Last year, we recommended $300 million of grants to GiveWell’s evidence-backed, cost-effective recommendations in global health and development, up from $100 million the year before. We recently decided that our total allocation for this year will be $350 million.
That’s a $50 million increase over last year, significantly driven by GiveWell’s impressive progress on finding more cost-effective opportunities. We expected GiveWell to identify roughly $430 million of 2022 “room for more funding” in opportunities at least 8 times more cost effective than cash transfers to the global poor. Instead, we estimate that GiveWell is on track to identify at least $600 million in such opportunities. However, due to reductions in our asset base, the growth in our commitment this year is smaller than the $200 million increase we had projected last fall.
The rest of this post:
- Reviews our framework for allocating funding across opportunities to maximize impact. (More)
- Discusses how changes in asset values influence the appropriate distribution of funding across our program areas. (More)
- Explains how we chose this year’s allocation to GiveWell, given our asset changes and GiveWell’s significant progress in finding more cost-effective opportunities. (More)
- Shares Alexander’s personal thoughts on why GiveWell seems like an unusually compelling opportunity for individual donors this year. (More)
Sorry if this is a stupid question: Does OpenPhil intend to make any changes to its asset portfolio to prevent such drastic declines in value in the future? How diverse is the portfolio (e.g. is it basically just Facebook stocks), and how risky are the things it's invested in?
Do you have any updates / plan to publish anything about the Monte Carlo simulation approach you write about in footnote 3?