If big donors have much better opportunities than small donors, then small donors can go to Las Vegas, or Wall Street

Summary: For various reasons, donors giving large amounts may be able to achieve more per dollar with their donations, enjoying economies of scale. When this is true, small donors may be able to do more good by exchanging a donation for a lottery with a 1/n chance of delivering a donation n times as large. In practice, transaction costs and taxation mean the donation will be smaller, a cost which must be compared against scale economies. However, the use of randomization, casino gambling, derivatives, and other institutions can limit lottery costs to a modest factor, lowest when investments are used. So small donors who believe strong scale economies exist can take advantage of them.

Recent growth at Giving What We Can and GiveWell

Summary: For the last three years Giving What We Can's number of additional members each year has been fairly steady. The same was true of GiveWell's increases in number of donors and money moved (excluding Good Ventures) for 2010-2012. However, small donors to GiveWell have shown accelerated growth in 2013 following Peter Singer's TED talk, which may be reflected by large donors as the figures for the 2013 giving season become known.

Turning log-consumption into a [crude] measure of short-run human welfare

Summary: [This post is intended more as notes than for a general audience.] Many have praised log income as a good proxy for individual humans' welfare. While log income alone is useful for analyzing transfers within a fixed population, when spending can also change population (e.g. through saving lives, contraception, assistance for parents) log income must be supplemented to produce a measure that tracks welfare, e.g. with an estimate of the value of a life at a subsistence income compared to the value of a life at some higher income. I then take a first pass at global income distribution statistics in this light.

How to think about displacing Good Ventures in funding GiveWell Labs?

Summary: It appears likely that visibly investing funds to donate next year would be a better bet than donating to GiveWell's 2013 picks, based on expected 2014 opportunities. How does this compare to donating to GiveWell's research fundraising, i.e. substituting for dollars that would otherwise be raised by Good Ventures? Since Good Ventures is investing most of its resources (with economies of scale in investment) for use when better information is available, this can be seen as another way to invest for future donation prospects. The value of doing this, compared to a donor-advised fund, should depend on one's beliefs about possible future disagreements, economies of scale, signalling, and incentives. Those who would firmly plan to give from their donor-advised funds based on GiveWell and Good Ventures recommendations have a good case for supporting GiveWell research, even if is not expected to increase research activity. 

What proxies to use for flow-through effects?

Summary: When assessing altruistic interventions from a long-run perspective, particularly ones which do not act directly on the long-run (like averting human extinction) assessing flow-through effects is essential. In this post I raise some possible metrics to use in assessing flow-through effects. The causal relationships between them are unclear, and exogenous interventions to boost a metric may break correlations with other outcomes: they are intended as a set of candidates to reference in later discussion. Additional candidates are welcome in the comments.

Thoughts on GiveWell's 2013 recommendations

Summary: Some observations regarding GiveWell's 2013 charity recommendations.

How are brain mass (and neurons) distributed among humans and the major farmed land animals?

Summary: I estimate, for humans and the most common domestic land animal livestock populations, their absolute and relative contributions to the total brain mass of the combined category. Humans make up the vast majority of the aggregate of brain mass for these populations, followed by cows. Chickens account for less than 1% of the total neural tissue of humans and domestic land animal livestock. As a proportion of the total number of neurons across these populations, cows and chickens are closer, due to the relatively high neuron density of chickens and humans, while the human proportion is higher.