This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
GiveWell's cost to save a life has gone from $4,500 to a range between $3,000 and $5,500:
https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life
From at least as early as December 2023 (possibly as early as December 2021 when the page says it was first published) until February 2024, that page highlighted a $7.2 million 2020 grant to the Against Malaria Foundation at an estimated cost per life saved of $4,500.
The page now highlights a $6.4 million 2023 grant to the Malaria Consortium at an estimated cost per life saved of $3,000.
You can see all the estimated cost per life saved (or other relevant outcome) for all GiveWell's grants at this spreadsheet, linked-to from:
https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates
I wonder how they select grants to showcase on that page. They've made grants that are both much larger and more cost-effective than that, e.g. this $71.5M grant in Jan '23 to HKI's vitamin A supplementation program that they estimate would save roughly 49,000 lives at ~$1,450 per life saved after all adjustments (or ~93,000 lives at $770 per life if only adjusting for internal and external validity, or nearly 280k lives at at $260 per life saved before any adjustments, i.e. the standard I usually see in most BOTECs claiming to "beat GW top charities"...). Only thing is, this wouldn't be obvious from their original CEA because they tend to input "donation (arbitrary size)" = $100k instead of the actual grant amounts; I had to manually input their grant budget breakdown into a copy of their CEA to get the numbers above (which also means I may have done it wrong, so caveat utilitor...)
I would guess that it's based on the marginal grant, but of course someone at GiveWell should be able to confirm.