Imagine you are planning to make a charitable donation and want your gift to make a real difference. You’ve done your research and found three very effective programs: one provides cash transfers to increase the incomes of very poor households; one provides treatment to correct clubfoot, a congenital condition that causes pain and mobility loss; and one provides children with medication to prevent illness and death from malaria. How do you decide?
Like GiveWell, you may aim to maximize the amount of “good” your donation does. But how can you compare giving opportunities when the good that programs do often looks very different?
Let’s go back to the three options you found. We very roughly estimate that a $10,000 donation might do one of the following:
Double the consumption of around 15 very poor people for one year1This is based on only the direct effects of providing unconditional cash transfers that allow people to purchase more goods and services; it does not account for spillover effects or health benefits. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15760_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15760_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
Correct clubfoot for eight children
Prevent the death of two children from malaria
Estimating the impact of your donation in this way doesn’t resolve the dilemma of where to give—it just raises other important questions. Which of those outcomes has the greatest impact? Is preventing a child’s death more or less valuable than doubling a household’s income? How much more or less valuable? In order to make a decision about where to donate, you’ll need a way to compare very different outcomes.
GiveWell faces the same set of questions. Because our funding is limited, we have to make choices about which programs to support, but those programs don’t all have the same outcomes. We need a way to compare programs to each other.
Assigning moral weights
We do this by using what we call “moral weights,” units of value that we assign to different outcomes. In our cost-effectiveness models, we use moral weights to compare outcomes and help us understand how much a particular program is likely to help people per dollar donated. We have established values for three key outcomes:
Mortality: How valuable is preventing a person’s death?
Morbidity: How valuable is reducing someone’s suffering?
Consumption: How valuable is increasing someone’s ability to purchase what they need?
Over GiveWell’s history, we have done ongoing work to determine values for these various outcomes, and our approach has changed over time.
At one point, we invited