GiveWell is focused on finding the best charities for casual donors rather than assessing the merits of entire charitable causes. Note that they recommend Small Enterprise Foundation as an outstanding microfinance charity.
I understand this point of view, but if Vilalge Reach is clearly so much better than an average health charity (as GiveWell seems to be certain of), shouldn’t they just get other health charities to reallocate a small portion of their vast funds to Village Reach?
How large a violation of EMH are we willing to accept here with how little evidence? Now EMH fails in many contexts for many reasons, but this really begs for some explanation. Why should we trust GiveWell if even other health charities seem not to? Even if they’re not certain, even modest level of agreement should result in transfer of funds a lot larger than what Village Reach currently gets.
Unfortunately there are only two possibilities in equillibrium here:
Other health charities drastically disagree with GiveWell.
Other health charities agree with GiveWell, some funds get reallocated, Village Reach gets very high coverage, marginal utility of health dollars falls down to mid tier charities.
EMH says GiveWell should only be trusted if we can observe ongoing large shifts of funding towards charities it promotes. It will lose informational value eventually but donations accelerate this shift towards more efficient charities.
Do we see this happening (in which case go ahead and donate to Village Reach), or is everyone ignoring GiveWell (in which case the crowd might have a point, and don’t blindly trust GiveWell).
My (vague) impression is that developing world countries with militaristic governments which devote a lot of financial resources to military spending often do so despite the fact that their poorer citizens have unmet basic needs. To the extent that this is true it points in the direction of supplying health interventions being unlikely to displace government money in the direction of military spending.
There was never really any country that could entirely disregard population’s needs.
My model—you need some level of spending X to keep country’s economy from collapsing and population from revolting. Everything more than that goes to military. If foreign donors give you Y for that, then X-Y of your spending will be enough to keep country’s economy from collapsing and population from revolting, leaving X more for military hardware. Even if Y>X, they’ll figure a way to embezzle excess funds.
This model is too extreme, but so is naive assumption of no offsets.
I understand this point of view, but if Vilalge Reach is clearly so much better than an average health charity (as GiveWell seems to be certain of), shouldn’t they just get other health charities to reallocate a small portion of their vast funds to Village Reach? [...]
VillageReach stands out for transparency, monitoring and evaluation and focus on a cost-effective program. Where this places VillageReach relative to other health charities in impact per dollar depends in some measure on what one’s default assumption is about a charity’s effectiveness in the absence of information. The GiveWell staff have a skeptical default assumption; the plausibility of which can be questioned. Note however that there are charities that that focus on the cause of clean water which is the DCP report lists as being something like 500 times less cost-effective than increased immunization; this pushes in the direction of adopting a skeptical default assumption.
The idea of getting other health charities to reallocate money to VillageReach is an interesting one but I suspect it’s infeasible for political reasons (employees of a generic health charity are motivated to keep the money donated to the charity within the organization as sending it elsewhere might entail layoffs, etc.).
There’s no profit motive attached to providing health services more efficiently so the usual hypotheses of the EMH are not in place. Again recall my earlier comment about donors not paying attention.
In view of this it seems that essentially the only factor that pushes in the direction of EMH in the non-profit world is altruism; but altruism in humans is limited and easily crowded out by tribalism and by (wishful thinking)/(need for self-image preservation).
My observation (e.g. as a student in public high school some time ago) is that there’s a tendency for badly inefficient policies to persist in the non-profit sector because the people who are perpetuating them find it uncomfortable to admit that the policies that they’ve been adhering to are defunct and correspondingly delude themselves into believing that they’re just fine as they are.
Do we see this happening (in which case go ahead and donate to Village Reach), or is everyone ignoring GiveWell (in which case the crowd might have a point, and don’t blindly trust GiveWell).
GiveWell has only been around since 2007 and only has four employees. My impression is that it’s presently little known within the philanthropic sector. Last year they leveraged a million dollars which is only 1⁄300000 of the total U.S. charitable contributions in 2009.
They have not made a systematic attempt to publicize their findings beyond their website up until now (no advertising, etc); so far preferring to focus on making their research and research process more robust with a view toward building a more solid product of broader interest.
In interest of building credibility, GiveWell has been asking outside volunteers to vet their research.
Potential donors seldom reject GiveWell’s recommendations on account of doubting the credibility of their analysis; much more common reasons for rejection are:
Squeamishness about mixing rational analysis with charity on account of seeing rational analysis as “cold and calculation” and charity as “warm and fuzzy.” This is not at all common on LW (!) but fairly common in broader society.
Lack of interest in the causes that GiveWell has covered so far.
Prior commitment to particular charities that they’ve become attached to.
My model [...]
I follow, but your model seems so extreme as to be a self-characiture! :-)
This model is too extreme, but so is naive assumption of no offsets.
I understand this point of view, but if Vilalge Reach is clearly so much better than an average health charity (as GiveWell seems to be certain of), shouldn’t they just get other health charities to reallocate a small portion of their vast funds to Village Reach?
How large a violation of EMH are we willing to accept here with how little evidence? Now EMH fails in many contexts for many reasons, but this really begs for some explanation. Why should we trust GiveWell if even other health charities seem not to? Even if they’re not certain, even modest level of agreement should result in transfer of funds a lot larger than what Village Reach currently gets.
Unfortunately there are only two possibilities in equillibrium here:
Other health charities drastically disagree with GiveWell.
Other health charities agree with GiveWell, some funds get reallocated, Village Reach gets very high coverage, marginal utility of health dollars falls down to mid tier charities.
EMH says GiveWell should only be trusted if we can observe ongoing large shifts of funding towards charities it promotes. It will lose informational value eventually but donations accelerate this shift towards more efficient charities.
Do we see this happening (in which case go ahead and donate to Village Reach), or is everyone ignoring GiveWell (in which case the crowd might have a point, and don’t blindly trust GiveWell).
There was never really any country that could entirely disregard population’s needs.
My model—you need some level of spending X to keep country’s economy from collapsing and population from revolting. Everything more than that goes to military. If foreign donors give you Y for that, then X-Y of your spending will be enough to keep country’s economy from collapsing and population from revolting, leaving X more for military hardware. Even if Y>X, they’ll figure a way to embezzle excess funds.
This model is too extreme, but so is naive assumption of no offsets.
VillageReach stands out for transparency, monitoring and evaluation and focus on a cost-effective program. Where this places VillageReach relative to other health charities in impact per dollar depends in some measure on what one’s default assumption is about a charity’s effectiveness in the absence of information. The GiveWell staff have a skeptical default assumption; the plausibility of which can be questioned. Note however that there are charities that that focus on the cause of clean water which is the DCP report lists as being something like 500 times less cost-effective than increased immunization; this pushes in the direction of adopting a skeptical default assumption.
The idea of getting other health charities to reallocate money to VillageReach is an interesting one but I suspect it’s infeasible for political reasons (employees of a generic health charity are motivated to keep the money donated to the charity within the organization as sending it elsewhere might entail layoffs, etc.).
There’s no profit motive attached to providing health services more efficiently so the usual hypotheses of the EMH are not in place. Again recall my earlier comment about donors not paying attention.
In view of this it seems that essentially the only factor that pushes in the direction of EMH in the non-profit world is altruism; but altruism in humans is limited and easily crowded out by tribalism and by (wishful thinking)/(need for self-image preservation).
My observation (e.g. as a student in public high school some time ago) is that there’s a tendency for badly inefficient policies to persist in the non-profit sector because the people who are perpetuating them find it uncomfortable to admit that the policies that they’ve been adhering to are defunct and correspondingly delude themselves into believing that they’re just fine as they are.
GiveWell has only been around since 2007 and only has four employees. My impression is that it’s presently little known within the philanthropic sector. Last year they leveraged a million dollars which is only 1⁄300000 of the total U.S. charitable contributions in 2009.
They have not made a systematic attempt to publicize their findings beyond their website up until now (no advertising, etc); so far preferring to focus on making their research and research process more robust with a view toward building a more solid product of broader interest.
In interest of building credibility, GiveWell has been asking outside volunteers to vet their research.
Potential donors seldom reject GiveWell’s recommendations on account of doubting the credibility of their analysis; much more common reasons for rejection are:
Squeamishness about mixing rational analysis with charity on account of seeing rational analysis as “cold and calculation” and charity as “warm and fuzzy.” This is not at all common on LW (!) but fairly common in broader society.
Lack of interest in the causes that GiveWell has covered so far.
Prior commitment to particular charities that they’ve become attached to.
I follow, but your model seems so extreme as to be a self-characiture! :-)
Agree.
What’s the best evidence against it, or quick test that would be able to at least tell maximally naive model apart from maximally cynical model?
Do we really know totally nothing about that?