In his Annual Letter, Bill Gates describes the “Green Revolution”: Almost every country that has become wealthy started with a huge increase in farming productivity. Chart 4 shows the increase in output per acre for various grains, including wheat, corn, and rice, in the United States, India, China, and Africa since 1961. This dramatic increase…
The GiveWell Blog
All posts by Holden
Measurement is not as common as it should be. Why?
The idea that there should be more measurement appears to be one of the points of widest agreement in the literature on aid. But we believe that agreement in principle is unlikely to mean much until donors (both large and small) act on it. It isn’t enough to request better information; we need to reserve…
Review of The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer
The Life You Can Save went on sale in the U.S. on Monday. First, disclosures: the book prominently features GiveWell, a portion of the book’s proceeds are being donated to GiveWell, and I was sent an advance copy. I have strong incentives to encourage people to read and buy the book. So let me start…
Preview report
Now linked from the front page of GiveWell.net is a preview of our 2008-2009 report. The main content of the report so far is a review of the Carter Center (discussed in previous blog posts here and here) as well as information on the track records of the programs it runs and the diseases it…
Learning from a small failure
Global Health Report: A computer science group from the State University of New York at Stonybrook presented three applications or “apps,” that is to say mini-computer programs, that they had designed for use on no-frills mobile phones owned by women working in the informal Senegalese economy. The pilot tests for two of the apps—a dictionary…
The root causes of poverty
GiveWell generally focuses on the question of how to get “bang for your buck” as a donor – help as many people as possible, as much as possible. Against this approach, one might seek to factor in the potential of a program to get at the “root causes” of poverty, and start – or be…