Hide table of contents

I recently discovered that a group of people in Denmark has been taking 'the promise', which seems to run very close to something like the 'giving what we can' pledge. Its aim is to guarantee food, water, peace and shelter for everyone, forever.

To my understanding, nobody in the EA community has yet assessed this movement, so I created a cost effectiveness analysis. I was quite shocked at the initial results, which suggests 915 QALYs per dollar spent.

I would be glad to have your support in improving this CEA, and taking next steps in running initial trials.

 

What is the promise

The promise is simply a piece of text, which is read aloud to become a 'Promiser'. The person makes a promise that if any other Promiser asks them for help with obtaining food, water, peace (defined as freedom from physical violence) or shelter, they must either fulfill that request or bring in another Promiser to help.

Each Promiser creates their own 'jury' of five people that they know, whose ethics they admire. This helps them to stick to their promise and have a flexible method of solving moral conundrums.

The promise also has the condition that it comes before all other laws (which is less controversial than it sounds, given that it is restating a subsection the UN human rights convention), and if any Promiser is being punished for putting their promise first, you should either prevent the punishment or bring in more Promisers to help.

You can see the full text of the promise here.


Cost Effectiveness

I created this document to asses the cost effectiveness of a hypothetical charity that has paid employees spreading the promise. Example activities of the charity could be:

  • Translating the promise
  • Using networks to share the promise with individuals
  • Improving the cost effectiveness analysis by monitoring success
  • Generating media attention for the promise

Feel free to make a copy, trial different input parameters, and make any tweaks.


Key points from the CEA:

  • The charity's first employee could continuously save lives for 0.04 USD per life, even with conservative estimates
  • The promise has features that allow it to grow exponentially:
    • Low infrastructural requirements
    • Immediate benefit to those who join the promise
    • Benefit to Promisers of spreading the promise
  • We need a trial run
    • There is a chance that the promise would not have exponential growth, and so would have a much smaller impact, if the defection rate (people dropping out of the promise) is greater than the spread rate. This should be tested in a trial
  • Intervening early is key
    • creating the charity when there are only 100 promisers (estimated current number) versus 10,000 will increase cost effectiveness by 3x
    • Rapid action should of course be balanced with conducting trials and testing evidence
       

How can you help?

  • Forecasting
    • What will the spread rate of the promise be over time?
  • Test and improve the CEA:
    • Check for calculation errors
    • Refine estimates for QALYs lost through lack of clean water, physical violence, and homelessness
    • A full list of planned model improvements can be found at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Feel free to act on any of these
  • Create a fancier CEA
    • Build an SIR-style model (similar to that used by infectious diseases)
    • Add scenario planning or uncertainties, e.g. through a monte carlo model
  • Create and fund a charity
    • I suggest creating a small charity with two employees, to run a trial of spreading the promise and testing the CEA. Let's do this ASAP. Perhaps someone from Charity Entrepreneurship could take the lead?

Get in touch, and let's make a plan



P.S. this scheme could work well within EA

The promise would build a safety net from which EAs would be able to take high-impact actions that have personal risks, such as starting a charity or undertaking a research project without institutional funding. What do you think? Would you take the promise together with a group of EA friends?


 

9

0
4

Reactions

0
4

More posts like this

Comments10


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

It's unclear how demanding this promise is -- I find it to be considerably more vague than the GWWC 10% Pledge in terms of how much sacrifice is expected, but let's assume for the time being that it is ~equally demanding as the 10% Pledge. It's taken many years and FTEs to get GWWC to ~10,000 pledgers, a rate of progress which makes me think that gaining promisers would be considerably more difficult than your model assumes.

It's true that there is a theoretical "benefit to those who join the promise" in that they obtain the ability to ask other promisers for material resources. However, for those who currently have enough food, water, peace, and shelter, there is zero marginal benefit to pledging now as one could always defer pledging until one had a need. One could perhaps get around this with an open season and a registry (e.g., people can only promise from Jan 1 to Jan 15 of each year, or else they can't claim the promise until the next year)? But even then, this system needs a balance between people who have excess resources and people who need basic resources, or ~everyone will likely get frustrated and give up. I'm not sure you'd get that.

The idea of closed communities of promisers in the postscript is interesting, although there would be awkwardness about who is allowed / not allowed into the group, whether people would be screened on various underwriting criteria, and so on.

Thanks very much for all these great hypotheses. I think there is a reasonable chance that these effects will be true, but also that we don't have strong evidence for any of them yet. I've split your comment into the following hypotheses, and tests that can be run to determine whether they are true:

Hypothesis 1: Spread rate will be similar to GWWC 10% pledge, at 10,000 members over 15 years of activity. GWWC currently have 15 employees, with a time averaged number of c. 10 employees. This puts the spread rate per employee at around 0.2 promisers per day, compared to the model's current estimate of 3. This would lower the QALYs per dollar from 915 to 123.
Test for hypothesis 1: monitor the spread rate per employee

Hypothesis 2: People gaming the system by becoming aware of the promise, but only taking the promise once they are in need, will be a significant effect.
Test A for hypothesis 2: Employees record interactions with potential promisers and indicate what proportion of them seem likely to engage in this behaviour
Test B for hypothesis 2: Monitor the spread rate by employees and by promisers directly, ignoring this intermediate variable

Hypothesis 3: There will be an overwhelming number of promisers without access to food, water, peace and shelter, which will lead to a high defection rate (above the 0.5% per day predicted in the model)
Test A for hypothesis 3: Record the defection rate from the promise by running trials
Test B for hypothesis 3: Observe the ratio of promisers who are able to give and promisers who are making requests for support

If you or anybody else would be interested in supporting the running any of these tests, please let me know.

 

It will do a service to your reader if you choose a title that explains what your post is arguing.

Could you suggest an alternative title? Maybe you're thinking something like: "we should set up a pilot charity to formalise the promise - predicted to save 915 QALYs per dollar"?

It sounds like a more effective version of Moai in Okinawa. It will be interesting to see how it goes!

https://www.bluezones.com/2018/08/moai-this-tradition-is-why-okinawan-people-live-longer-better/

I wish you luck with this project!

I'm a bit more skeptical, but this sounds fascinating. Would love to hear more.

Great! What questions do you have? What makes you feel skeptical? 

Nothing specific. It just seems like it would make sense for them to write an explanation of why they're doing this.

Does the promise have a website? Do you happen to know how many people have taken the promise so far? BTW There is a notion page where EAs can sign up to host others so it's kind of like promise already.

There is no website as far as I have seen. It is not a formal organisation, but rather a text. There is, because of this, no centralised register of who has taken the promise, though I'm sure that would be welcomed, and could be one of the activities that the created charity does. So far, the promise has been working via word of mouth - if you need help, you ask Promisers that you know, and they ask Promisers that they know.
Cool about the notion page. Maybe you could link it?

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 7m read
 · 
This is a linkpost for a paper I wrote recently, “Endogenous Growth and Excess Variety”, along with a summary. Two schools in growth theory Roughly speaking: In Romer’s (1990) growth model, output per person is interpreted as an economy’s level of “technology”, and the economic growth rate—the growth rate of “real GDP” per person—is proportional to the amount of R&D being done. As Jones (1995) pointed out, populations have grown greatly over the last century, and the proportion of people doing research (and the proportion of GDP spent on research) has grown even more quickly, yet the economic growth rate has not risen. Growth theorists have mainly taken two approaches to reconciling [research] population growth with constant economic growth. “Semi-endogenous” growth models (introduced by Jones (1995)) posit that, as the technological frontier advances, further advances get more difficult. Growth in the number of researchers, and ultimately (if research is not automated) population growth, is therefore necessary to sustain economic growth. “Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed. (We do this, in the model, because each innovator needs a monopoly on his or her invention in order to compensate for the costs of developing it.) Improvements in process efficiency are called “vertical innovations” and increases in good variety are called “horizontal innovations”. Variety is desirable, so the one-off increase in variety produced by an increase to the population size increases real GDP, but it does not increase the growth rate. Likewise exponential population growth raise
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Sometimes working on animal issues feels like an uphill battle, with alternative protein losing its trendy status with VCs, corporate campaigns hitting blocks in enforcement and veganism being stuck at the same percentage it's been for decades. However, despite these things I personally am more optimistic about the animal movement than I have ever been (despite following the movement for 10+ years). What gives? At AIM we think a lot about the ingredients of a good charity (talent, funding and idea) and more and more recently I have been thinking about the ingredients of a good movement or ecosystem that I think has a couple of extra ingredients (culture and infrastructure). I think on approximately four-fifths of these prerequisites the animal movement is at all-time highs. And like betting on a charity before it launches, I am far more confident that a movement that has these ingredients will lead to long-term impact than I am relying on, e.g., plant-based proteins trending for climate reasons. Culture The culture of the animal movement in the past has been up and down. It has always been full of highly dedicated people in a way that is rare across other movements, but it also had infighting, ideological purity and a high level of day-to-day drama. Overall this made me a bit cautious about recommending it as a place to spend time even when someone was sold on ending factory farming. But over the last few years professionalization has happened, differences have been put aside to focus on higher goals and the drama overall has gone down a lot. This was perhaps best embodied by my favorite opening talk at a conference ever (AVA 2025) where Wayne and Lewis, leaders with very different historical approaches to helping animals, were able to share lessons, have a friendly debate and drive home the message of how similar our goals really are. This would have been nearly unthinkable decades ago (and in fact resulted in shouting matches when it was attempted). But the cult
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
TLDR When we look across all jobs globally, many of us in the EA community occupy positions that would rank in the 99.9th percentile or higher by our own preferences within jobs that we could plausibly get.[1] Whether you work at an EA-aligned organization, hold a high-impact role elsewhere, or have a well-compensated position which allows you to make significant high effectiveness donations, your job situation is likely extraordinarily fortunate and high impact by global standards. This career conversations week, it's worth reflecting on this and considering how we can make the most of these opportunities. Intro I think job choice is one of the great advantages of development. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone had to be a hunter-gatherer or a farmer, and they typically didn’t get a choice between those. Now there is typically some choice in low income countries, and typically a lot of choice in high income countries. This already suggests that having a job in your preferred field puts you in a high percentile of job choice. But for many in the EA community, the situation is even more fortunate. The Mathematics of Job Preference If you work at an EA-aligned organization and that is your top preference, you occupy an extraordinarily rare position. There are perhaps a few thousand such positions globally, out of the world's several billion jobs. Simple division suggests this puts you in roughly the 99.9999th percentile of job preference. Even if you don't work directly for an EA organization but have secured: * A job allowing significant donations * A position with direct positive impact aligned with your values * Work that combines your skills, interests, and preferred location You likely still occupy a position in the 99.9th percentile or higher of global job preference matching. Even without the impact perspective, if you are working in your preferred field and preferred country, that may put you in the 99.9th percentile of job preference