Rory Fenton
Bio
Director of Strategy for the Centre for Effective Altruism. I previously ran new programs at Innovate Animal Ag and led the research team at a nonprofit focused on building $1B+ philanthropic initiatives/megaprojects. Before that I lived in Tanzania and ran some RCTs there.
Posts 4
Comments27
In that case it was just waiting for USDA approval of a pilot of the vaccine (it was a vaccine for chickens). Our best guess was that the approval was another, say, 2 months out, so we could just let the vaccine pilot batch take a bit longer to make and it wouldn't affect when the pilot itself started (we could make the vaccine before it was approved, we just couldn't actually use it).
It might seem strange but there are many choices that poor people make that could save tens of dollars a year, that people don't take advantage of. I would weakly disagree that poor people are good at saving money, especially if it requires a small investment first.
I think part, but not all of that, is due to rationally putting a high premium on avoiding catastrophe, with poor families often operating barely above the limits of survival. You want to wait to sell your crops in 2 months when the market is better but what if your crops get eaten by pests, or the market actually collapses? For a poor family, that could spell total disaster, whereas at least by selling the crops today, at the low harvest season prices, you are guaranteed to get something. (That doesn't explain the TV though! But I think cash transfer studies suggest that marginal funds are normally spent more wisely than on TVs)
That points to the value of interventions that reduce that risk, e.g. "I'll lend you money at harvest time and you only pay me back if you can sell your crops at a higher price in the low season" type deals.
I can't speak to this product in particular but my experience at One Acre Fund in Tanzania was that it's often just really hard to physically distribute products to rural Africa without super high costs or damage. The practicalities of distribution are hard to solve, which I guess is more what Nick is looking to do here. Once you find a way to get the product in front of users and it saves them money, they'll often buy it, I agree that it might not need to be given for free (not withstanding another practical note: if you need to charge, that also generates a bunch of logistics!)
Totally agreed! I very much assumed my audience was very EA and already stepping back on cause-prio + intervention choice every so often. You are right that that often isn't the case, and the way I've framed things here might encourage some folks to just plough on and not ask important questions on whether they are working on the right thing, in the right way.
Thanks Vasco! I think it depends on how well your particular system is a strict A > B> C> Done flow. If it's as linear as car production, then it is indeed that case that if you make 100 wheels, 20 front axles and 40 windshields per day, you have made 20 cars (your bottleneck is the axles). And making 400 wheels the next day without changing your axle output has zero effect on the number of cars produced, the additional "productivity" is entirely wasted.
Not every process will be quite so linear, but at least for the elements that are, I do think that increasing the output of non-bottlenecks will have zero effect on the output you care about.