I still have no idea of how the total amount of dying people is relevant, but my best reading of your argument is:
If givewells cost effectiveness estimates were correct, foundations would spend their money on them.
Since the foundations have money that they aren’t spending on them, the estimates must be incorrect.
According to this post, OpenPhil intends to spend rougly 10% of their money on “straightforward charity” (rather than their other cause areas). That would be about $1B (though I can’t find the exact numbers right now), which is a lot, but hardly unlimited. Their worries about displacing other donors, coupled with the possibility of learning about better opportunities in the future, seems sufficient to justify partial funding to me.
That leaves the Gates Foundation (at least among the foundations that you mentioned, of course there’s a lot more). I don’t have a good model of when really big foundations does and doesn’t grant money, but I think Carl Shulman makes some interesting points in this old thread.
I still have no idea of how the total amount of dying people is relevant, but my best reading of your argument is:
If givewells cost effectiveness estimates were correct, foundations would spend their money on them.
Since the foundations have money that they aren’t spending on them, the estimates must be incorrect.
According to this post, OpenPhil intends to spend rougly 10% of their money on “straightforward charity” (rather than their other cause areas). That would be about $1B (though I can’t find the exact numbers right now), which is a lot, but hardly unlimited. Their worries about displacing other donors, coupled with the possibility of learning about better opportunities in the future, seems sufficient to justify partial funding to me.
That leaves the Gates Foundation (at least among the foundations that you mentioned, of course there’s a lot more). I don’t have a good model of when really big foundations does and doesn’t grant money, but I think Carl Shulman makes some interesting points in this old thread.