A return on your generosity not as comforting as you might hope? Fair. A donor who follows GiveWell’s recommendations receives a math platter instead of feel-good photos and vanity plaques. The dryness and anonymity of the GiveWell project may not suit everyone. But for altruists, GiveWell delivers.
In a bright conference room in Oakland, Calif., Hassenfeld and I discussed corruption within EA, gaps in storytelling, and whether some lives are more worth saving than d ‘others. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Virginia Heffernan: Looking around your offices, I don’t see many posters of happy, hydrated children being helped by the major GiveWell charities. I don’t see many stories. And what’s on your site is mostly numbers. For what?
Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah, well, sometimes stories and pictures can get in the way. It is fundamental to our mission to communicate accurately about our analyses. This means using the default data.
An example of a warning about the misuse of images is the PlayPump, a kind of merry-go-round that children could play on that pumped water. PlayPump has gotten a lot of investment with great videos showing kids having fun and splashing around.
But when the researchers returned, they found that the children weren’t playing with the PlayPump. The women of the community pumped water while walking, and it turned out that operating the pump was much more difficult than operating a regular pump. You really had to work and push to get water, and it took hours of pumping to get enough water to support a community for a day. They had to close them all.
There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth about EA’s corruption. But GiveWell keeps plugging away, rarely addressing the big issues on the ground. So, what is GiveWell about?
The organizations we recommend offer the best value for money. This often means saving the lives of children under five who would otherwise die from preventable diseases.
And look, what motivated me to do this work was thinking about the people I’m closest to. If my kids need antibiotics, I go to the CVS around the corner. Literally every time I do this I think about how unfair it is that not everyone can do it.
OK, but the people who see GiveWell’s research aren’t needy. They are donors, many of whom are extremely wealthy. What to do donors turn to GiveWell for?
