If the separation is going to continue, I'd prefer it be entrusted to (elected? appointed but independent-of-CEA?) stewards. My concern is that community tagging might end up being voting by a different name (users will be less likely to tag things they like).

It's "a cost of USD PPP 299,418 per death averted," which is about $125,000 nominal USD based on the conversion implied by other parts of the article. At least to the extent that people are comparing to GiveWell estimates -- and I suspect most readers will be -- the nominal figure may be the better figure to highlight here.

Perhaps the most lifesaving consumption does not, but the drop in labor-force participation for a six-month period was pretty significant:

"In the three months before and after a birth, however, cash transfers reduce female labor supply in recipient households by 20.79 hours a week, relative to a control group mean of 40 hours . . . ."

Interventions that attempt to improve decisionmaking by elites in developing countries might at least slightly blur the chart, to the extent it suggests the "most powerful" are the USG, Silicon Valley elites, etc.

Do we have a sense of how well the well-studied benefits of UCT in a general population sample might be diminished to some extent in a month-of-birth sample? 

From the study, it seems that the month-of-birth recipients spend their money in a manner that is meaningfully different than how a general sample spends the money. For example, one might expect a general population to spend relatively more on home improvements since it would not be spending nearly as much on improving birth outcomes. And to the extent that the month-of-birth sample used some of the money to reduce maternal labor while maintaining or improving consumption, it's not clear that this slice of expenditures would have the same spillover effects as most potential uses of the money.

That is to say that "the same $1,000 cash transfer improved" graphic looks fair for a general population but might not end up reflecting the non-mortality outcomes for a month-of-birth program. Or to state it differently, we might be looking at trading off some magnitude of certain classic GiveDirectly positive outcomes for better child/maternal health outcomes. I suspect it will be a tradeoff worth making, though.

Adding this quote for context:

Targeting UCTs to women in the third trimester of pregnancy under these assumptions
would cost about USD PPP 92,000 (or $39,000 in nominal dollars) per child death averted.
We can benchmark these calculations to 37 WHO-recommended maternal and child health
interventions in East Africa as estimated by Stenberg et al. (2021). Across interventions
and scenarios, the cost per death averted ranges from USD PPP 27 to USD PPP 222,952.^[1]
Hence, even without taking into account any of the other documented benefits of UCTs (such
as gains in consumption), the transfers are squarely in the range of cost per death averted
among these WHO-recommended interventions.

Article at p. 34 (footnote # is 36).

Stenberg et al. is here. Eastern sub-Saharan Africa is table 3. I'm not sure how to convert HLYs into deaths averted, but of the 37 interventions, #36 (ACER ^[2]of 1156.2) and #37 (ACER of 1310.6) are significantly less cost-effective than even #35 (ACER of 355.9). Based on the range in the article, it sounds like UCT-for-pregnant-women might rank somewhere between #35 and #36 here?

That doesn't sound like a particularly strong showing. The 27th out of 37 interventions has an ACER of 94.9. Some interventions I've seen discussed in EA circles are rated by Stenberg et. al much lower than even that: Vitamin A supplementation (0-4 years), 7.1; Kangaroo mother care, 20.1; Syphilis detection and treatment in pregnancy, 24.8.

1. ^{^}

   Stenberg et al. (2021) evaluates cost-effectiveness using three coverage level scenarios: 50%, 80%, and 95%, and report health impacts in terms of healthy life years (HLY) saved. We converted HLYs to deaths averted using WHO data on total and healthy life expectancy in Kenya (World Health Organization, 2025).

2. ^{^}

   "The average cost-effectiveness ratios (ACERs) were calculated by dividing the total cost for scale-up by the total health gain."

It's at least somewhat germane here. As I understand Adam's post, he is urging GiveWell to weight certain types of animal-welfare harm in its analyses. But that would make GiveWell's work less valuable to many people whose views materially differ in certain ways from whatever specific views and weights regarding animal welfare GiveWell incorporated into its analyses. I think Vasco's views represent a valid (albeit unusual) example of those circumstances for a specific potential(?) donor.

While it's impossible to prove that absolutely zero funging would occur, there are some features that make me think it is very unlikely to be present at any significant level here:

• For GiveWell to give to an animal-aid program, it would need to conclude that this was a better buy than a Top Charity (unless the funding source was limited to livelihoods work, in which case it wouldn't potentially funge with your donation to the Top Charities Fund). As I read their livelihoods announcement, they are searching for donation options for a donor who weighed livelihoods benefits twice as heavily as GiveWell's own moral weights. This suggests that animal-aid funding would come out of monies dedicated to livelihood work which couldn't be used for Top Charities anyway, which makes funging unlikely.
• If I understand your concern correctly, a donation to the Top Charity Fund might reduce the marginal cost-effectiveness of the most cost-effective Top Charity after all donations from the Top Charity Fund are allocated. This might make it easier for an animal-aid program to clear the bar for All Grants or Unrestricted funding.
• GiveWell raises in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the Top Charities. This doesn't include their non-GiveWell funding sources. Generally, the Top Charities are able to absorb large amount of funding without the cost-effectiveness dropping very much.
• Moreover, my understanding is that the calculated cost-effectiveness bar for Top Charities only moves in fairly large increments. If the best marginal use of the 250 millionth through 253 millionth dollar GiveWell can recommend toward Top Charities is for Charity X's program in County Z, I doubt GiveWell is recalculating the bar between (say) the 251.4 millionth dollar and the 251.5 millionth dollar.
• So unless one is a large donor, I think it's reasonable to model the cost-effectiveness of Top Charities for funging purposes as fixed. I think that remains approximately true for all but the largest donors.
• Although I can't figure out why I think this, the expected small size of any animal-aid grant (at least in early years) also makes me think the risk is lower. Maybe it is that -- even assuming your Top Charities donation counterfactually caused something else to get funded, and further assuming it was a livelihoods program, the odds that the next livelihoods dollar would be for an animal-aid program do not seem high.
• To the extent one is concerned about this kind of funging risk, it is also likely present if you gave to the top charity organization directly. Supposing that AMF is the most effective Top Charity at the margin today, giving it $1MM should have about the same effect on the Top Charities cost-effectiveness bar as giving GiveWell Top Charities $1MM to give to AMF. Indeed, unless one of the Top Charities wasn't going to get funded by GiveWell this round anyway, this result may hold for independent gifts to any Top Charity. So although intuitively the funging risk feels higher because you're giving to a different fund at GiveWell, I'm not sure how much that is the case.

This raises an interesting, and possibly unsolvable, point for organizations in GiveWell's shoes. 

GiveWell was created as a donor-advisory service, and to a significant degree still is (albeit most donors now entrust their money to GiveWell to disburse, so its recommendations can be executed in a timely and efficient manner). Almost by definition, GiveWell and its donors are aligned as to the primary purpose of the organization. But it's unsurprising that the donor base may have differing opinions on secondary issues like animal welfare. (By secondary, I mean that animal welfare is not the animating concern behind GiveWell's existence.)

If my memory serves, GiveWell's moral weights are mostly derived from the views of its donors, although staff views and beneficiary preferences also get some weight. I recall a sentiment that beneficiary preferences should get more weight than they do, but also a recognition that they are difficult to measure. In my estimation, there's no sound reason to defer to staff views on this issue, and I suspect beneficiary views would end up close to GiveWell's current position. As far as donor views, I speculate that they are somewhat bimodal ~ a number of donors would not really care, and a number would care a lot. So using some sort of amalgamation of donor views is likely to make very few donors happy

In a usual charity, the practical solution might be to have separate buckets for "all livelihoods work, including animal-aid" and "livelihoods excluding animal-aid" programs. But people in this community know about fungibility, and the fungibility problems on that setup would probably be significant.

Conditional on a universe in which GiveWell would recommend an animal-aid programs to livelihoods donors absent an animal-welfare adjustment, I think it may be impossible to avoid a significant problem for one subgroup of livelihoods donors.^[1] If it discloses the situation, then the donors who don't favor considering animal welfare (or apply only a minor downward adjustment) are going to preferentially fund the animal-aid program. This doesn't look much different than the two-livelihoods-bucket approach as far as funging effect. 

But suppressing the information deprives other donors of the ability to make the highest-impact choice by their own values. And the lack of transparency would be problematic for an organization whose value proposition is helping donors make effective choices with their own monies.

1. ^{^}

   For various reasons, I don't think fungibility between livelihood-focused buckets and lifesaving/health-promoting buckets at GiveWell is a major concern here.

"Socialist" is one of those words with a wide and disputed range of meaning. E.g., most members of the Democratic party in the US would endorse "social safety nets, universal health care, equal opportunity education, respect for minorities" but would not self-identify as socialist. They wouldn't limit that label to Marxism, but most would be generally thinking of a fairly strident anti-capitalist stance. Everything you mentioned is not inconsistent with capitalism with more regulations, taxes, and redistribution.

I upvoted your comment; the linked post would be improved by including an explanation of what OP means by socialism.