Benjamin Todd

The top interventions, like vaccines, have been shown to have significant benefits, but are also extremely cheap.

the top intervention is over 10 times more cost-effective than the average, and 15,000 times more than the worst.

This means if you were working at a health charity focused on one of the top interventions, you'd expect to have 10 times as much impact compared to a randomly selected one.

This study isn't perfect.

There were mistakes in the analysis affecting the top results, and that's what you'd expect due to regression to the mean.

But the main point is solid.

The best health interventions are many times more effective than the average.

So how much more impact might you make with your career by switching your focus to global health?

Because, as we saw in the first chart, the world's poorest people are over 20 times poorer than the poor in rich countries, resources go about 20 times as far in helping them.

Then, if we focus on health, there are cheap, effective interventions that everyone agrees are worth doing.

We can use the research in the second chart to pick the very best interventions, letting us have perhaps five times as much impact again.

In total, this makes for a hundredfold difference in impact.

Does this check out?

The UK's National Health Service and many US government agencies are willing to spend over $30,000 to give someone an extra year of healthy life.

This is a fantastic use of resources by ordinary standards.

However, research by GiveWell has found that it's possible to give an infant a year of healthy life by donating around $100 to one of the most cost-effective global health charities, such as Against Malaria Foundation.

This is about 0.33% as much.

This suggests that, at least in terms of improving health, one career working somewhere like AMF might achieve as much as 300 careers focused on one typical way of doing good in a rich country.

Though our best guess is that a more rigorous and comprehensive comparison would find a somewhat smaller difference.

It's hard for us to grasp such big differences in scale, but that would mean that one year of equally skilled effort towards the best treatments within global health could have as much impact as what would have taken others 100 years working on typical rich country issues.