Benjamin Todd

For instance, William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden, Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, wrote, Put the focus back where it belongs.

Get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads.

This is not making the poor dependent on handouts.

It is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

Within health, where to focus?

An economist at the World Bank sent us this data, which also amazed us.

Here's a graph.

On the y-axis, we have the cost-effectiveness of an intervention in health per $1,000 spent.

On the x-axis, we have the interventions in order of effectiveness.

So at least half of the x-axis is taken up by cost-effectiveness so low you can't really see it above zero.

And then it begins to increase gradually and then rapidly all at the end.

The most cost-effective interventions are above 300 on the y-axis in health per $1,000.

whereas even by around the 90th percentile, they're still around 100 on the y-axis.

That's captioned, cost-effectiveness of health interventions as found in the Disease Controls Priorities Project 2.

This is a list of health treatments, such as providing tuberculosis medicine or surgeries, ranked by how much health they produce per dollar, as measured in rigorous randomized control trials.

Health is measured in a standard unit used by health economists called the Quality Adjusted Life Year.

The first point is that all these treatments are effective.

Essentially all of them would be funded in countries like the US and UK.

People in poor countries, however, routinely die from diseases that would certainly have been treated if they'd happened to have been born somewhere else.

Even more surprising, however, is that top interventions are far better than the average, as shown by the spike on the right.