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by lucasmullens 1919 days ago
We're improving rapidly, but I think we need to set our expectations higher. According to givewell.org, it only costs between $3000 and $5000 to save a life. There's a lot of people who could give that amount and don't, so there's a lot of lives that could be saved that aren't. And that's a pretty miserable failure to me.
2 comments
aksss 1919 days ago
We can always do better, that's for sure. Charitable giving is massively high in the US as a percentage of GDP though[1]. Individual giving is the highest source of that money[2]. That's a testament to something good, I think. That more people could give more and don't is a failure at an individual level, but systemically the globe is reducing poverty on its current track.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...

[2] https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2020-charitable-giving-show...

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bpodgursky 1919 days ago
Well, a few decades ago, it took maybe $200 to save a life. We're certainly trending right.
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aksss 1919 days ago
That's fascinating.. so human lives are worth more, or there's more friction to intervention these days? Hoping it's the former. But curious what you think the explanation is for this. Just a reflection in standard of living, and so the cost to save has a higher standard?
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bpodgursky 1919 days ago
A few decades ago, mass famine was still a thing, and all it took to keep people alive was food aid. Ex, the famine in Ethiopia which killed a million+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...

Food insecurity is still a thing, but the only mass starvation is driven by conflict in hard-to-reach places like Yemen, where you can't just easily ship food and save a million lives.

Now, the most effective aid interventions are campaigns like de-worming and Malaria; but those are more of a QALY calculation, where you de-worm 100 kids to prevent serious disease in some subset of them. Which overall drives the cost up, but is actually a good trend.

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boring_twenties 1919 days ago
I think it's more that the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked. In other words, all the lives that could be saved for $200 have already been saved. If I'm right about that it would seem to be an unambiguously good thing.
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