As you may have heard on a recent episode of our podcast, we’re launching an experiment: focusing more attention on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. We are in the process of completing a search for a new program officer to lead an expanded livelihoods research team, and we plan to allocate up to $10 million for granting to cost-effective programs we find in the first year. Depending on the outcome of these efforts, we may hire additional researchers to focus on livelihoods.
GiveWell has historically directed most of its funding toward health interventions that avert death and disease, but those are not the only positive outcomes our grants target. We have long grappled with questions about how to value different positive impacts relative to each other. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially increase someone’s economic well-being? Our expanded research into programs that improve lives will help us better reflect the diversity of relevant perspectives on that question in our grantmaking.
Why livelihoods and why now?
Our standard moral weights—that is, the values we assign to different outcomes—assume that saving a life is about 100 times more valuable (depending on age) than doubling a person’s income for a year (see our recent blog post on moral weights to learn more). This assumption has meant income-focused programs have been less likely than health-focused programs to meet our cost-effectiveness threshold.
But our moral weights are a necessary tool, not an absolute truth. Some GiveWell donors and staff, as well as some of the people affected by the programs we fund, place a higher value on income-increasing programs. To account for this, we’ll be funding livelihoods programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard moral weights.