In some cases (this is the most nearby alternative hypothesis to Davidmanheim’s), the spending required to maintain their class privilege (unless they’re really unusually clever) scales slightly ahead of their income.
In other cases, they get addicted to the game, and become obsessed with scoring points.
I haven’t looked into it like GiveWell has or even read up on it, but my armchair thinking was just that there ought to be diminishing returns because the low-hanging Africans are saved first, and increasing returns because of economies of scale, and those feel like they should about balance out for purposes of saying “can save ~twice the African lives”.
There just aren’t enough excess deaths in Africa for your claim to be true without implying silly things about how easy it is to save foreigners’ lives. Most relevant part of the argument:
GBD 2015 estimates that communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional deaths worldwide amount to about 10 million in 2015. And they are declining at a rate of about 20% per decade. If at current cost-effectiveness levels, top charities could scale up to solve that whole problem, then if we assume a cost of $5,000 per life saved, the whole thing would cost $50 billion. That’s more than Good Ventures has on hand—but it’s not an order of magnitude more. It’s not more than Good Ventures and its donors and the Gates foundation ($40 billion) and Warren Buffett’s planned gifts to the Gates Foundation add up to—and all of those parties seem to be interested in this program area.
Seems unlikely that excess deaths in Africa preventable by the Gates foundation are much higher than global deaths due to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional causes. (Are they going to stop wars in Africa? End aging, but just for Africans?) If the GiveWell numbers are true, then the “economies of scale balance out diminishing returns” argument implies that the current amount of money available to the Gates Foundation alone is enough to make Africans substantially better off from a mortality perspective than Americans—but surely by the time death rates roughly equalize, we should expect to have exhausted the comparatively cheap interventions like immunizations or diarrhea medication. And if they’re false and Gates is spending money slowly for good reasons, then you’re already abandoning the premise that extra money would help, since we’re already much farther out on the diminishing returns curve than we’re pretending to be.
I looked up the 2017 numbers to double-check, and it’s about 10M deaths per year, of which the majority seems to be infectious disease (such that if you scale up preventing individual cases you eventually get eradication). declining at about 30% per decade.
There’s a good number of people for whom utility is almost linear in amount of money they have.
Why is it that they are like that?
In some cases (this is the most nearby alternative hypothesis to Davidmanheim’s), the spending required to maintain their class privilege (unless they’re really unusually clever) scales slightly ahead of their income.
In other cases, they get addicted to the game, and become obsessed with scoring points.
Because their desire to spend money is a constant multiple of the amount they have, and that constant multiple is usually slightly above one.
See: Hedonic Treadmill.
At the very top end, if Bill Gates has twice the money he can save ~twice the African lives.
Why do you think that?
I haven’t looked into it like GiveWell has or even read up on it, but my armchair thinking was just that there ought to be diminishing returns because the low-hanging Africans are saved first, and increasing returns because of economies of scale, and those feel like they should about balance out for purposes of saying “can save ~twice the African lives”.
There just aren’t enough excess deaths in Africa for your claim to be true without implying silly things about how easy it is to save foreigners’ lives. Most relevant part of the argument: