I don’t think Ben is implying that CEA and GiveWell are claiming that the average price is low. Here is what I understand to be his argument:
What you actually mean by marginal price is something like “the price I would have to pay to cause a marginal life to be saved, right now”
GiveWell and the Gates Foundation have already pledged billions of dollars towards saving marginal lives with the most cost-effective interventions
This means, that if I am trying to understand how much of a difference a counterfactual additional dollar would make, the relevant question is “what difference would my money make, after GiveWell and the Gates Foundation have spent their already pledged $50B+ on saving marginal lives with the most cost-effective intervention”
He then argues that the world does not look like it actually has $50B of life-saving opportunities for $5k a piece lying around
As such, as an independent donor, trying to assess the marginal cost of saving a life, I should estimate that as much higher than $5000, since we should expect the marginal cost of saving a life to go up with investment, and we already have $50B of investment into this area
Maybe GiveWell and the Gates Foundation state that they have done some weird things to commit themselves to not take some of the opportunities for saving lives at $5k a piece, but he argues that both (I am least clear on this part of the argument, both in my understanding of Benquo, and in my understanding of what the correct game theory here is):
Doing so is pretty similar to extortion and you should ignore it
They are most likely lying about that, and have shown in the past to just fund opportunities at that level of funding, and their overall messaging sure seems to communicate that they will take those opportunities
I think Ben is straightforwardly arguing that the marginal cost of saving a life, taking into account some basic game theory and economics, must be much higher than $5k.
He then argues that the world does not look like it actually has $50B of life-saving opportunities for $5k a piece lying around
This point seems like it’s doing a lot of the work, and I’m honestly uncertain. I can imagine it going either way—for example I can imagine the average life saved being very cheap when you’re taking advantages of things at scale.
So it seems like a crux whether Gates Foundation’s cost effectiveness is comparably low relative to $5k (GiveWell’s suggested cost-effectiveness estimate). If it seems higher, then something is going wrong. Oli and I looked into two cases, here’s some partial work:
Gates Foundation spent $1.3 billion on malaria in 2012. For that to be beating GiveWell cost effectiveness estimates, it would have to beat $5k/person saved, which would be 260k people. This is not obviously implausible, given that ~500k people died of malaria that year. This would overall mean they’d have to have reduced malaria instances by around 30%, which seems massive but not implausible.
Measles has stayed around constant since 2010, around 300-400k deaths per year. It seems like Gates might have put 100s of millions in, which means for GiveWell’s recommendations to beat Gates’ cost effectiveness, measles cases would have had to counterfactually double in that time period, or something like this, which seems somewhat unlikely.
However, I think that Gates was trying to ‘kill off’ measles, which has a large returns in the long term, so it’s not obvious they shouldn’t spend a lot of money on high variance bets to maximise coverage of measles vaccines.
The malaria story has fair face validity if one observes the wider time series (e.g.). Further, the typical EA ‘picks’ for net distribution are generally seen as filling around the edges of the mega-distributors.
FWIW: I think this discussion would be clearer if framed in last-dollar terms.
If Gates et al. are doing something like last dollar optimisation, trying to save as many lives as they can allocating across opportunities both now and in the future, leaving the right now best marginal interventions on the table would imply they expect to exhaust their last dollar on more cost-effective interventions in the future.
This implies the right now marginal price should be higher than the (expected) last dollar cost effectiveness (if not, it should be reallocating some of the ‘last dollars’ to interventions right now). Yet this in turn does not imply we should see 50Bn of marginal price lifesaving lying around right now. So it seems we can explain Gates et al. not availing themselves of the (non-existent) opportunity to (say) halve communicable diseases for 2Bn a year worldwide (extrapolating from the right now marginal prices) without the right now marginal price being lied about or manipulated. (Obviously, even if we forecast the Gates et al. last dollar EV to be higher than the current marginal price, we might venture alternative explanations of this discrepancy besides them screwing us.)
I don’t think Ben is implying that CEA and GiveWell are claiming that the average price is low. Here is what I understand to be his argument:
What you actually mean by marginal price is something like “the price I would have to pay to cause a marginal life to be saved, right now”
GiveWell and the Gates Foundation have already pledged billions of dollars towards saving marginal lives with the most cost-effective interventions
This means, that if I am trying to understand how much of a difference a counterfactual additional dollar would make, the relevant question is “what difference would my money make, after GiveWell and the Gates Foundation have spent their already pledged $50B+ on saving marginal lives with the most cost-effective intervention”
He then argues that the world does not look like it actually has $50B of life-saving opportunities for $5k a piece lying around
As such, as an independent donor, trying to assess the marginal cost of saving a life, I should estimate that as much higher than $5000, since we should expect the marginal cost of saving a life to go up with investment, and we already have $50B of investment into this area
Maybe GiveWell and the Gates Foundation state that they have done some weird things to commit themselves to not take some of the opportunities for saving lives at $5k a piece, but he argues that both (I am least clear on this part of the argument, both in my understanding of Benquo, and in my understanding of what the correct game theory here is):
Doing so is pretty similar to extortion and you should ignore it
They are most likely lying about that, and have shown in the past to just fund opportunities at that level of funding, and their overall messaging sure seems to communicate that they will take those opportunities
I think Ben is straightforwardly arguing that the marginal cost of saving a life, taking into account some basic game theory and economics, must be much higher than $5k.
This point seems like it’s doing a lot of the work, and I’m honestly uncertain. I can imagine it going either way—for example I can imagine the average life saved being very cheap when you’re taking advantages of things at scale.
So it seems like a crux whether Gates Foundation’s cost effectiveness is comparably low relative to $5k (GiveWell’s suggested cost-effectiveness estimate). If it seems higher, then something is going wrong. Oli and I looked into two cases, here’s some partial work:
Gates Foundation spent $1.3 billion on malaria in 2012. For that to be beating GiveWell cost effectiveness estimates, it would have to beat $5k/person saved, which would be 260k people. This is not obviously implausible, given that ~500k people died of malaria that year. This would overall mean they’d have to have reduced malaria instances by around 30%, which seems massive but not implausible.
Measles has stayed around constant since 2010, around 300-400k deaths per year. It seems like Gates might have put 100s of millions in, which means for GiveWell’s recommendations to beat Gates’ cost effectiveness, measles cases would have had to counterfactually double in that time period, or something like this, which seems somewhat unlikely.
However, I think that Gates was trying to ‘kill off’ measles, which has a large returns in the long term, so it’s not obvious they shouldn’t spend a lot of money on high variance bets to maximise coverage of measles vaccines.
The malaria story has fair face validity if one observes the wider time series (e.g.). Further, the typical EA ‘picks’ for net distribution are generally seen as filling around the edges of the mega-distributors.
FWIW: I think this discussion would be clearer if framed in last-dollar terms.
If Gates et al. are doing something like last dollar optimisation, trying to save as many lives as they can allocating across opportunities both now and in the future, leaving the right now best marginal interventions on the table would imply they expect to exhaust their last dollar on more cost-effective interventions in the future.
This implies the right now marginal price should be higher than the (expected) last dollar cost effectiveness (if not, it should be reallocating some of the ‘last dollars’ to interventions right now). Yet this in turn does not imply we should see 50Bn of marginal price lifesaving lying around right now. So it seems we can explain Gates et al. not availing themselves of the (non-existent) opportunity to (say) halve communicable diseases for 2Bn a year worldwide (extrapolating from the right now marginal prices) without the right now marginal price being lied about or manipulated. (Obviously, even if we forecast the Gates et al. last dollar EV to be higher than the current marginal price, we might venture alternative explanations of this discrepancy besides them screwing us.)