“Are our Top Charities saving the same lives each year?” by GiveWell

This is a link post. Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate In a nutshell We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These programs provide health interventions to the same children under 5 years old annually or every 3 years. Our cost-effectiveness models currently assume that different lives are saved each year from these interventions. We think it's possible the programs are actually saving the same, high-risk children over and over. In a worst-case scenario, this could mean the programs are saving 80% fewer cumulative lives than we thought. Based on a shallow review of empirical evidence and talking to experts, our best guess is that we're only overstating the total lives saved by these programs by around 10%, because: Under-5 deaths [...] ---Outline:(00:12) In a nutshell(02:46) What's the issue?(06:44) What did we find?(11:53) How could we be wrong?(14:31) What's the issue?(17:35) Why we don’t think this is a big concern(18:22) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk(20:42) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population(25:12) Modeling these drivers(34:08) Sensitivity checks(35:35) Outside the model checks(37:34) How could we be wrong?(40:28) Are we returning children to normal life expectancy?(42:34) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk across the life cycle(43:43) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population(48:13) Moral difficulties raised by the life expectancy question --- First published: June 18th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jNAFTJWpKK89pisaQ/are-our-top-charities-saving-the-same-lives-each-year --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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