Don’t wait – there’s plenty more need and opportunity today

I think that this kind of criticism is really useful, and I am glad it was written. 

That being said, there is something about this post that really rubbed me the wrong way. This is a shame, because the topic is very pertinent and deserves an in-depth discussion - how do opportunities for funding today compare to opportunities for funding 5 or 10 years from now? 

Let me try to give my best shot at a more thoughtful critique.
 

In the midst of a global pandemic that pushed 150 million people into extreme poverty while billionaires’ wealth grew by $5.5 trillion, it’s odd timing. 

This is pretty much an unrelated remark. While I agree that this reflects inequality and a sad arrangement of the world, it has very little to do with whether GiveWell should or not be patient.

I am pointing this out because this is one of things that made me icky about the post, even though it is a great post otherwise.
 

The team at GiveWell know all these numbers of course, and they would likely agree that influencing more money is better. But their decision here tries to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving in isolation from the other 99.9%; when, in reality, growing that 99.9% and allocating it better will mean a lot more for our world than asking those donors to hold out for possible silver bullets down the road.

The argument here is that focusing on fundraising is probably a better use of GiveWell's resources than  being patient with their money. But this assumes that fundraising trades off against patience, which I believe is false. GiveWell can focus on fundraising AND be patient.

I assume that the crux here is that GiveDirectly believes that spending more money now would have a good publicity effect, that would promote philanthropy and raise the total amount of donations overall.
I would change my mind if this was the case, but I don't see this as obvious.

Since 2018, we have asked GiveWell to fully engage with this study and others, but they have opted not to, citing capacity constraints. Until they do, they may be underestimating the effects of cash transfers by 2.6x and overstating the benefits of waiting by the same amount.

This is the strongest argument in this document. If GiveWell has not taken into account these second hand effects and those would increase the effectiveness by x2 that might push them over the edge of effectiveness that would justify giving more now.

On the other hand, I am unsure of how much this affects the math on whether to expect better giving opportunities in the future. In fact, it could counterintuitively mean that good spending opportunities are easier to find than we expected, which could incentive waiting.

We’re skeptical about GiveWell’s hopes to find much more without a more fundamental re-evaluation of the scale of the sector, the opportunities available, and their role within it. We hope we’re wrong about that, but if we’re not it’s another reason to move faster now, rather than hold out for better opportunities down the road.

I agree with your position - if I believed that GiveWell has run out of low hanging fruit then this definitely is a good argument in favour of spending more now instead of waiting.

On the other hand, GiveWell is incredibly young. And they seem to be capacity constrained enough that they cannot afford to look into very relevant studies on cost-effectiveness like the one you mention in the post. I would be quite surprised if there weren't better funding opportunities than the ones already identified.

So it seems prudent to expect that better opportunities will be identified later.

However, people living in poverty have good reasons to answer this table’s impossible questions in a variety of different ways. They may also have good reasons to differ with GiveWell on what else matters, let alone which interventions will do the most for the things that matter most to them. Many of these potential differences of opinion are highly relevant to whether or not GiveWell should save funds and give further down the road.

I absolutely agree with this. And I commend GiveDirectly on its efforts to incorporate the voice of their recipients in their processes - I think its exemplary and something to be imitated.

I'd love to see GiveWell expand their work on this area, and to hire a more diverse team to help integrate many valuable perspectives. 

I know very little about the chances of finding better funding opportunities in the future and of GiveWell and GiveDirectly. So please definitely take all of this with a grain of salt.

My TL;DR of the post is that GiveWell might be understimating direct giving and needs to do more work on listening to charity beneficiaries to learn how to help them best. It was also argued that GiveWell is unlikely to find better funding opportunities in the future, but I didn't find those arguments particularly convincing.

Thank you to GiveDirectly for taking the time to engage with the community. Highlighting these problems is definitely something I would like to happen more often, so we stand a better chance at fixing them.

Some great points have been made in previous comments, but I think there is some important context missing in GiveDirectly's post and this discussion.

Disclosure and caveats: At Ayuda Efectiva we rely heavily on GiveWell's research and will soon incorporate GiveDirectly as a giving option for Spanish donors. We therefore have an ongoing relationship with GiveWell and a just-getting-started one with GiveDirectly. We talk to GiveWell regularly to get a better sense of their thinking but all I write here is my personal  understanding (which could be wrong).

Even though GiveWell has been around for more than a decade, it is a fast-growing and fast-changing organization. It seems that one of the current key drivers of change is the success of their Maximum Impact Fund. More and more,  donors seem to be choosing to let GiveWell pursue whichever opportunities they think are the most impactful at any given time.

The way I see it, what this means in practice is that GiveWell's role as a charity recommender is becoming less prominent while their role as a grantmaking organization is expanding. The 40% growth of their incubation grants in 2020 also seems to point in that direction.

Once you see GiveWell in that light, the arguments against the roll over of part of their 2021 let-GiveWell-decide money raised seem to me quite weaker. If there is a strong argument, it should be applicable to any foundation (e.g. Gates, Open Phil, you name it) not giving away all of their available money in cash transfers now.

I do find convincing the argument that GiveWell is still widely seen and represented as just a charity recommender and they do have an important influence on giving decisions (I would say mostly in the EA community and adjacent groups). Their communications can therefore have a big impact and potentially unintended consequences. I have two comments to make on this:

First,  GiveWell's message to donors is not "do not give, hold your money":

We will continue to raise funds, and our top recommendation to donors continues to be our Maximum Impact Fund, which grants funds on a quarterly basis to the most cost-effective giving opportunities we’ve identified at the time grants are made.

In fact, they expect to cover funding needs in 2022 equivalent to a very large percentage of the money they hope to raise:

Second, I find GiveDirectly's argument on the potential impact of GiveWell's announcement rather confusing:

But their decision here tries to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving in isolation from the other 99.9%; when, in reality, growing that 99.9% and allocating it better will mean a lot more for our world than asking those donors to hold out for possible silver bullets down the road.

One possible interpretation is the one in Jaime's comment. The way I understood it made me think the argument is not very consistent: On the one hand, they say that GiveWell is trying to optimize 0.1% of U.S. charitable giving. I don't know what the exact percentage is but it does seem clear that GiveWell's money moved and influence is very small in the scheme of things. On the other hand, the post seems to suggest that GiveWell is somehow telling the 99.9% donors it has no influence on to hold their donations.

In any case, I think it is perfectly compatible for GiveWell to announce they will be holding some funds for some time in order to achieve maximum impact (since that is precisely what they set out to do) while other donors decide to give now because they prefer to address the immediate needs that GiveDirectly is focused on. It does not seem like GiveWell's announcement should have a huge impact on that latter group,  even if it is not the messaging that GiveDirectly will want to (and should) emphasize when addressing the 99.9% donors out there.

I want to agree with your points on delegating as much decision making directly to the affected populations, but my sense is that this is something GiveWell already thinks very seriously about, and has deeply considered.

For example, I personally felt very persuaded by some of Alex Berger's comments explaining that the advantage of buying bed-nets over direct transfers are that many of the beneficiaries are children, who wouldn't be eligible for GiveDirectly, and that ~50% of the benefits are from the positive externalities of killing mosquitoes, so people making individual choices would tend to underinvest.

I'm guessing you wouldn't find that argument compelling, or at least not sufficiently compelling, so I'd love to understand what I'm missing here, or why/how our views might differ.

a large-scale study evaluating our program in Kenya found each $1 transferred drove $2.60 in additional spending or income in the surrounding community, with non-recipients benefitting from the cash transfers nearly as much as recipients themselves. **Since 2018, we have asked GiveWell to fully engage with this study and others, but they have opted not to, citing capacity constraints. ** [emphasis mine]

This sounded pretty concerning to me, so I looked into it a bit more.

This GiveWell post mentions that they did engage with the study, or at least private draft results of it. An updated at the top of the post does clarify that they have not reviewed the full results. They explain the decision as:

We have not made it a high priority to update this analysis because it is very unlikely to change our recommendations to donors. This is because we estimate that the grants we have recommended on the margin are at least 5 times, and in most cases at least 10 times, as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers, so we do not anticipate that any changes to our model from investigating this factor further would be large enough to lead us to direct Maximum Impact Fund grants to GiveDirectly at this time.

I guess that decision sounds fine to me. They're basically saying that even taking the 2.6x multiple at face value, it doesn't put GiveDirectly ahead of any of their top charities, so it's not worth taking the time to fully evaluate it.

Does that seem unfair to you?

I've written a post about why stepping up expenditure during a difficult time is often the correct thing to do here.  I also talk about how I think the view of "let's wait and things will be easier in the future" is flawed.

TL;DR: GiveWell just announced ~$900M of giving recommendations this year, which they estimate are all at least 10 times as effective as cash transfers (10x cash). They only expect their donors to contribute $600M to these opportunities, leaving ~$300M unfunded. I think donors who have to GiveDirectly a year ago on GiveDirectly's recommendation would have done ~10x more good by giving to GiveWell instead (now, or earlier in the past year). I think this was very foreseeable and was disappointed by GiveDirectly's post here saying the opposite when I saw it last year.

Hi GiveDirectly,

I'm commenting on this post from a year ago because the results of GiveWell's research are finally in, so it's a good time for GiveDirectly to do a retrospective on this post.

(I'm also commenting because I was very disappointed by this post when I saw it last year—I felt it went against the principle of effective altruism that says you should try to do the most good, rather than settle for doing some good, and I want to speak my mind about that finally.)

GiveWell wrote the following in its newsletter that was sent out today, November 23, 2022 (bold emphasis added by me):

We’re thrilled that our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding opportunities this year in both the core interventions implemented by our top charities—malaria prevention, incentives for vaccination, and vitamin A supplementation (VAS)—and newer-to-us areas, such as water treatment, iron fortification, and maternal syphilis screening and treatment.

This year, we don’t expect to raise enough funds to support all of these excellent programs. If donor support is in line with our forecasts, we'll be leaving $300 million of identified funding gaps unfilled.

(See GiveWell's blog post for the full details: Our recommendations for giving in 2022.)

A year ago in this post, GiveDirectly wrote:

As we share below, we think GiveWell is thinking too small, undervaluing what can be achieved today, underestimating the costs of waiting, overestimating how much better they’ll allocate funds in the future, and not accounting for the perspectives of people living in poverty. In short, we think the world has an unprecedented opportunity to eliminate most of extreme poverty in our lifetimes, and we worry GiveWell’s decision hinders that effort.

I strongly disagreed with this and GiveDirectly's condemnation of GiveWell's 2021 decision to rollover funds.

Let's look at the two concrete claims above that we now have new information on:

1.

overestimating how much better they’ll allocate funds in the future

GiveWell's funding bar was 5-8x cash last year, and decided to rollover funds that could not meet that funding bar to this year because GiveWell expected to identify significantly more giving opportunities above that bar. As it turns out, GiveWell did not overestimate how much better they'd allocate funds in the future. GiveWell's announcement today says:

We’re thrilled about the expected impact of the above grants, all of which we estimate are above our bar of 10 times as cost-effective as cash transfers.

As expected last year, any donors who gave to GiveDirectly last year rather than wait until today to give to GiveWell's 2022 recommendations lost out on ~90% of the impact they could have had with their money.

2. 
estimate their top charities at 10x cash. So it seems they did not overestimate how much better they'll allocate funds.

undervaluing what can be achieved today

I'm highly suspicious of GiveDirectly's claim that "[GiveWell may have been] underestimating the effects of cash transfers by 2.6x and overstating the benefits of waiting by the same amount," but for the sake of argument assume GiveDirectly is correct. Even cash transfers have always been 2.6x as valuable as GiveWell estimates, waiting a year to do 3-4 times as much good per dollar is still totally worth it.

GiveDirectly's claim that GiveWell was "underestimating the costs of waiting" still seems clearly false. Waiting a year to do 3-4 times as much good is a fantastic return.

But as a thought experiment, which is more likely?

Case A: A donor comes to GiveDirectly today and says, "I'm disappointed that the best giving opportunity I can identify today is GiveWell's recommendation which is 10x as effective as cash. I wish I could go back in time a year and give my money to GiveDirectly instead."

Case B: A donor comes to GiveDirectly today and says, "I donated to GiveDirectly last year because GiveDirectly recommended giving now after I heard about GiveWell's decisions to rollover funds, but I just learned that if I had waited just a year I could have done ~10 times as much good with my money."

We applaud the work they did with IDinsight to understand better preferences of potential aid recipients, but the scale and scope of this survey doesn’t go nearly far enough in correcting the massive imbalances in power and lived experience that exist in their work and in philanthropy in general.

Was happy to see you link to this. I agree the IDinsight surveys are simultaneously super useful and nowhere near enough.

My own sense is that more work in the vein of surveying people in extreme poverty to better calibrate moral weights would eventually alleviate something like 50% of my concern that donors are much wealthier than their recipients, but my interpretation of your phrasing makes me guess you would put that number at more like 5%.

What do you think would be a promising future scale and scope for surveys like this? Are those surveys being conducted? Do you worry that even much more comprehensive surveys wouldn't "go nearly far enough"?