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If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.
Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you’ll find in the newspaper.
But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that’s more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.
As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)
GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we’re now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about where to focus our efforts going forward.
Before this year, our grants for vaccine programs focused on (a) increasing uptake of the vaccines given to children in the first two years of life, and (b) speeding up the rollout of malaria vaccines.
Relative to other global health approaches, vaccines garner a lot of attention. Governments in high-income countries contribute to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which heavily subsidizes the purchasing of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries and provides cash assistance to help these countries deliver them. The Gates Foundation is also a major contributor to vaccine programs. These efforts have been fairly successful—in 2022, 81% of children in the 57 low-income countries supported by Gavi had received the DTP3 vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. DTP3 coverage is often used as a benchmark for progress on vaccination.
This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for finding cost-effective giving opportunities. On the one hand, thankfully, the people who are easiest to reach with vaccines are already being reached, which means more expensive or innovative methods are needed to expand coverage. On the other hand, we can build on the extensive knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.