Would anyone of average intelligence who wants to do as much good as possible fail flagrantly in giving where it maximizes welfare? Why then the drastic difference between personal buying and donation? Someone planning an Arctic trip will not make the contemplated mistakes, which is why you used personal buying to contrast with donation practices. Whether the desire to benefit mankind is powered by warm fuzzies or some other expression of altruistic motivation, if contributors were human-welfare maximizers they would do a lot better at maximizing welfare. People aren’t that irrational!
Donations have little to do with welfare maximization and warm fuzzies. They primarily function as a signaling device. Isn’t that obvious?
Yes. It should also be obvious that it succeeds because “appearing to desire welfare maximization and warm fuzzies” is the signal. If you donated to a charity that burned your money to reduce inflation your signal would fail.
It is less obvious but hopefully inferred by many that one of the intentions of this post and posts like it (and one of the intentions of charity-rating initiatives) is to break conventional giving, turn it into a failed signal, and replace it with efficient giving. That way, all the signalling donors will continue to donate as they did before, signalling the same things, achieving the same status gain, and accidentally helping the world more.
How does trying to prevent wars and/or stop them rate as charitable activity? On the one hand, wars are tremendously destructive and on the other, it’s hard to be sure how effective opposing a war is.
I am not sure. One of my nodes for “charitable activity” is non-profit organisations working in the area in question, so I hadn’t even considered prevention/stopping of wars as charity. Some very light research suggests that peace activism has had a measurable impact, although by imparting the kind of pressures I think a lobby group would have more success applying.
This suggests to me some sort of lobby group should be formed, and made powerful through charitable donations. Stopping the Iraq war, to work with an example, would have saved about 110,000 lives; if it cost a lobby group around 20 million dollars to achieve the non-invasion of Iraq then you’re looking at 180 dollars a life—for comparison, VillageReach gets about $200 a life and Stop TB Partnership gets about 150-170 a life. The non-disruption of citizens’ lives should beat the improvement in citizens’ lives when charities begin operating in a town; I don’t know how to treat it more rigorously though. My intuition is that formalising the disability-adjusted life years lost due to invasion and occupation should blow all the other charities out of the water (at 20 million).
Could a lobby group stop a war with 20 million dollars? Maybe. The numbers are in the same ballpark. Lobbying against war might have some better leverage with timing (they might no need constant pressure against, they might just need to cancel out the highest points of pressure for), but declared lobbying might vastly underrepresent actual lobbying. Again, I don’t know enough to treat this possibility properly.
So it rates as possibly up there with the very best of charities, definitely worth investigating, but not a very warm or fuzzy cause at all.
Edit: GiveWell’s recommendations on cost-effectiveness give the upper limits of $100 per DALY prevented and $1000 per life significantly changed; without DALYs for war (I can find no figures) this gives us at most 110 million lobby dollars before GiveWell would stop recommending the lobby group. That much money seems like it could have made a significant try at opposing the Iraq war, to be honest.
Thanks. I think stopping wars is a warm and fuzzy cause, but perhaps peace activists are apt to position themselves as outsiders and this has made it less likely for them to create a formal lobby.
On the other hand, demonstrations may have become less effective, which may make a lobby more plausible.
Trying to take into account those and other factors of war besides being shot in battle led me to this statistical estimate of the effect of the Iraq War. The lowest bound was 400,000, and treating excess mortality as happening on the average between 16 and 67 (an overtly optimistic hope that people under 16 remain the least affected-by-war group), we get 10.2 million expected life years lost. Assume that for every person killed, there is one person disabled in some way (a quick check suggested 3:1 serious injury:death ratio for soldiers and 1.8:1 for civilians, I went with 1:1 because disability doesn’t always follow from serious injury, but concerns like PTSD can bring the ratio up to equal) and the figure is just above 20 million DALYs lost to the Iraq war. GiveWell’s figure of $100 per DALY being the upper bound of efficient charity means that a lobby group or charity that could have stopped the Iraq War given 2 billion dollars would have been a gold-standard efficient charity.
I believe this answers your query, Nancy. Stopping wars most definitely rates as some of the best charity around.
There’s another level, I think. Afaik, wars are less likely between democracies than for other permutations of government types, so charities which spread democracy might also be a good choice, depending on one’s estimate of their effectiveness.
Indeed. To the extent that a charity spreads democracy, and to the extent that democratization reduces likelihood of war, these democracy charities are stop-war charities.
“Excess mortality” is a difficult concept.
Most estimates I’ve seen calculate excess mortality based on a pre-hostilities baseline because this is relatively easy to calculate and produces the highest possible figure for excess mortality.
But the number we really want would compare that mortality to the expected post-war mortality. In the case of Iraq, this would provide a higher expected value than the rate immediately pre-war.
This argument is based on completely ignoring future costs and benefit analysis and the available alternatives. To accept this as a (implicit?) axiom seems unnatural. Imagine a powerful lobby group stopped American involvement in the Korean war and all of South Korea ended up like the North. Imagine NATO did not strike Serbia and Milosevic continued to reign. Even the Iraq war did have some positive effect—Hussein was evil, and potentially the new government in Iraq would lead to less suffering, both internally and because of other—local and global—conflicts avoided. The particulars of these arguments are debatable (the Iraq government may collapse into chaos; even if it does not, we will never know the ultimate costs of keeping or not keeping Saddam in power), but the larger point stands. Other comments mentioned promoting democracy as a means of promoting peace. War can be a radical mean of promoting democracy (at least in Serbia it seems to have worked), and this should not be ignored.
Even the Iraq war did have some positive effect—Hussein was evil, and potentially the new government in Iraq would lead to less suffering, both internally and because of other—local and global—conflicts avoided.
If you take the after-invasion Iraq government and subtract that from Hussein’s governing, you get the improvement in governance. Is that improvement going to save 400,000 lives in its reduction of local and global conflicts? Please keep in mind it is not a dichotomy of “Invade and fix Iraq XOR abandon countries to the whims of evil dictators”. It is closer to “Improving Iraq: Military intervention, or other means?”.
Assassinating Hussein and backing a democratic coup is a much better way of radically promoting democracy in Iraq. I accuse you of completely ignoring available alternatives.
Shall I contribute to charities promoting assassinations of evil foreign leaders (there are still a few left) and backing democratic coups instead of the blanket pro-peace movements?
Charities aren’t well-suited to radical political tasks. You would be better off pursuing a career in international diplomacy or statesmanship, focusing on networking with espionage rather than the military-industrial complex, if you wish to achieve these kinds of changes.
Would anyone of average intelligence who wants to do as much good as possible fail flagrantly in giving where it maximizes welfare? Why then the drastic difference between personal buying and donation? Someone planning an Arctic trip will not make the contemplated mistakes, which is why you used personal buying to contrast with donation practices. Whether the desire to benefit mankind is powered by warm fuzzies or some other expression of altruistic motivation, if contributors were human-welfare maximizers they would do a lot better at maximizing welfare. People aren’t that irrational!
Donations have little to do with welfare maximization and warm fuzzies. They primarily function as a signaling device. Isn’t that obvious?
Yes. It should also be obvious that it succeeds because “appearing to desire welfare maximization and warm fuzzies” is the signal. If you donated to a charity that burned your money to reduce inflation your signal would fail.
It is less obvious but hopefully inferred by many that one of the intentions of this post and posts like it (and one of the intentions of charity-rating initiatives) is to break conventional giving, turn it into a failed signal, and replace it with efficient giving. That way, all the signalling donors will continue to donate as they did before, signalling the same things, achieving the same status gain, and accidentally helping the world more.
How does trying to prevent wars and/or stop them rate as charitable activity? On the one hand, wars are tremendously destructive and on the other, it’s hard to be sure how effective opposing a war is.
I am not sure. One of my nodes for “charitable activity” is non-profit organisations working in the area in question, so I hadn’t even considered prevention/stopping of wars as charity. Some very light research suggests that peace activism has had a measurable impact, although by imparting the kind of pressures I think a lobby group would have more success applying.
This suggests to me some sort of lobby group should be formed, and made powerful through charitable donations. Stopping the Iraq war, to work with an example, would have saved about 110,000 lives; if it cost a lobby group around 20 million dollars to achieve the non-invasion of Iraq then you’re looking at 180 dollars a life—for comparison, VillageReach gets about $200 a life and Stop TB Partnership gets about 150-170 a life. The non-disruption of citizens’ lives should beat the improvement in citizens’ lives when charities begin operating in a town; I don’t know how to treat it more rigorously though. My intuition is that formalising the disability-adjusted life years lost due to invasion and occupation should blow all the other charities out of the water (at 20 million).
Could a lobby group stop a war with 20 million dollars? Maybe. The numbers are in the same ballpark. Lobbying against war might have some better leverage with timing (they might no need constant pressure against, they might just need to cancel out the highest points of pressure for), but declared lobbying might vastly underrepresent actual lobbying. Again, I don’t know enough to treat this possibility properly.
So it rates as possibly up there with the very best of charities, definitely worth investigating, but not a very warm or fuzzy cause at all.
Edit: GiveWell’s recommendations on cost-effectiveness give the upper limits of $100 per DALY prevented and $1000 per life significantly changed; without DALYs for war (I can find no figures) this gives us at most 110 million lobby dollars before GiveWell would stop recommending the lobby group. That much money seems like it could have made a significant try at opposing the Iraq war, to be honest.
Thanks. I think stopping wars is a warm and fuzzy cause, but perhaps peace activists are apt to position themselves as outsiders and this has made it less likely for them to create a formal lobby.
On the other hand, demonstrations may have become less effective, which may make a lobby more plausible.
Not sure how you’d add this to the figures, but veterans make up 1 in 4 of the homeless and Homeless adults have an age-adjusted mortality rate nearly 4 times that of the general population their average life span is shorter than 45 years.
I don’t have stats for the effects on children of having one or both parents with PTSD, but I expect it to be serious.
Hmm. Watch out, more numbers.
Trying to take into account those and other factors of war besides being shot in battle led me to this statistical estimate of the effect of the Iraq War. The lowest bound was 400,000, and treating excess mortality as happening on the average between 16 and 67 (an overtly optimistic hope that people under 16 remain the least affected-by-war group), we get 10.2 million expected life years lost. Assume that for every person killed, there is one person disabled in some way (a quick check suggested 3:1 serious injury:death ratio for soldiers and 1.8:1 for civilians, I went with 1:1 because disability doesn’t always follow from serious injury, but concerns like PTSD can bring the ratio up to equal) and the figure is just above 20 million DALYs lost to the Iraq war. GiveWell’s figure of $100 per DALY being the upper bound of efficient charity means that a lobby group or charity that could have stopped the Iraq War given 2 billion dollars would have been a gold-standard efficient charity.
I believe this answers your query, Nancy. Stopping wars most definitely rates as some of the best charity around.
I’ve been amazed for a long time how much people don’t add up the costs of war.
There’s another level, I think. Afaik, wars are less likely between democracies than for other permutations of government types, so charities which spread democracy might also be a good choice, depending on one’s estimate of their effectiveness.
Indeed. To the extent that a charity spreads democracy, and to the extent that democratization reduces likelihood of war, these democracy charities are stop-war charities.
“Excess mortality” is a difficult concept. Most estimates I’ve seen calculate excess mortality based on a pre-hostilities baseline because this is relatively easy to calculate and produces the highest possible figure for excess mortality. But the number we really want would compare that mortality to the expected post-war mortality. In the case of Iraq, this would provide a higher expected value than the rate immediately pre-war.
I aimed for the lower bound. If you go by strictly what has been confirmed then something like 400 million dollars is the efficiency cut-off.
This argument is based on completely ignoring future costs and benefit analysis and the available alternatives. To accept this as a (implicit?) axiom seems unnatural. Imagine a powerful lobby group stopped American involvement in the Korean war and all of South Korea ended up like the North. Imagine NATO did not strike Serbia and Milosevic continued to reign. Even the Iraq war did have some positive effect—Hussein was evil, and potentially the new government in Iraq would lead to less suffering, both internally and because of other—local and global—conflicts avoided. The particulars of these arguments are debatable (the Iraq government may collapse into chaos; even if it does not, we will never know the ultimate costs of keeping or not keeping Saddam in power), but the larger point stands. Other comments mentioned promoting democracy as a means of promoting peace. War can be a radical mean of promoting democracy (at least in Serbia it seems to have worked), and this should not be ignored.
If you take the after-invasion Iraq government and subtract that from Hussein’s governing, you get the improvement in governance. Is that improvement going to save 400,000 lives in its reduction of local and global conflicts? Please keep in mind it is not a dichotomy of “Invade and fix Iraq XOR abandon countries to the whims of evil dictators”. It is closer to “Improving Iraq: Military intervention, or other means?”.
Assassinating Hussein and backing a democratic coup is a much better way of radically promoting democracy in Iraq. I accuse you of completely ignoring available alternatives.
Good, now we are talking.
Shall I contribute to charities promoting assassinations of evil foreign leaders (there are still a few left) and backing democratic coups instead of the blanket pro-peace movements?
Charities aren’t well-suited to radical political tasks. You would be better off pursuing a career in international diplomacy or statesmanship, focusing on networking with espionage rather than the military-industrial complex, if you wish to achieve these kinds of changes.
It doesn’t have to be all one thing or the other.