Your entire family is stranded with a bushfire raging towards you and only have a small motorbike to escape.You find out that you can have an alternate treatment that will give them six years of excellent life. Your beloved family pet is diagnosed with a disease and only expected to live for six months with standard treatment.Then you are told there’s an alternate procedure for the same cost that increases their chances of living to 80%. Your partner is diagnosed with a disease and they only have an 8% chance of surviving with the standard procedure.Then you find there is another procedure that’s just as effective for only $5,000. You need a life-saving surgery that costs $500,000.Take a moment to slowly read and imagine each of these examples: To get a sense of scale, it can help to try and picture the impact very personally. Our brains don’t really intuitively have an emotional sense of scale (psychologists call this phenomena scope insensitivity ). When reading numbers that affect others, the only difference between 1 and 100 is two little zeros - it doesn’t feel significant. We just notice it less when it’s affecting others (especially if they’re far away in distance or time, or otherwise different enough from us). However, a donor will often donate the same amount regardless of the impact. If one company is charging $10,000 for a laptop and another company is charging $1,000 for a better laptop, the first company wouldn’t survive long. Many investments lose money while some return 1,000 times the initial investment.įurthermore, charities don’t have the same competitive dynamics as the private sector because it's not the beneficiary that pays for the intervention.A bestselling author far outsells the average author.The most profitable businesses are many many times more profitable than the average business.We’re used to seeing uneven distributions in all kinds of fields: Most people find this surprising, but it probably shouldn’t be. We’ve collated a list of examples at the bottom of this page, but first. In that case, it’s estimated that would have a negative effect, costing society $29,300 for that $100 invested. Suppose you were to spend that same $100 on trying to prevent juvenile offending using the “Scared Straight” programme. In comparison, new cancer drugs are generally recommended in Australia if their cost per year of healthy life saved is around $45,000–$75,000 - a factor of almost 1,000.Īt least merit scholarships and new cancer drugs have positive effects - they still improve schooling and save lives. That would seem like a pretty good deal, right? However, if you spent that $100 on school-based deworming treatments it would result in about 14 years of school - that’s almost 100 times more schooling.įurthermore, that same deworming programme could give an extra year of healthy life for roughly $28–$70 (according to charity evaluator GiveWell). Providing merit scholarships for girls would result in about a month or two of school attendance (0.15 years). How many additional years of school could that buy? Imagine you had $100 to spend to help improve school attendance of school children in low-income countries. For a more recent analysis of this topic, see 80,000 Hours' article: " How much do social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find. ![]() We hope to update it as soon as we can, and still believe that the core argument is correct. This page contains some out-of-date information.
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