Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post September 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post September 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.
Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you'll find in the newspaper.
But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that's more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.
As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)
The post GiveWell as Moneyball appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.
Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you'll find in the newspaper.
But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that's more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.
As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)
The post GiveWell as Moneyball appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we're now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about where to focus our efforts going forward.
Where are we now?Before this year, our grants for vaccine programs focused on (a) increasing uptake of the vaccines given to children in the first two years of life, and (b) speeding up the rollout of malaria vaccines.
Relative to other global health approaches, vaccines garner a lot of attention. Governments in high-income countries contribute to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which heavily subsidizes the purchasing of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries and provides cash assistance to help these countries deliver them. The Gates Foundation is also a major contributor to vaccine programs. These efforts have been fairly successful—in 2022, 81% of children in the 57 low-income countries supported by Gavi had received the DTP3 vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. DTP3 coverage is often used as a benchmark for progress on vaccination.
This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for finding cost-effective giving opportunities. On the one hand, thankfully, the people who are easiest to reach with vaccines are already being reached, which means more expensive or innovative methods are needed to expand coverage. On the other hand, we can build on the extensive knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.
The post Research Strategy: Vaccines appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we're now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about where to focus our efforts going forward.
Where are we now?Before this year, our grants for vaccine programs focused on (a) increasing uptake of the vaccines given to children in the first two years of life, and (b) speeding up the rollout of malaria vaccines.
Relative to other global health approaches, vaccines garner a lot of attention. Governments in high-income countries contribute to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which heavily subsidizes the purchasing of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries and provides cash assistance to help these countries deliver them. The Gates Foundation is also a major contributor to vaccine programs. These efforts have been fairly successful—in 2022, 81% of children in the 57 low-income countries supported by Gavi had received the DTP3 vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. DTP3 coverage is often used as a benchmark for progress on vaccination.
This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for finding cost-effective giving opportunities. On the one hand, thankfully, the people who are easiest to reach with vaccines are already being reached, which means more expensive or innovative methods are needed to expand coverage. On the other hand, we can build on the extensive knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.
The post Research Strategy: Vaccines appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post September 2024 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post September 2024 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post August 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post August 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Sometimes statistics can help when it's hard to decide what to do.
You’re at a local art fair, and they’re raffling off a car worth $10,000. Five hundred tickets are being sold, each for $10. Does it make financial sense to buy a ticket? (For the moment, let’s set aside other questions about raffles and just focus on the benefit for you, the potential ticket-buyer.)
You can use a statistical concept called “expected value” to help you decide. Expected value is calculated by multiplying the probability of each potential outcome by its value, then adding these results together to get the average result of an action.
Let's figure this out—a car is on the line. First, we multiply the probability of each potential outcome by its value.
The post Raffles, Deworming, and Statistics appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Sometimes statistics can help when it's hard to decide what to do.
You’re at a local art fair, and they’re raffling off a car worth $10,000. Five hundred tickets are being sold, each for $10. Does it make financial sense to buy a ticket? (For the moment, let’s set aside other questions about raffles and just focus on the benefit for you, the potential ticket-buyer.)
You can use a statistical concept called “expected value” to help you decide. Expected value is calculated by multiplying the probability of each potential outcome by its value, then adding these results together to get the average result of an action.
Let's figure this out—a car is on the line. First, we multiply the probability of each potential outcome by its value.
The post Raffles, Deworming, and Statistics appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
It started in my early forties, and it's only gotten worse since then. At first, it was a mild annoyance, but now it affects my quality of life and makes it harder to get things done. I'm definitely not alone—almost every middle-aged person I know has the same problem—and maybe you do too: a condition called presbyopia, a type of age-related vision loss that makes it difficult to see things clearly at close distances.
Luckily, the condition is easily and inexpensively treated with reading glasses, widely available at nearly every corner drug store in the United States. Reading glasses work well, and they're cheap enough that I have them stashed around my house so a pair is always in reach. But an estimated 510 to 826 million people around the world have presbyopia but do not have corrective glasses.
What we know and what we don't knowWe think that providing reading glasses to people who need them is a promising way to improve their employment opportunities and increase their economic well-being. It makes intuitive sense that being able to see better would improve people's ability to work, particularly for vision-intensive jobs such as crop cultivation and inspection, manufacturing, or retail work.
Since we're not as confident as we'd like to be in the effect of distributing reading glasses, we're co-funding a study to find out more before we allocate significant funding to direct delivery of glasses. We're recommending a $4.8 million grant for the study.
The post Bringing the Economic Benefits of Reading Glasses into Focus appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
It started in my early forties, and it's only gotten worse since then. At first, it was a mild annoyance, but now it affects my quality of life and makes it harder to get things done. I'm definitely not alone—almost every middle-aged person I know has the same problem—and maybe you do too: a condition called presbyopia, a type of age-related vision loss that makes it difficult to see things clearly at close distances.
Luckily, the condition is easily and inexpensively treated with reading glasses, widely available at nearly every corner drug store in the United States. Reading glasses work well, and they're cheap enough that I have them stashed around my house so a pair is always in reach. But an estimated 510 to 826 million people around the world have presbyopia but do not have corrective glasses.
What we know and what we don't knowWe think that providing reading glasses to people who need them is a promising way to improve their employment opportunities and increase their economic well-being. It makes intuitive sense that being able to see better would improve people's ability to work, particularly for vision-intensive jobs such as crop cultivation and inspection, manufacturing, or retail work.
Since we're not as confident as we'd like to be in the effect of distributing reading glasses, we're co-funding a study to find out more before we allocate significant funding to direct delivery of glasses. We're recommending a $4.8 million grant for the study.
The post Bringing the Economic Benefits of Reading Glasses into Focus appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
What do you do if you’re in the very fortunate position of having more money than you need to meet your own immediate needs? You might find new things to buy. You might stockpile it for a rainy day. You might donate it to cost-effective global health programs. Or you might do some combination of the three.
GiveWell thinks about that same question.
First, a bit of context: All donations made to GiveWell's Top Charities Fund, All Grants Fund, and recommended organizations go to the programs we recommend. (We do not take a percentage of donations made to recommended organizations through GiveWell’s website, nor do we receive any fees from organizations for being featured on our site.)
Our own organizational needs are met by donors who choose to direct funding to GiveWell’s operations (by giving to our Unrestricted Fund). In other words, we are supported only by donors who explicitly choose to support GiveWell itself through unrestricted donations.
But what happens when we receive more unrestricted donations than we need? We could choose to spend the funds on something new for the organization. We could squirrel those funds away, building an endowment to cover future needs. Or, like you, we could donate to cost-effective global health programs.
The post What If We Have Extra? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
What do you do if you’re in the very fortunate position of having more money than you need to meet your own immediate needs? You might find new things to buy. You might stockpile it for a rainy day. You might donate it to cost-effective global health programs. Or you might do some combination of the three.
GiveWell thinks about that same question.
First, a bit of context: All donations made to GiveWell's Top Charities Fund, All Grants Fund, and recommended organizations go to the programs we recommend. (We do not take a percentage of donations made to recommended organizations through GiveWell’s website, nor do we receive any fees from organizations for being featured on our site.)
Our own organizational needs are met by donors who choose to direct funding to GiveWell’s operations (by giving to our Unrestricted Fund). In other words, we are supported only by donors who explicitly choose to support GiveWell itself through unrestricted donations.
But what happens when we receive more unrestricted donations than we need? We could choose to spend the funds on something new for the organization. We could squirrel those funds away, building an endowment to cover future needs. Or, like you, we could donate to cost-effective global health programs.
The post What If We Have Extra? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
What does it take to prevent malaria? Some of the programs GiveWell recommends might sound straightforward—for example, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programs provide antimalarial drugs to young children—but the process of accomplishing this is not simple at all.
Below, we offer a post from Malaria Consortium that describes the many complex steps required to carry out an SMC campaign. See our reports for more information about the evidence for SMC and about Malaria Consortium's SMC program.
The post More than a Spoonful of Medicine appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
What does it take to prevent malaria? Some of the programs GiveWell recommends might sound straightforward—for example, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programs provide antimalarial drugs to young children—but the process of accomplishing this is not simple at all.
Below, we offer a post from Malaria Consortium that describes the many complex steps required to carry out an SMC campaign. See our reports for more information about the evidence for SMC and about Malaria Consortium's SMC program.
The post More than a Spoonful of Medicine appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Today we’re sharing a few quotes from pieces we’ve come across recently in our work—claims have not been vetted, and (of course) interest is not endorsement.
The post Some Things We’re Reading appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Today we’re sharing a few quotes from pieces we’ve come across recently in our work—claims have not been vetted, and (of course) interest is not endorsement.
The post Some Things We’re Reading appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
