Your “global common goods” are just going to help “individual rich people” once they’re developed, and they’re almost certainly going to cost more per-person than the interventions that top charities are working to deploy.
With global common goods that we already have we can raise the life expectancy and quality of life of a substantial percentage of the world’s population by 30 years. Instead, you want to work on technologies that hope to increase the life expectancy and quality of life of a different portion of the world’s population by 30 years, at far greater cost. Why do you think that is? Do you think it might be because that technology is applied to the subset of the population you happen to be part of?
I have a hard time believing that SENS will be short of funding. It has the ultimate pitch for rich donors: we can make [i]your[/i] life longer. How could that be underfunded, especially as the technology gets closer to market?
I tend to think GiveWell beats SENS in terms of adding expected lifespan to the lives of current people, because of the incredibly low cost of reducing 3rd world infectious disease (and a culture of efficient charity will improve aging research too), but it’s not entirely obvious to me. Some points that make aging research look more plausible:
-China and India are aging, and if trends continue for another decade the desperately poor will be concentrated almost wholly in Africa, a smallish minority of world population, with the great majority of deaths owing to diseases of aging and wealth; surprisingly, in the Copenhagen Consensus’s recent reports heart disease treatment in developing countries has ranked highly for cost-effectiveness
-if you develop aging therapies that work, developed countries will pay for the production themselves; if you develop new treatments for the desperately poor, you also need charity to pay for production
--pushing forward effective therapies for aging forward by a day could avert 100,000+ deaths, which would be worth $100 million at $1,000/life
-SENS is supposed to be in part a way to kickstart/lobby for research with various feasibility proofs, mobilizing a much larger pool of funds, similar to GiveWell, and so could plausibly compound to push research forward by one or more days
-the Gates Foundation has shifted the ratio of research effort going into 3rd world diseases vs aging (the NIH institute of aging is relatively small, anyway) to put them within an order of magnitude of each other
-humanitarian foreign aid budgets greatly exceed aging-specific research budgets
-there are real taboos and social barriers to openly calling for research aimed at aging, creating a plausible niche
-SENS might actually reduce the pace of aging research by attracting backlash (I doubt this, having an “extreme” flank for triangulation often helps to legitimize less extreme arguments)
Your “global common goods” are just going to help “individual rich people” once they’re developed
I expect the treatment would be affordable to the working class, once economies of scale are established.
and they’re almost certainly going to cost more per-person than the interventions that top charities are working to deploy.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
you want to work on technologies that hope to increase the life expectancy and quality of life of a different portion of the world’s population by 30 years
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
I have a hard time believing that SENS will be short of funding. It has the ultimate pitch for rich donors: we can make [i]your[/i] life longer.
That is a nice theory, but we can observe if rich people are funding SENS and they aren’t. Instead Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are donating to typical “help the poor” charities. Possible explanations are that rich people, like other people generally, don’t think that indefinite lifespan is possible or desirable. See also this explanation of similar issues in cryonics, some of which generalizes.
How could that be underfunded, especially as the technology gets closer to market?
Maybe the situation will change as the technology gets closer to market. But it doesn’t make sense to make current decisions as if that hypothetical future is occurring now.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
That’s a good point. Aging is very expensive, so I’d hope the interventions would eventually be at least cost-neutral.
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
The “potentially unbounded life span” part is so far off we can’t reliably estimate when it might be achieved. I’d guess that’s also why they’re having trouble getting funding for it.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research. Or we can continue to let a great portion of the world’s population suffer, and let money continue to be wasted on ineffective interventions.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research.
Yes, as I mentioned in the last paragraph here, I take a more favorable view of “helping poor people” charities that actually achieve this. Validating this requires more than just counting lives saved, though.
Right. Well I think that’s our critical differing assumption.
My view of these charities would be different if I didn’t think the gains appreciated. I’d donate to a science or technology endeavour if I thought that the next generation would be exactly the same, and all a donation could do was provide an anaesthetic.
The general opinion seems to be that foreign aid has saved lives from disease, holding per capita income fixed, and gains in life expectancy and infant survival have probably increased total (but not per capita) GDP through larger populations, but there is very little evidence of a positive effect on GDP per capita, i.e. reducing poverty.
Analyses tend to find weak effects of aid, which disappear when replicated on new datasets, and effect sizes tend to shrink as sample size and data quality increase. The literature also shows the usual signs of data mining and publication bias like spikes around the significance threshold, disproportionate reporting of positive results, etc. See this article, for instance.
The Gates Foundation, GiveWell, and many others seem to buy the basic model that public goods (agricultural and medical research for Gates, vaccines) work, and public health can generate welfare/save lives, but are not great for economic development.
I don’t want to claim that we now understand how to do aid without making mistakes. But I do want to say that decades of bad aid have not accomplished as much as they might have if they were actually designed to help the poor (rather than win the Cold War, support American farmers, or other political goals.) I think it’s reasonable to expect that evidence-based aid will do better than aid as a whole has so far.
It seems that knowing if and to what extent a charity helps people become productive participants in the economy would be valuable to you. As near as I can tell, GiveWell does not rate charities on this criteria. As it sounds like you are planning to donate a substantial amount, you should consider contacting them about making an earmarked donation (I don’t know if they actually do this, but it is worth trying) for a research project to establish such ratings.
GiveWell has an economic empowerment category, but says that the efficacy and transparency of interventions and charities in that sector are too poor to recommend anything in the category in comparison with public health.
Your “global common goods” are just going to help “individual rich people” once they’re developed, and they’re almost certainly going to cost more per-person than the interventions that top charities are working to deploy.
With global common goods that we already have we can raise the life expectancy and quality of life of a substantial percentage of the world’s population by 30 years. Instead, you want to work on technologies that hope to increase the life expectancy and quality of life of a different portion of the world’s population by 30 years, at far greater cost. Why do you think that is? Do you think it might be because that technology is applied to the subset of the population you happen to be part of?
I have a hard time believing that SENS will be short of funding. It has the ultimate pitch for rich donors: we can make [i]your[/i] life longer. How could that be underfunded, especially as the technology gets closer to market?
I tend to think GiveWell beats SENS in terms of adding expected lifespan to the lives of current people, because of the incredibly low cost of reducing 3rd world infectious disease (and a culture of efficient charity will improve aging research too), but it’s not entirely obvious to me. Some points that make aging research look more plausible:
-China and India are aging, and if trends continue for another decade the desperately poor will be concentrated almost wholly in Africa, a smallish minority of world population, with the great majority of deaths owing to diseases of aging and wealth; surprisingly, in the Copenhagen Consensus’s recent reports heart disease treatment in developing countries has ranked highly for cost-effectiveness
-if you develop aging therapies that work, developed countries will pay for the production themselves; if you develop new treatments for the desperately poor, you also need charity to pay for production
--pushing forward effective therapies for aging forward by a day could avert 100,000+ deaths, which would be worth $100 million at $1,000/life
-SENS is supposed to be in part a way to kickstart/lobby for research with various feasibility proofs, mobilizing a much larger pool of funds, similar to GiveWell, and so could plausibly compound to push research forward by one or more days
-the Gates Foundation has shifted the ratio of research effort going into 3rd world diseases vs aging (the NIH institute of aging is relatively small, anyway) to put them within an order of magnitude of each other
-humanitarian foreign aid budgets greatly exceed aging-specific research budgets
-there are real taboos and social barriers to openly calling for research aimed at aging, creating a plausible niche
-SENS might actually reduce the pace of aging research by attracting backlash (I doubt this, having an “extreme” flank for triangulation often helps to legitimize less extreme arguments)
I expect the treatment would be affordable to the working class, once economies of scale are established.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
That is a nice theory, but we can observe if rich people are funding SENS and they aren’t. Instead Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are donating to typical “help the poor” charities. Possible explanations are that rich people, like other people generally, don’t think that indefinite lifespan is possible or desirable. See also this explanation of similar issues in cryonics, some of which generalizes.
Maybe the situation will change as the technology gets closer to market. But it doesn’t make sense to make current decisions as if that hypothetical future is occurring now.
That’s a good point. Aging is very expensive, so I’d hope the interventions would eventually be at least cost-neutral.
The “potentially unbounded life span” part is so far off we can’t reliably estimate when it might be achieved. I’d guess that’s also why they’re having trouble getting funding for it.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research. Or we can continue to let a great portion of the world’s population suffer, and let money continue to be wasted on ineffective interventions.
Yes, as I mentioned in the last paragraph here, I take a more favorable view of “helping poor people” charities that actually achieve this. Validating this requires more than just counting lives saved, though.
Right. Well I think that’s our critical differing assumption.
My view of these charities would be different if I didn’t think the gains appreciated. I’d donate to a science or technology endeavour if I thought that the next generation would be exactly the same, and all a donation could do was provide an anaesthetic.
The general opinion seems to be that foreign aid has saved lives from disease, holding per capita income fixed, and gains in life expectancy and infant survival have probably increased total (but not per capita) GDP through larger populations, but there is very little evidence of a positive effect on GDP per capita, i.e. reducing poverty.
Analyses tend to find weak effects of aid, which disappear when replicated on new datasets, and effect sizes tend to shrink as sample size and data quality increase. The literature also shows the usual signs of data mining and publication bias like spikes around the significance threshold, disproportionate reporting of positive results, etc. See this article, for instance.
The Gates Foundation, GiveWell, and many others seem to buy the basic model that public goods (agricultural and medical research for Gates, vaccines) work, and public health can generate welfare/save lives, but are not great for economic development.
I don’t want to claim that we now understand how to do aid without making mistakes. But I do want to say that decades of bad aid have not accomplished as much as they might have if they were actually designed to help the poor (rather than win the Cold War, support American farmers, or other political goals.) I think it’s reasonable to expect that evidence-based aid will do better than aid as a whole has so far.
It seems that knowing if and to what extent a charity helps people become productive participants in the economy would be valuable to you. As near as I can tell, GiveWell does not rate charities on this criteria. As it sounds like you are planning to donate a substantial amount, you should consider contacting them about making an earmarked donation (I don’t know if they actually do this, but it is worth trying) for a research project to establish such ratings.
GiveWell has an economic empowerment category, but says that the efficacy and transparency of interventions and charities in that sector are too poor to recommend anything in the category in comparison with public health.