Interview, Fireside Chat
How to improve global health and wellbeing in clear, direct ways | Alexander Berger
- Open Philanthropy plans to rapidly expand its Global Health and Well-Being program to distribute main donors' funds within their lifetimes, hiring a Cause Prioritization Team, a Program Lead for South Asian air quality, a Program Lead for Global Aid Advocacy, and two fellows focused on social science research and practitioner engagement.
- The organization anticipates a long-term funding allocation of roughly 50% to long-termism and 50% to Global Health and Well-Being, with a potential range of 30-70% in either direction, aiming for a portfolio structure that supports recruitment and fundraising.
- South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy are identified as viable new causes, with projections that quadrupling funding to achieve a 1% reduction in air pollution in India could match GiveWell top charities, though open philanthropy acknowledges the difficulty of finding scalable interventions exceeding a 100x cost-effectiveness bar.
- While long-termism is expected to see greater growth compared to the shrinking opportunity set of Global Health and Well-Being, the organization expects its science and policy grants to compete with top charities at a similar cost-effectiveness level rather than exceeding them by orders of magnitude.
- The organization expects to apply lessons from its Global Health and Well-Being portfolio to its long-termist work regarding policy advocacy and grant-making tactics, while recognizing that the long-termist cause area's recommendations will likely change, necessitating optionality for career planning.
- Funding flexibility will be influenced by internal diversity in the long-termist space and the capacity to absorb billions of dollars in Global Health and Well-Being, where declining marginal returns are expected to set in before reaching 10x the cost-effectiveness of current top charities.
- The macroeconomic stabilization program faces an uncertain future with potential pivots toward policy gaps in Europe, while the organization expects to learn material lessons from grantee experiences applicable across disciplines.
- Risks associated with living kidney donation are estimated at a roughly 1 in 3,000 probability of death for healthy donors and a one percentage point long-term increase in kidney disease risk.
- Perspectives on the long-term future emphasize deep uncertainty over fanatical betting, noting that "cluelessness" regarding the long term is overwhelmingly likely to be wrong, while acknowledging that increasing the salience of existential risks could potentially yield net-negative outcomes by accelerating AI progress.
- Technological impacts are projected to pose more existential risks in the coming centuries, though technology is likely to be net risk-reducing over a million-year horizon, and the impact of saving a life 10,000 years ago is expected to be vastly larger due to compounding growth.
- The organization expects the broad long-termist approach of improving general societal judgment to be too difficult to justify compared to concrete health interventions, while maintaining that making "crazy bets" on the future is a valuable pursuit if grounded in deep uncertainty.
- Skepticism from those outside the effective altruism community regarding air pollution impact is noted, though the organization believes the numbers warrant action, and expects that actions generally have predictable positive effects rather than being hopeless.