.

From the point of view of writing about cost-effective charity donation, the take-home message is that Geary-Khamis dollars are fairly complex economic fictions that are not easy for donors to understand. Nobody actually uses Geary-Khamis dollars (apart from, well, people who lived in the US in the year 2000). So it is of no motivational or emotive relevance to say to someone: "You could get that for 40 Geary-Khamis dollars!"

For a general audience we should use real dollars (or pounds, or whatever currency your audience understands), and make sure to either date the currency to a particular year, or adjust your statistics for inflation year upon year. If there are significant purchasing power disparities to take into consideration, you should give the headline statistic first and then explain what the purchasing power disparity does to your cost-effectiveness measure; don't just bundle it into the piece of confusing economic terminology that is the Geary-Khamis dollar.

I have argued that we should take responsibility for the rhetoric we generate when making statistical arguments for cost-effectiveness and moral decision-making. My three key recommendations are:

Write an executive summary highlighting the decisions the desired reader should make;

Present cost-effectiveness data in DALYs/dollar not dollars/DALY - the former is a better frame;

Draw linear graphs - they are clear to understand - and highlight a single comparative message; and

Use real economic metrics, such as US dollars, that are used by people in their daily lives.

Joined us at part three? Check out Yuan's posts on 

Brenton Mayer

The Run to Better Days

The Run to Better Days is a fun example of how members of Giving What We Can in Australia - and their friends - are trying to spread the word about effective altruism. Here, organiser Brenton Mayer explains how the run works and asks how effective it's likely to be.

 we ran 1,200 kilometres in a relay format up the coast of Australia. We raised $27,000 and stopped in along the way to speak at schools, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs and universities, presenting to around 10,000 people in total.

"We tried to frame global poverty as an ethically challenging issue which Australians can and should act upon, and we gave away 600 copies of Professor Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save to interested people.

"This year's run will be even bigger and kicks off today!

"Dan Charles started the Run to Better Days four years ago after reading Singer's book in his final year of school, knowing that he wanted to communicate its message to kids in schools in an exciting way. During the run, each runner covers about 10km each in a relay format. Fresh runners are brought by car every few hours, and in this manner we crawl along at roughly 100km a day. Our big not-so-secret secret of course, is that athletically it's not really that impressive, and the point of the run is all about talking to people about poverty.

"This year we have five speaking teams of two people. While the run is happening, they will drive to schools in the vicinity, and give presentations to students in their final two years of school. After this we speak at society meetings (primarily Rotary and Lions Clubs), with an appropriately adjusted pitch with more space for questions at the end, and give away just a couple of books. In my experience these are invariably pleasant evenings where we're made to feel very welcome by club members, and last year we were pleasantly surprised by just how many groups donated generously towards the run. The team members who aren't speaking drive to the accommodation. From there we organise the the next day, monkey around for a bit like groups of 20ish 20ish year olds do, and vote, upon hearing the embarrassing tales of the day, for who should be forced to wear the 'Donkey of the Day' pants for the next 24 hours."

Is the Run to Better Days effective altruism?

The run has been designed to maximise how many people we can get to think seriously about Singer's arguments on poverty. Our presentation starts off by introducing Singer's drowning child thought experiment, covers the basics of what extreme poverty is, compares extreme poverty with our own growing wealth, and then looks how much our society and our government are doing towards poverty alleviation at the moment. We then challenge our listeners with the question of, given all the above, what should we be doing? To help them answer that, we present some of the wonderfully straightforward calculations that show how much people living in developed countries can do for others, examples of which you can find 

"After the talk we suggest that 'if anything we've said has struck a chord or seemed interesting, then the best thing to do is to read this book; The Life You Can Save.' We offer a free copy of the book, as well as a letter, to all who are interested and want to engage more with the ideas, spreading the message about how and why they can improve the world in the best way.

"Last year was the first year we did the run, so this year we have the opportunity to put into practice everything we learned from the operation in its test run, including follow up and keeping track of how many people remained interested. In the absence of that data, here are a couple of points on the way we've designed the The Run to Better Days that I hope point towards it being quite effective:

By speaking at schools we reliably get large audiences for solid lengths of time, with little effort on our behalf relative to the difficulty in procuring other audiences. The basic idea is that we're young people with a little bit of street cred left, and we can say - "Hey kids, social justice is cool!"

Kids in their final years of school are some of the best people to speak to about poverty because they're old enough to follow what you're saying, whilst being open minded and not automatically sceptical.

The Run has allowed us to speak at a huge range of venues, including classes of 800 medical students, 1200 allied health students, and a Masters of Public Health class.

We don't need a large percentage of people to read The Life You Can Save for giving out books to be effective: if 1% of the people who ask for a copy are affected, that makes 15 new people questioning seriously whether we should do a lot more about poverty.

The run ends up being a common topic of discussion, so as a result we are prompted to explain Singer's idea and often have discussions as a result. If you'd like to get an idea of what's in the talk, get in touch as I can send you a low quality podcasted talk. Additionally, we would be happy to give out a transcript and a copy of our visual aids as well, if you'd like to present something similar.

"So, to summarise my answer to 'is the Run to Better Days Effective Altruism?': We're putting in a solid effort to try and make it as effective as possible, and with proper follow up, we will find out for sure this year."

Interview with GiveWell: giving to learn, research methods, and the added value of AMF

Research Director Robert Wiblin interviewed GiveWell co-founder Elie Hassenfeld on a range of issues suggested by volunteers and members of Giving What We Can. This is the second post, which covers when to donate, how GiveWell's research has changed over time, and exactly what the Against Malaria Foundation are doing that makes them GiveWell's number one charity. An unabridged transcript of the interview is available 

RW: Do you think donors should consider waiting a couple more years in the hope that you or someone else will be able to find a significantly more cost effective option that AMF or your other recommendations?

 on a while back, but I think there's a couple of things to think about. I think that if I had to bet, I'd bet that our recommendations three years from now will be better than our recommendations today. I do think there's a couple of pretty important counter-arguments to that and reasons why I personally give to our current recommendations, rather than just waiting around for our recommendations a few years from now. One is I think that it's helpful to become habituated to giving to charity. I think that there's a non-negligible danger of allowing yourself to hold on to the funds and never quite being ready to pull the trigger. Obviously, there's an easy way to deal with that problem, which is using a mechanism like a donor-advised fund where you actually get the money out the door, but you don't select the organisation to which you're giving.

The other factor that I also think is important is giving to learn. By that I mean giving money and then following up with the organisation to find out what happened. You gave the money as a means for improving your understanding about how the charity world works. And this has been one of best learning mechanisms that we have found at GiveWell. It goes back to our recommendation of VillageReach and all of the work we've done to follow them over the years to understand what went well and what went poorly for that organisation. But the same is true for SCI, AMF, GiveDirectly. Following closely on the ground is the way we learn about effectiveness. If everyone were to decide not to give and to hold out, I think the quality of GiveWell's future research would fall because we wouldn't have that opportunity to direct money and learn from how we directed that money.

RW: Related to that, one of our members sent the question "How many charities do you need to investigate in each field before you get confident that you're getting near the best?" I guess I have a similar question: how your recommendations have changed over the last seven years? Have they been getting better or worse and why, and does that inform your best guess as to whether your recommendations will get better or worse in the future?

EH: Let me answer those in turn. The first question was about the number of charities you investigate in a field before feeling confident that you're getting 'near the best'. I don't really think the set number is the right way to think about it. You want to do enough work in a given area that you start to see patterns in the organisations you're finding and you're not surprised by the results that you find. You're not bumping into new organisations, new approaches, new ideas that are things you haven't investigated at all or can't really know how they would match up to our top charities. For us, in the area of global health and development, over the years we've been in business, we've looked into this area sufficiently that we haven't been surprised for a long time at something that's just popped up on the scene, we generally see the same stories popping up over and over again.

I think we have a good sense of the characteristics of an organisation that would make them promising in our process - that they are largely implementing a program that has strong evidence behind it, and is cost-effective, and that they are willing to be transparent. You do those things, that's great. You don't do that, that's less promising. And we've got to the point where we're not just bumping into organisations that have those characteristics that we haven't heard of before. So that means that at this point, with our global health and development organisations, I'm less optimistic that we're going to find new organisations. I know who the next ten contenders are and we're trying to encourage them to engage us, but we also have a very good sense of the lay of the land.

On the second question - of changes over time - I think that our research has become significantly more intense and in-depth, and I do think the recommendations that are on our site now are better in some aggregate sense than the recommendations we made in the past. We went full time in 2007. In our first full-time period, we received grant applications from organisations and we had very little information. We tried to do these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations for the organisations that applied, and we recommended Population Services International and Partners in Health based on these very explicit cost-effectiveness calculations. With Partners in Health, there was some of the case that was not explicitly quantifiable. All of these archived reviews are available on our website if people are interested in seeing the 2007 version of GiveWell's research.

Our research back then was limited both by the set of organisations that applied, but also our understanding of what we should be looking for. In 2009, we changed our process, we reached out to new organisations, and that's when we recommended Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership as our top organisations. Both Village Reach and Stop TB Partnership are incredibly outstanding organisations, certainly in terms of the programs that they work on, how transparent they are, the quality of people involved in their activities. But they have weaknesses that they have that our current charities do not have.

In the case of Stop TB, we couldn't get compelling information on room for additional funding. What was really going to happen to Stop TB's programs because of additional funding from GiveWell directed donors? At the time of our review, we thought they were going to provide more basic treatments for TB. Back to that learning idea, we were going to follow that up, and we learned later that the funds were not needed for first-line TB drugs - the basic TB treatment. We wrote in the latest review of Stop TB Partnership that we don't have sufficient understanding of room for more funding to recommend this organisation.

Today, our recommendations are ones where the room for more funding - what impact an additional dollar donated to the organisation has - is a major part of what we're focussed on. In the case of Village Reach, we knew that they were taking a riskier approach to development than we had been hoping for when we started looking for top charities. The thing that they didn't have was that really iron-clad evidence-based case that their programs made any difference. I think they had a lot of evidence that it did, but there are also questions that were not answered by the types of data they were able to present, more post-hoc assessments of what occurred, and using some qualitative assessments of the likely causes of changes driven by their programs. AMF, Givedirectly and SCI are all organisations whose programs are informed by multiple Randomized Controlled Trials. This is a standard of evidence that is significantly higher than the standard we held Village Reach's programs to.

In the very big picture, the way I would describe the change in our recommendations over time is that we've become more sensitive to the issues that are most important to investigate deeply and we've significantly increased the depth of our research. I look at GiveWell today, and I think what we've done for global health charities is outstanding, but I also recognise that there are certain types of activities that we have not looked into solely because we haven't had the time yet to get to them. Activities like funding scientific research, or potentially trying to influence government action. These are things that large-scale philanthropists are very involved in.

It seems to me intuitive that they might be significantly more impactful than organisations that provide direct services, and therefore we must look into that. We might not find anything. But my instinct is we'll find things that at least for some donors are significantly more appealing than the organisations that we recommend today. I think that will largely come by broadening the scope of the research we've done to remove the criterion of significant evidence of effectiveness.

RW: You mentioned earlier that it seems like you can both give now to your best charities and support incredibly valuable research into what works. So what kind of research are the charities you recommend - AMF, SCI and Givedirectly - doing? What's a specific project that they're conducting which excites you and is going to produce useful information for GiveWell and others?