The GiveWell Blog

Don’t let Elie rip you off!

My buddy Elie, a member of the GiveWell project and a passionate diarrhea guy, is trying to get you excited about the idea of saving lives for about $1000 a pop (see below). Hey, it is a good deal, and I agree with his take that repairing someone’s fistula is pretty comparable to saving her…

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What’s a life worth?

There’s a scarcity of $250,000 Ferrari 599 GTB Fioranos, and that’s ruining Christmas for 49 investment bankers who can’t buy the Christmas gift they want. I have an idea of what they can do with their money instead: Save 250 lives. How, you ask? I recently learned about the problem of Obstetric Fistula. Briefly, childbirth…

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Thank God I don’t have HDTV

Corrective surgery organizations love to make generalizations: $250 can save a child’s smile, $10000 makes children smile for miles, smiles are magical, frowns are a leading cause of death, etc. I asked the organizations I was looking at for more details, because there are all kinds of ways that numbers like that can be ambiguous…

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Nice to meet you

I’m Holden, and I’m the guy who will be making sure this blog gets updated twice a week (Tuesday and Saturday) at a minimum. So if you’ve been wishing there were more blogs to read, you’ll be getting to know me well. Right now I’m talking to no one, because we haven’t told anyone about…

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