Measuring MacKenzie Scott's Giving in Quality-Adjusted Life Years
MacKenzie Scott's Giving, in Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs)
I built an interactive model to estimate the health impact of MacKenzie Scott's $30 billion in charitable giving, translating her donations into Quality-Adjusted Life Years. By weighting interventions based on causal evidence, the analysis reveals that while her portfolio generates significant health benefits, global health frontiers like malaria control offer vastly higher returns per dollar. This tool highlights the uncertainty in evidence quality and the trade-offs between domestic social programs and international health interventions.
At the skeptical defaults, the frontier delivers roughly 1,500 times more health per marginal dollar.
- phoneafriend
"A QALY is a health metric. Most of Scott's giving targets economic mobility, education, and equity, whose value is largely non-health — income, opportunity, rights, wellbeing. The model therefore understates her total social impact; it answers one specific question. The largest dollar buckets (equity & justice at ~22%, education at ~18%) contribute little health precisely because no credible study ties those grants to QALYs, not because the giving lacks value."
Which other metrics could be included to balance these economically?
- society-wide morale lift & improved individual output
- international desirability & forex lift
Or just re-weighting giving to normalize out non-health targeted expenditures?
Oh, and f** Malaria. Go get 'em, GiveWell and all working to reduce Malaria deaths. Polio too, heartbreaking that we have not beaten this one down yet. Suspect spend per paralysis/mortality is very high on Polio right now, but probably most agree the spend is very worth it given the payoff of a Polio-free planet.
- joshjob42
It's a real shame that she has wasted her money so catastrophically. You can save a life via GiveWell for what 5k or so? At best she saves one year of life for a dozen times that. On a QALY basis, she's probably 300x or more worse. I'm not saying someone has to give all their charitable giving to GiveWell or similar, but if you're not you should probably have a very strong argument why not (for instance, high risk basic research you find unusually promising, or trying to solve an engineering challenge that would unlock huge value etc), or admit to yourself that you aren't primarily trying to help people but to further some particular value to yourself. You could donate $5k to the local school so they can renovate the art room, but in doing so you're deciding to do that rather than save a life. That's fine, but it's functionally more like buying concert tickets or a new TV -- the improvements you're making in others lives are tiny by comparison to what you could have bought with that money instead (a save life with GiveWell), so that part obviously has negligible weight in your decision, it's primarily about your personal enjoyment of furthering particular values. Again, that's fine, we all do that. She's just decided to take a course of action that is much closer to buying giant yachts and football teams or a vanity run for office than try to make the world a better place while trying to look like she's trying to make the world a better place.
- nadagast
Interesting that I could _immediately_ tell the model visualization was built with Claude
- npunt
Another thing that this does not measure is philanthropic effectiveness. If there are lessons to be learned in terms of what kinds of philanthropy works better than others, then those learnings may cause other philanthropic endeavors to have greater success. I've had a bit of experience working with several big foundations and seeking out effective ways to spend lots of money is an extremely hard problem and they're all aware of it, and they treat each investment as an experiment.
Of course, the effectiveness of each type of investment is not fixed, and will inevitably drop off. I believe the whole 'just buy malaria nets' first-order thinking was part of discourse for a while before people wised up.
- xhevahir
Smells like EA. The "Evidence stance" measure in particular, which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage, is rank pseudoscience.