August 28, 2025

Episode 372: Elie Hassenfeld - (Approximately) Optimal Philanthropy

August 28, 2025

Elie leads GiveWell’s work researching, and raising funds for, outstanding organizations in global health and development. Elie co-founded GiveWell in 2007 when he was unable to find data-driven recommendations for his own charitable giving.

Since then, GiveWell has directed over $2 billion in funding to highly effective programs.

Prior to GiveWell, Elie worked for a hedge fund. He has a B.A. in religion from Columbia University.

He enjoys taking up (and mostly failing at) new athletic pursuits and spending time with his wife and four young children.

In this episode, we are joined by Elie Hassenfeld, Co-Founder and CEO of GiveWell to discuss how data, transparency, and moral trade-offs can guide charitable giving with maximum impact. Elie brings his background in finance and philosophy to the world of global philanthropy—explaining how GiveWell rigorously evaluates programs to determine which ones save or improve lives most effectively. We explore how GiveWell assesses cost-effectiveness, why transparency is a core organizational value, and how moral weights shape grantmaking priorities. Elie also opens up about the challenges of running a high-stakes nonprofit that directs nearly $400 million annually, why global health interventions are often overlooked by traditional donors, and how they navigate philosophical dilemmas like saving a life versus doubling someone’s income. This conversation blends finance, ethics, and effective altruism into a compelling framework for anyone who wants to do the most good with their giving.

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:01:00) Why charitable giving is a financial decision—and why it deserves evidence-based thinking.

(0:02:20) GiveWell’s mission: Using rigorous research to direct donor funds where they’ll do the most good.

(0:03:44) How Elie’s frustration with vague charity claims led him to co-found GiveWell in 2007.

(0:08:35) The scope of impact: GiveWell’s 80-person team now directs ~$395M annually.

(0:10:43) The weight of responsibility: Why directing hundreds of millions of dollars is both gratifying and stressful.

(0:12:22) Radical transparency: Publishing internal debates and mistakes as a matter of principle.

(0:13:06) GiveWell’s core values: Maximize impact, transparency, truth-seeking, and deep consideration.

(0:16:25) How GiveWell differs from traditional charity evaluators (like those focused on overhead ratios).

(0:18:15) The business model: GiveWell is a nonprofit funded by donors—no cut taken from giving funds.

(0:21:20) Who gives: A mix of finance and tech professionals across the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

(0:22:16) EA and SBF: How distancing from the effective altruism label insulated GiveWell from the fallout.

(0:24:04) GiveWell’s four criteria for evaluating programs: Evidence, cost-effectiveness, room for more funding, and transparency.

(0:29:45) How GiveWell identifies top charities—through academic research, NGO outreach, and sector immersion.

(0:31:07) Current top charities: Against Malaria Foundation, Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller Intl, and New Incentives.

(0:34:31) Why GiveWell shifted to global poverty after early comparisons showed massive cost-effectiveness differences.

(0:39:24) Why the cost to save a life is higher than people think—nets don’t reach everyone, and malaria risk is probabilistic.

(0:43:27) How GiveWell measures “good”: lives saved, health improved, income increased—standardized into one metric.

(0:46:47) Moral weights matter: Why GiveWell equates saving a life with doubling 100 families’ income.

(0:50:37) Where moral weights come from: surveys, literature, and direct community input from Kenya and Ghana.

(0:53:44) Letting donors tweak the model: Tools exist to adjust for your personal moral priorities.

(0:54:57) Do top charities cannibalize each other’s impact? (Spoiler: Not really.)

(0:56:20) Capacity assessment: How GiveWell determines how much money an organization can productively absorb.

(1:00:15) Why even on-the-ground observations (like chlorine testing methods) shape their assessments.

(1:01:27) Why evidence matters—especially when trying to help people you’ll never meet.

(1:03:55) Elie’s personal definition of success: Deep relationships, personal growth, and demonstrable impact.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Cameron Passmore, Chief Executive Officer at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: You know, Ben, you've done that intro 372 times and we all know it off by heart and today we welcome Elie Hassenfeld to have a discussion around sensible, charitable decision-making, which is so interesting. It's the framework that is at the heart of this podcast that's over seven years old now, but it's the heart of how you view the world and help make decisions. This was an incredible, I think as Elie's said, awesomely nerdy discussion on charitable giving.

Ben Felix: I said awesomely nerdy and Elie appreciated it.

Cameron Passmore: He appreciated it.

Ben Felix: It is still a financial decision. People decide to give and there are psychological benefits to giving.

You're doing good. There's a moral benefit to giving and we talk about assigning moral weights to different types of giving throughout the conversation, which I think is just fascinating to think about. This is ultimately still a financial decision.

Where should you give? You want to do good in the world with your money. Where should you give?

That's what Elie and his organization have really set out to figure out. They've been doing it since 2007 when Elie co-founded GiveWell. They've been doing it ever since, but they take this quantitative rigor and transparency to that objective that's allowed them to grow.

Now in 2024, 2025 kind of thing, they're directing hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's funds where people are saying, you guys have done the research. You know where our money should go. We trust you.

We're going to give to your giving funds and then GiveWell, this organization is distributing those funds. We talk about the business model of GiveWell and how their operations are funded during the conversation. I know people will be curious about that, but I think what they're doing and how they're solving this problem of where should you give your money to have the most impact. It’s absolutely fascinating.

Cameron Passmore: It's so similar to when you're making investment decisions. You're making trade-offs. There's uncertainty in outcomes. The links are there.

Ben Felix: We talk about it. I mean, Elie has a background in finance. He studied at Columbia and then worked at Bridgewater before going full-time to start GiveWell, which he's been running ever since.

It's a big organization. It's a lot of people all funded from donations, but they're doing serious work. It's like you said, Cameron.

It's like they're taking evidence. They're reading academic papers. They're doing their own studies.

They're funding studies. They're collecting information. They're talking to people.

All of that culminates in research that they publish on their website that anybody can use. You don't have to give through them to use their research, but it all comes down to this objective of if you want to do good with your money, what is the most efficient way to do it? What is the best way to do it?

That's what their organization exists to try and solve. It seems like from talking to Elie and from reading all the content on their website that they're doing a pretty good job and a pretty unique job of accomplishing that goal. This is a topic that I've wanted to cover on this podcast for a long time because we have definitely talked in the past about giving and how that's part of many people's financial plans.

There are interesting financial planning questions around that, like what's the most efficient way to give? Should you give cash? Should you donate appreciated securities?

All that kind of stuff, but strictly from the perspective of where should you give and is there a way to, if you were to take the way of thinking that this podcast tends to present and promote and apply that to giving, to charitable giving, what would that look like? Elie is the answer to that question.

Cameron Passmore: Where did the idea come from?

Ben Felix: Right. A listener to Rational Reminder knows Elie and sent me a message a while ago saying, if you guys ever wanted to do a topic on giving that basically does what I just said, basically applies the Rational Reminder approach to giving, then he's got a great guest suggestion. I said, yes, of course.

He reached out to Elie. Elie was interested and that's it, so we finally had him on.

Cameron Passmore: Let's go to our great conversation with Elie Hasenfeld.

Cameron Passmore: Elie Hasenfeld, welcome to the Rational Reminder podcast.

Elie Hasenfeld: Glad to be here.

Cameron Passmore: Great to have you. Glad you could join us. Off the top, what does GiveWell do?

Elie Hasenfeld: We're an organization that does rigorous research to identify places to direct charitable dollars to help people as much as possible in low-income countries. We do the research, we publish everything about our research, our findings, and our recommendations on our site. Then donors can either give directly to us and enable us to regrant those funds out to organizations that are helping people, or they can go on our website, see our recommendations, and just give directly.

Ben Felix: That's really cool. You're providing research that people can use regardless, but you'll also direct their donations for them if they give through GiveWell.

Elie Hasenfeld: Exactly. For donors who want to use our research, our operations are supported by another set of donors. If you want to go to our website, you want to give to our recommendations, we don't take a cut.

You don't need to give to us. We know that a lot of people, when they're giving, don't want to see more of what they're giving go to overhead. With that in mind, we want to make it as easy as possible for folks to use our research. That's the same reason donors support us. They want to make it as easy as possible for other users.

Ben Felix: How was GiveWell started?

Elie Hasenfeld: Right after I graduated from university, I worked in finance at an investment firm. After being there for a few years, a friend and I were young, single guys, making a little bit more than we needed, and we wanted to give money to charity. At the time, we were trying to give a few thousand dollars away.

We went and tried to figure out which charities are doing the most good with their dollar. What are they doing, and how well is it working? In the process of trying to figure out where to give, we realized that there was very little information available that could answer our questions.

Happy to tell a bunch of stories about that. We also just found ourselves obsessed with this question. It becomes a really interesting question.

There are all these problems in the world. What can you do to direct money to help people? We realized that this wasn't something that was available.

You couldn't get these answers. We knew from all the work we were doing that folks in our position weren't able to determine where to give because the information wasn't there. We were obsessed, so we left our jobs and started GiveWell as a full-time project back in 2007 to really serve donors like us, donors who wanted to give, wanted to give with confidence, wanted to have a lot of impact, and wanted to understand and see themselves that the money they were giving was having a big impact.

Ben Felix: Can you tell one of the stories?

Elie Hasenfeld: Well, I'll tell a couple of them. I was really interested in giving to organizations that focused on water, so just helping people access clean water, which is a big problem in low-income countries. I called them up and I'm like, so if I give you money, what happens?

How does that work? They said, $20 provides a child water for life. I said, well, how does that work? Are you digging wells? If you dig the wells, do you know if they're still there in a year? Is the water clean?

They were like, all right, all right. We can't answer your questions right now, but we're going to send you information. About a week later, I got this giant package in the mail.

It was academic papers, data reports. It was a 25-page annual report that was 95% pictures of kids. Then it's sort of like Pedialyte, the solution you can put into water if a kid has diarrhea to help them get over it.

I was just like, this is crazy. There were no answers to these questions. My co-founder, I give a lot when he was interested in a different set of organizations.

He just asked, how much money do you spend in each country you work on? To get a sense of, are you spending in the places that have more people and a greater degree of problem? The organization accused him of being a spy for a rival charity, because why else would anyone be asking questions like this?

It didn't make any sense. It was just a picture back then. It's really changed now, which is great, but a picture back then where charitable organizations just weren't getting these kinds of questions.

I think one said to me, you guys are asking questions that we don't even get from our million-dollar donors. That really stuck with me because, I don't know, I just thought we were asking logical questions. I shouldn't say no one else was, but it certainly wasn't the norm.

Cameron Passmore: How big is the GiveWell team?

Elie Hasenfeld: We're 80 people today. We have 50 people working on our research team, and then about 15 who work on communications and fundraising, and another 15 who work on business operations, so finance, legal, HR, et cetera.

Ben Felix: That's a serious operation.

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. GiveWell now in 2024, we directed about $395 million to the organizations that we recommend. I don't know exactly where that stacks up as private funding of international programs.

I think we'd almost certainly be in the top 10 of private funders of global health programs and global health and development programs. Privately, governments are much larger, possibly in the top five. It's a really large chunk of money that we're able to direct to people around the world.

Cameron Passmore: That was in a year?

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah, that was just in 2024. We've grown over time. When we started out, I think in our first year, we raised about 100 grand from our former coworkers. Our second year, we raised $35,000 and got it out the door and just have been growing ever since.

Ben Felix: That is wild. What was 2023 like, and what do you expect 2025 to be? Just trying to get an idea of the scale.

Elie Hasenfeld: I don't even know that off the top of my head. You can see that on our website. We have metrics reports that we share that go into that data, but we've basically been operating at the scale of low to mid hundreds of millions of dollars raised and directed every year.

I hope we can raise a lot more money because especially now with cuts to aid globally, with more funding, we'll be able to do a lot of good. We hope to keep raising money. I hope we don't stop raising the money we have.

Each year, donors need to step up again and give. We're incredibly grateful for their consistent support, but we're not an endowed foundation. We don't have a huge war chest in the bank.

Basically, every year, we're raising the money that we're able to direct in the subsequent year. Every year, we need to keep doing our job, keep showing donors that we can direct their funds well so they can give to us and we can direct it on.

Ben Felix: Man, I got to ask, how does it feel to be directing that amount of money to causes that are important to you?

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. I guess two different ways. It's real crazy to think back to those early years.

Before we started recording, you were saying how we post a lot of information on our website, and some of it's a little weird. I remember this board meeting we had in the summer of 2010. That's about three years into GiveWell.

Unfortunately, I think that recording is still on our website. It was a depressing board meeting. We were not sure that we were going to survive.

We didn't know if anyone cared about what we were doing. We didn't have a bunch. We didn't have fans.

In hindsight, even by then, people had already learned about us, who we're going to give in the future, and we were on the path. When I think back to where we came from and where we are, yeah, it's extremely gratifying that so many people have come to work at GiveWell and made our work as impactful as it is and that donors want to give to us. It's pretty amazing.

I never would have imagined it. At the same time, yeah, I think it's pretty stressful sometimes to just think about the stakes of the work that we do. If we make mistakes with directing $100,000, which is a fraction of the total, that really affects people's lives around the world.

It has a history of doing a lot of good and sometimes doing some harm. It can easily be wasted. We just take that responsibility really seriously.

Ben Felix: Man, yeah. You mentioned the website. I don't know if I'd call it weird, but it's radically transparent.

My comment to you is that it's transparent to the point of me as the reader being uncomfortable reading the amount of detail that you guys publish about past mistakes and past issues that have come up. It's really incredible for an organization to be that transparent where me as the user or consumer of that information is squirming like, I can't bElieeve they're this transparent. I'd say that it's impressive.

Elie Hasenfeld: I think it's good. We're asking people to take their money, trust us to direct it 10,000 miles away. There's a lot of worry people have about charitable organizations being scams.

The truth is most charitable organizations mean well. They're doing their best. I think people should be skeptical that the places they're sending their money are having the impact they hope.

I don't know. If we can send the message that we're bending over backward to tell you what we're doing and trying to be open about mistakes we've made, then I think we're doing a good job because I don't know. I think you should demand that. I think more people should be demanding that. In some ways, that's what we're going for.

Ben Felix: I don't know. It's a great precedent to set. I agree.

Cameron Passmore: Elie, can you talk about GiveWell's values?

Elie Hasenfeld: I'd say that our North Star value is just trying to have as much impact as we can on people who are in need. That means improving their lives, saving their lives. That could be via health programs, increasing their income so they can buy the things they want, just improving their lives via improving their health, providing them people who want it with contraception so they can decide when and how many children to have.

That's our North Star. The main ways we go about that is through two other core values, which are transparency, which we've already talked about, which to me is just, I don't know, it's so easy to make all sorts of claims about things. We just want folks to know that when we say, we think it costs this much to save a life or we directed money to this organization because of what we think it will do, you don't have to take our word for it.

You can go check it out yourself. If you don't want to do that, you can have the confidence that there's a bunch of other people out there who are doing that and that should give you more confidence. Transparency is a core value and that's helping us achieve this other goal we have, which is being truth-seeking in our work, just trying to get the right answers to questions.

I feel a little bit sheepish about using, we talked about truth-seeking as a value because, I don't know, there's no capital T truth in what we do. It's not like we ever really know the impact for sure. We try to trade off between the good achieved by increasing someone's income versus the good achieved by reducing some sickness they have.

There's no answer to how to trade off to those. That's our anchor of our work is just we ask questions, we ask questions, we ask questions, we dig and we dig and we dig. Really, the only thing that stops that digging is the fact that we're not an academic group, we're actually directing money.

At some point, we just got to do the best we can and push money out into the world. A final value we take really seriously is just being considerate for two big reasons. One is, I think groups that talk about maximizing impact, being transparent, being truth-seeking, that has a certain vibe can be really cold and challenging to engage with.

We're not that way, we don't want to be that way. I think it's a good corrective. Then also, we're a non-profit, we raise funds.

At the same time, we're directing funds to other groups. When you're directing a lot of money out the door, people have every incentive in the world to bend over backward to do what you want. Organizations we've taken a call with and then next thing we know, they've spent days preparing a long report for us to try to convince us that we should give them money.

We really try to be forward thinking about what's going on on the side of the organizations we're considering supporting, ultimately the people who we're trying to help and just have them in front of mind in everything we do so we don't get too lost in our own research and models. Just remember that it's like the other groups that are really the priority in our work.

Ben Felix: The truth-seeking really shows up in the information on the website too because you have a thesis for something, but then you'll come back a few years later and question whether you were right and reevaluate. It does exactly what you just described, which is incredible. What would you say sets GiveWell apart from other nonprofit evaluators that are doing maybe similar-ish work?

Elie Hasenfeld: Ultimately, it's the combination of those factors, the values that I described that no one else brings together. There are evaluators that primarily focus on financial ratios, like how much is going to overhead versus programs while we're focusing on impact, like how much are we able to help people. There are lots of groups that grant out money and make recommendations, but they don't share the level of detail about the underlying reasons for those recommendations that we do.

I think that we're rigorous and truth-seeking in a way that's unique, though that I think is harder to really know and say about other groups. Ultimately, it's that focus on impact and then being transparent that I don't think you'll find anywhere else.

Cameron Passmore: How do you evaluate the success of GiveWell?

Elie Hasenfeld: Our success comes down to how much we're able to help people. That's a function of two factors, basically. One is how much money we raise and are able to direct.

You can complicate that a little if you want. Then also, how good our recommendations are. The first one, how much money we raise, well, that's straightforward.

So we measure that, we report on that. Then it's really hard to say how good our research is. There's no external number that we can point to that says, well, this is how much additional good GiveWell created in the world because of its existence.

You can't have the equivalent of the annual return on an investment portfolio because there's just no way to get at that number. What we try to do to assess the quality of our research is put our work out in the open, invite external critique, try to critique it ourselves. That intense focus on what we believe, what we decided, what we were right about, what we were wrong about, and where we need to get better, we think that's the other way that we're assessing whether or not we're successful.

Ben Felix: We'll talk more about how you guys are doing that in a bit. You mentioned this, but I still want to ask, can you describe GiveWell's business model?

Elie Hasenfeld: We're just a nonprofit. We raise money from donors to support our operations. That enables us to have an office, pay staff, travel to see the programs in person that we need to see.

Then with that operational funding taken care of, donors can come and support us without having to pay in if they don't want to. Some donors just come to our website, use our research for free. We don't ever know about it.

They give directly to organizations, and then others are giving through us. Depending on how people decide to give, there can be a transaction fee on their donation, but we don't need to take a cut of what they're giving. That's how we operate.

Ben Felix: You have no incentive to convince people to give through you, but you need people to support the operations.

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. We want people to support the operations. At the end of the day, we're not completely indifferent to people giving through us versus giving directly, but we're nearly indifferent about those two options.

The reason we're not completely indifferent, if it comes through us, it's easier for us to measure. If we can measure it, we're better able to go to our donors and say, look, it's worth supporting us with the money we're raising. Then also, we have more control over the money that comes through us.

Sometimes, we might want to support a particular program in a particular region of a country. If the money comes through us, we can go to an organization and say, for example, there's a lot more malaria in this part of Democratic Republic of Congo than in that part. We really want to make sure you're supporting the part where your activities will have greater impact.

Then on the other hand, if you give directly, sometimes, and I think for the organizations we recommend, I hope that they're normally taking that into account, but really, that sort of comparison and quantification is our bread and butter. Organizations have different means of operating. It's also helpful to us because we can say, right now, this particular region and this particular program is the place that has the greatest need in direct funds there.

Cameron Passmore: Where are your donors typically located?

Elie Hasenfeld: Very broadly, I'd say in the English-speaking world. US, Canada, UK, Australia would be the biggest locations. US is by far the largest.

Then in the US, across the whole country, but the big centers would be New York and the Bay Area. You might think of the, again, this is overly simplified, but the paradigmatic donor is someone who is, on one hand, maybe working in finance and saying, I'm quantitative about my investing, about how I think about my life, about how I get return on my investment. I want to bring that same mindset to charitable giving.

That is a big group that supported us. I'd say that's primarily centered in New York. Then at the same time, a bunch of folks in the tech sector, primarily centered around San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Again, also around the world, but people say, kind of bring that technical and careful, rigorous mindset to what they do. Then they expect to see the same kind of supporting evidence and argumentation. They see that in our work that they're used to and other things they do.

Ben Felix: You could have been describing our podcast audience just now.

Elie Hasenfeld: Good. That's music to my ears.

Ben Felix: You mentioned Canadians. How can Canadians participate? Can Canadians give to GiveWell or what is the alternative?

Elie Hasenfeld: We work with a group called RC Forward. It's a Canadian-registered organization. Through them, Canadian donors can donate directly to GiveWell's top charities.

If people wanted, they could donate to our operations directly and do that in a tax-advantaged way. RC Forward does charge a small fee. They do charge a fee.

That's to support their ongoing operations in addition to the transaction cost. We also just have sometimes Canadian donors will reach out to us directly for support. Then we work with them and connect them with RC Forward.

There's an email address on our website if you're looking for help, which is just info at GiveWell.org.

Cameron Passmore: I'm really curious if Sam Bankman-Fried his association with effective altruism, if that had any effect on GiveWell.

Elie Hasenfeld: I wouldn't say it had any direct effects, but I think it might have had some hard-to-measure indirect effects. GiveWell, as an organization, predated the effective altruism movement and the term effective altruism. There are things in the effective altruism movement that are obviously very similar to how GiveWell thinks about things, but it was always really important to me and to us at GiveWell that we said, we have these core values, truth-seeking, transparency, impact, being considerate.

Those, I think, stood on their own, stand on their own, regardless of the effective altruism movement as a whole. Then I think because of that, there's one blog post we wrote a long time ago where we talked about being part of the effective altruism movement, but predominantly, we just didn't directly align ourselves fully with that movement as our identity. I think that helped insulate us when everything happened with Sam Bankman-Fried.

We just didn't have these direct negative effects via Sam or some foundation of his. I think organizations that we recommend received about a million and a half dollars, and that came through us, and we returned the money to the bankruptcy estate that it wanted because we were able to do that and thought that was the right thing to do. Then the indirect effects are harder to measure and probably are more potentially concerning, where people just have...

There was a time when effective altruism and the ideas surrounding GiveWell were thought of almost entirely in a positive way. Then in the years following that, and maybe still, those ideas are thought about in a more negative way. What was a tailwind may have become a headwind, but it's just hard to know the extent to which that headwind is affecting us and how much.

Ben Felix: All right. We're going to move on to how you guys evaluate charities. What are your criteria for grant making?

Elie Hasenfeld: There's four very broad things that we're looking at. Then each of these will break down into almost infinite levels of inquiry, but the big questions are first, what's the evidence that this works? How do we know that this program is having the impact you expect on the world?

Let me give an example. We provide a lot of support to malaria nets. These are nets that people hang over their beds at night.

They protect against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. There are more than 20 randomized controlled trials. That's the sort of gold standard for assessing the impact of a medical program that show that when you give out these nets, they reduce cases of malaria.

There's also a number of studies that measure mortality directly. They reduce deaths from malaria. Question number one is just like, what's the evidence that this program works?

Question number two is how cost effective is it? What bang do you get for your buck? Okay.

I can tell you that malaria nets are effective, but now you want to know, well, how much does it cost to buy one and how much does it cost to distribute them and get them to the people all the way from the factory to the village? You want to know if you purchase 100, how many actually reach the village? Some of them might get lost or stolen and some do get lost and stolen.

How often do people hang it up? How often do people not even bother to hang their nets up or use it for something else? Over time, mosquitoes get resistant to the insecticide in the net.

All of that, take that into account and you say, all right, well, what am I getting with the money that I'm spending? That's cost effectiveness. What we're aiming to do is then direct funds to the programs that are most cost effective, get the biggest bang for your buck.

Let me just pause here because, I don't know, it's easy to talk about rigor and throw a lot of numbers out there. I think something that's just worth keeping in mind is that we use these numbers and in some ways, doing all this work helps discipline our thinking because we can compare things to each other. But when we talk about, oh, it costs this much to avert a death from malaria, I mean, there's a huge uncertainty band around that number because there's so many factors.

Those are kind of the core and then two others are what we call room for more funding, which is really asking the question, what would marginal funding do in this cause? You might say, historically, you've given all this money to a program and it's had all this effect, but what you really want to know is right now, given all the money it's got, if you're a donor who's giving additional dollars, what's the marginal effect that'll happen? I don't know, this is true everywhere.

As organizations, as companies reach larger scale, their ability to have impact shifts based on their place in the ecosystem. We're looking at this room for more funding question. Then finally, transparency, which is both the fact that I mentioned this at the beginning, that information wasn't available.

Well, it's still the case that most information about organizations' impact is not readily available. We need organizations that are collecting data and willing to share data with us. If they're not going to share, if they're not going to be transparent, there's really nothing we can do because the information doesn't exist.

I will say, having gone from raising like $30,000 a year to moving multiple of that, organizations have an incentive to share more information with us now. That's become fewer over time. Then also, transparency is important because we're never going to see everything.

We're looking for organizations that are going to proactively share with us information that's most important, meaning tell us when something goes wrong. Tell us that they're struggling with something rather than try to hide it and have us find it after the fact. There are a bunch of organizations that we work with that I think do that well. Those are the four big buckets of things that we're looking at when we assess organizations.

Ben Felix: Obviously, great criteria. The one that jumped out at me when I was reading through this initially was the room for more funding things. It reminds me of stock prices.

If you find a really good stock and then everyone buys it, eventually, it's not a good stock anymore. It sounds like it's a similar principle where if you find a really, really good, efficient way to give, if you give all of your money there, all of a sudden, it's actually not so productive anymore.

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. I want to say why it's a great analogy. Then I think there's an important way in which the analogy, it's really different in charitable giving from the stock market.

I think it's a great analogy because you don't get to buy the average return. You only get to buy what's happening in the future. If the price got bid up or in the case that I'm talking about, malaria nets were totally funded already, you don't want to give more to there. It is not the case. The malaria nets are totally funded. They need more money.

In that way, the analogy holds. Then I think there's this important way where the analogy breaks down, which is in the private markets, the person who's paying is the same as the person who's benefiting. For example, if you buy an iPhone, you know the iPhone is good because you get to use the iPhone.

If the iPhone was terrible, Apple would not have succeeded because people wouldn't have kept buying it. This totally breaks down in the charitable market, so to speak, because the person who is benefiting from the program is the person living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The person deciding to pay for the program is the donor sitting somewhere else around the world.

That creates a real problem because basically, the fact that the price got bid up doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good deal or the fact that so much money has come in doesn't mean that it was successful. That implies a lot of things, but one of the important things that implies is that there can be places where a lot of money is flowing in, there's more room to keep giving more, and you're still getting, I don't know how to put it exactly, but a ridiculous price for your money because the charitable market doesn't have the same mechanism to be efficient that the investment market does.

Cameron Passmore: How do you identify top charities?

Elie Hasenfeld: There's basically three ways that we go looking for organizations. One is we're looking at academic papers that are reporting on the effectiveness of programs. Our first criterion, evidence of effectiveness, most of the information about what is effective is coming from the community of academics who are studying things like, well, how do we increase growth in low-income countries?

How do we improve health? Does this particular program work? We're just staying up to date on that.

When there's a program that's effective, we are looking to see if an organization is implementing it. Second, we are talking to major international non-governmental organizations, often referred to as INGOs. We're asking them the question like, what are your programs and do you know if they're working?

So go right to the implementing organizations themselves to say, what are you doing and do you know if it works? And then finally, we have on our research team, and one of the reasons we're fairly large is teams that focus on different cause areas. So malaria, water, vaccines, and they are very embedded in the community of people working on those programs.

So they're telling us about what's happening and what's working. When we hear about new things that we should look at, we're able to bring them in and put them through our process.

Ben Felix: So reviewing research, but also being on the ground where stuff is happening to identify opportunities. What are the current top charities?

Elie Hasenfeld: We have four organizations. So two work on preventing malaria. Malaria still kills about 600,000 people a year, most of them young children.

Think about that in daily terms. It's a crazy number. There's two organizations.

One is the Against Malaria Foundation. They purchase and then facilitate the distribution of malaria nets that protect against malaria all around the world. They've been a top charity for a long time.

The other one is an organization called Malaria Consortium. They run a program called Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention. You can sort of see these are maybe organizations not the best at marketing and fundraising, but the actual programs they run are amazing.

This is a newer program. The studies for this Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention is preventative malaria medicine were only conducted, I think they finished getting in 2011, 2012. These studies were finished.

Then they started getting rolled out globally. Basically, it's delivering a set of preventative malaria medication to children under five during the first week of each month during the time of year when malaria is most prevalent, mostly in the area of Africa called the Sahel. That's another very cost-effective program.

These programs, just to give you a ballpark figure, cost about $5 per person reach, like order of magnitude. It could be a few dollars less, a few dollars more, but per year, we estimate all in, again, very roughly, we're talking about about $5,000 to avert the death of a young child from those programs. Those are two.

The other two, one is Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program. They're serving areas where vitamin A deficiency is extremely high. There's a series of randomized trials from maybe 30 to 40 years ago at this point that show big reductions in child mortality from delivering vitamin A supplementation in high vitamin A deficiency contexts.

That's a very simple, straightforward program that we support. Then finally, an organization called New Incentives. They provide conditional cash transfers that are incentives for immunization.

Basically, these are families who live in Nigeria. At the time that we started supporting New Incentives, about 60% of children were receiving their full vaccine series in that location. I think there could be a lot of reasons why they weren't receiving their vaccines.

It could be some vaccine hesitation. It costs money and is pretty challenging often in rural areas to get from home to the clinic to receive the vaccine. These relatively small cash incentives encouraged them to come in.

In a randomized trial that we actually supported to measure the effect, that immunization rate went from 60% to 80%, roughly, among children. That program is now scaled up across other states in Nigeria. That rounds out our four top charities.

It's a very short list. We're not trying to say, these are the only good organizations out there. There's actually a lot of other organizations we give to through the direct grant making that GiveWell is able to do.

These are the four that I'd say have the combination of the strongest evidence behind them. We've worked with them for a long time. They have a strong track record.

Frankly, just like additional money to them at the margin is funds that we think will do are competitive for doing some of the most impact that you could with charitable dollars.

Cameron Passmore: Why do top charities focus on global poverty?

Elie Hasenfeld: It's actually not how we started out, but we came to it through our research. When we started out, we were looking both at social programs. At the time in the United States, we were living in New York, so looking at social programs in New York City.

After a couple of years of research, what we found was just how big the differences are in terms of what money can accomplish for us at home versus overseas. We think we're talking about single digit thousands of dollars to avert the death of a young child from giving overseas. Some of the programs we looked at in New York, it might be a charter school program.

Bringing kids from low income families in New York into an improved school to improve educational outcomes, that was in the range of $1,000 to $2,000 per year in school. Just like the difference in the magnitude of the effect, a few thousand dollars per life saved, a few thousand dollars per year in school, really caused us to focus our energy overseas where we think just in aggregate, the money we direct will do more good.

Cameron Passmore: How frequently do the top charities change?

Elie Hasenfeld: They've been pretty static recently. We've recommended the Against Malaria Foundation for a really long time, and there just isn't that much news that comes out that would cause them to fall off that we're looking at it, but they've shifted a lot over history. We've had times where the top charities list was eight or nine organizations.

We've had organizations that we put on and came off for various reasons. It could be because there were updates to evidence. It could be because we just frankly thought we could get a higher impact giving elsewhere, and they weren't competitive anymore with the best things that we could find.

Maybe I'll just tell one example. One of the things that we've done in our history is try support the creation of new top charities. When we started out, our attitude was, let's just see what exists and try to direct funding to the very best things we can find.

After, let's see, like six or seven years of doing that, we're like, all right, we've seen a lot. What can we do now to try to create more organizations that we could add to this list? One of the groups I mentioned, New Incentives, which does immunizations, they're a group that we really help support, and we support it through the way.

They have a long winding story of getting data and having to pivot and learning that what they were doing wasn't working and moving on to other things. There was actually an organization, when did we do this? This was about 10 years ago.

We supported an organization to test an idea for what they called seasonal migration. The idea is that in Bangladesh, many people are small-scale farmers. During the farming season, they have plenty of food, but in the lean season, when there's no harvesting crops, they don't have money and people are really struggling.

They don't have enough food to eat. Some folks migrate from rural areas to urban areas. There were a series of randomized trials coming out of economics departments and universities that showed if you gave people a small cash incentive, they would migrate.

Then they would earn more money, send it back to their families. I think most interestingly, we then migrate without the incentive in subsequent years. The basic idea behind it was then people were feeling some risk aversion about migration.

If you could show them with this cash incentive, reduce that risk aversion, then they see that it was good. We decided this looked great. This was a very promising program.

We supported an organization called Evidence Action to roll this out as a new charitable program. It was actually on our top charities list, I think, for a year. At the same time, we said, consistent with our earlier discussion about scale, the research studies, I think, I may be getting these numbers wrong, but they were reaching about 1,000 people, 2,000 people at a time.

At scale, it was 100,000 people. All of a sudden, you need to come up with a new way of operating. We supported a randomized trial of that program.

The trial found no net increase in migration between the treatment group and the control group. We tracked those results over two years. They're like, all right, I don't know.

This is just not working. They shut down the program. They came off the list, and we moved on.

I don't know. I just think it's a good example of how we try to operate and also why it's important to operate the way we do. There's this alternative universe where we're just like, seasonal migration, go.

This obviously works. There's randomized trials. That's even better than what most things would have behind them, but it was that extra effort to keep measuring and, I don't know, seeing that we could be wrong and we were wrong, that I think over time is leading our recommendations to be higher quality.

Ben Felix: Such an awesomely nerdy way to approach this stuff. I love it.

Elie Hasenfeld: Awesomely nerdy describes it pretty well, or at least nerdy. Hopefully, awesomely nerdy.

Ben Felix: You mentioned the cost to save a life. You mentioned a couple of numbers, like a few thousand dollars, maybe $5,000. Why is the cost to save a life so high when something like mosquito nets or malaria drugs are pretty inexpensive?

Elie Hasenfeld: There's a few reasons. The biggest one is that even though malaria kills so many people every year and is so prevalent, the chance that any individual child will die of malaria is relatively low. I don't want to quote this number wrong, but it would be in the range of half a percent to 1% per year is the risk of death, I think.

With that in mind, you have to distribute a lot of nets in order to prevent one child from dying. And then you have all the other problems that I mentioned along the way. That's assuming nets being perfect at preventing malaria, but they're not.

Nets only prevent about 50% of the cases because mosquitoes bite at night. Well, some of that is when you're sleeping. Some of that is when you're outside. Some nets get stolen. A bunch of nets don't get used. Insecticide resistance builds up.

Nets have holes over time. You've got to redistribute them. And so we have to take all of that into account when we're trying to come to that bottom line figure.

And I actually think this is a mistake that we see sometimes when people are trying to do more simple calculations. If you assume everything goes right, your numbers are going to look really compelling. But in reality, in every program, a lot of things go wrong because you're trying to deliver something to some of the hardest to work places in the world.

It's places where, literally, people are dying for the lack of a $5 malaria net. That's a place that's quite challenging to be in. A lot goes wrong.

And so when you add all those things up, the cost to save a life is much more expensive than that cost to purchase that commodity. And then at the same time, it's sort of crazy to think about the fact that you could save someone's life for single-digit $1,000. That's kind of a wild reality.

Cameron Passmore: How do you evaluate whether your top charities are actually producing the results that were expected based on some of this past academic research you talked about?

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. I mean, this is really hard. What we're doing is we're constantly looking back at what we expected to happen, what organizations are able to share with us about their program delivery, what problems they ran into.

So we can say, well, you thought it was going to cost you $5 to deliver a net and that 80% of the nets were going to be used. And then in reality, it cost $4 and maybe 70% of the nets were used. So we can get all that data and reassess the results relative to expectations.

That's one input. Another thing that we do is try to go back and obsess about our research and where we might be wrong. What are we missing?

What could we get wrong? Get outsiders to do that. And then at the end of the day, there's just a lot that's unknowable.

So we rely on a bunch of randomized trials from a long time ago. And the world is different today than it was a long time ago. We've tried to collect some of that data and reanalyze the data ourselves.

We have these published academic papers from the 90s and the early 2000s, and we've just failed to be able to get our hands on that data. We've thought about ways that we could pay for new randomized control trials of the same programs. And there's a variety of challenges I'm happy to go into that make that difficult.

And so at the end of the day, there's also a lot that is unknowable. Maybe most importantly, we have estimates of the number of deaths averted because new incentives has caused more kids to get vaccines than they otherwise would have. But that rEliees on a lot of guessing and thinking and making our best analysis of how many additional kids are going to get served.

That's not a quantity that we can then follow up on and measure empirically and what those vaccines did for mortality rates from the diseases they're protected against. We just don't know. So we do our best and also just recognize that there's a lot that is unknown at the end of the day about what's ultimately happening.

Ben Felix: You're not an academic organization. You have to find the places to give, like the money has to move. In some cases, you have to make the best effort.

How do you measure the cost effectiveness of the charities when you're evaluating them?

Elie Hasenfeld: Mostly we're just trying to turn more or less like everything into either an impact on health, which could either be like averting a death or giving people like more additional years of healthy life. In sort of the high-income countries, we talk about QALYs, quality-adjusted life years, and low-income countries, people talk about DALYs, disability-adjusted life years, which are just the inverse. But just trying to look at those two quantities.

And then a lot of programs also have effects on people's ability to earn money. And then we say, how much did you increase income and put all that together into some overall measure of like GiveWell's version of the good. And really the question we're asking is how much does a donor have to put in to get out like that amount of good, that reduction in deaths, that improvement in health, that increase in income.

Lots of guesses that go in there. Lots of things in there are debatable like philosophically, but we're doing all of that in these like giant spreadsheets that if you want, you can kind of look at on our website and we try to make all the reasoning behind them available. But we're trying to do that very meticulously to try to get the best answers we can.

Cameron Passmore: And what effect does uncertainty have on your cost-effectiveness evaluations?

Elie Hasenfeld: We don't do something where we're like formally modeling the uncertainty and then have like a formal way in which the uncertainty influences what we do. But the fact that we know that we have a huge uncertainty about these numbers has a big effect on how we operate as an organization. So if you go to a bunch of our pages, like our top charities page, there'll be this simplified cost-effectiveness model where we try to show our best estimate, but then also, well, I don't know, what would we call it?

Either like low and high or like 25th percentile and 75th percentile outcomes. You can see there's like a wide variation in there. And so the biggest thing that that does in our work, it does like two big things.

The first is it's a reason we care a lot about that follow-up information because we just, we really want to know like what world are we in? Half the time we'll be outside the 25th or the 75th percentile in our outcomes. And so we really need to keep getting more information to learn because we know that ex-ante, we just like don't really have the answer.

And so it's imperative that we keep learning. And then the second thing is at some level, we just don't let our decisions be made like only by the numbers. And so what I mean by that is like we, to give sort of a simplified example, like let's say that our threshold for cost-effectiveness was $5,000 per death averted.

And then one organization is 5,100 and one organization is $4,900 per death averted. We don't view those as like meaningfully distinct. You know, at that point we're like, okay, those are close enough quantitatively that qualitative factors have to be the driving factor in the decision.

And that's part of the reason that the transparency is so critical. So we can describe like what those qualitative factors are and people can look at them themselves. The final thing I'd say is that like we are more prone sometimes to want to take some, you know, be open to doing things where we're not sure.

I don't know how to put this exactly, but like the bet we're making is right up front, but there's some chance that it could be really good. And so we'll take the bet. We know that, you know, we don't know how it will turn out and then we'll see down the line if it worked out or not.

And then we can either, you know, go forward and scale up if it goes positively or like move on if it didn't.

Ben Felix: Man, these next couple of questions are, might be the most interesting ones in my opinion. Like everything else has been kind of almost quantitative, but like all of that hinges on this piece. So I'll ask the question, how impactful are moral weights to the granting decisions and charity evaluation that you guys are doing?

Elie Hasenfeld: They make a big difference to our decisions. Let me just kind of explain what they are. So we as an organization are trying to allocate the money that we're responsible for to the places we think it'll do the most good.

And a lot of donors say to us, we trust you, like we want you to make the best decision that you can give well. So then we have this problem, which is not every outcome that an organization achieves is comparable to every other outcome. Like one organization saves the lives of children under the age of five.

Another organization gives people money so they can buy more of the things they want and that or no, like improves their lives in countless ways that might flow through to mortality, but you know, do other good things for people's lives. And so we've tried to come up with a way for us to compare these two things, like in some sense, like create the exchange rate between the value that comes from increasing income and the value that comes from averting deaths. We have that, we've done that.

Just to be clear, like we, this is not like true. Like we don't think we have some like special information. These are just things that we, we have to come up with because otherwise, I mean, there's other ways you could do this.

You could sort of refuse to make the choice and make donors make the choice, but donors want us to, we could do this arbitrarily in some way, like we'll give 20% to this and 20% to that, but why? And so, you know, we've done this, I'd say like with, I hope, you know, a fair degree of humility and understanding that we don't really know what they should be, but it's useful in our work to be able to, to make decisions about how to allocate between these different kinds of good.

Ben Felix: If you tweaked your moral weights, for example, would it change how much you're giving to each organization that you're currently giving to?

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah. I think that what the numbers are going to give you are right, but roughly speaking, we, our current moral weights say that averting the death of like a child under five is equivalent to doubling the income of 100 families for a year. Okay.

And I think it's important to remember just in a low income context, like doubling someone's income really changes what their quality of life is like where, I don't know, I feel very fortunate if you double my income, it would enable me to do things I can't do today, but I'm comfortable, you know, like it's not really like kind of changing the, I mean, I've talked to people, they had a thatched roof over their head and when it rains, they get wet and they have to like leave their house in the middle of the night, go to their friend's house. They get like a bag of rice just so it's backup food. So when they don't have enough food, they have this backup rice.

They got school uniforms for their kids. Cause in some parts of the world, if you don't have a school uniform, you can't go to school. So if you can't pay for the uniform, anyhow, we're trying to come up with this.

That's the ratio we use. So that's kind of like the assignment that we have made. And then like, how did we come to that?

Like, where did those numbers come from? It's a combination of a few places, like none of which I think has like given us a whole lot of confidence. If you ask me like, what's the thing that someone should be most focused on in GiveWell's work and where they most disagree, it's here.

Because if you were to say, well, I don't want to make it a hundred to one. I want to make it 200 to one. You would allocate like even more money towards health programs and wouldn't do any of the work that we've done to support programs that focus on increasing people's incomes.

You know, if you made like income less valuable. And on the other hand, we used to put more weight on income like several years ago. If you like doubled the weight you put on income, so made it 50 to one instead of a hundred to one, you would be supporting a lot more income increasing programs than we do today.

Ben Felix: How do you guys come up with those exchange rates? Like how do you assign the moral weights?

Elie Hasenfeld: So there's like three basic inputs that we've used over time. First is, I'm sorry, I'm trying to think what order to go in. Well, I'll go kind of in like chronological order of how we did it.

And then now they are all combined. So the first thing we did is we just like surveyed GiveWell staff and GiveWell donors, not because that is like the best answer, but it was like, where do we even begin with this question? And so we tried to get people's input on how they would weigh.

And then we've like aggregated those up. That's kind of step one. Step two was looking at academic literature.

The academic literature on this question is, I mean, there isn't, it sort of exists. There's value of statistical life studies where you can say like, well, how much is the US government willing to pay to reduce like the, or the Canadian governments are sort of US centric, apologies for that. But how much is like a country's government willing to pay to reduce deaths from traffic accidents?

And that can give you some sense at the country level. They also do surveys of people. There are some in low income countries, but it's less.

And then the final thing we've done is supported some studies where we've paid for research groups to go and try to ask people. So far, we've done this in Kenya and Ghana. We're kind of working on another round of these studies in the future, you know, actually this year.

And we want to know from them, like, well, how do you person in Kenya, or like, how do you think about this question? What would you want? Those are like the three things we're bringing together that third set that so you can read all about it on our website, if you want.

It was really hard, as you might imagine, to get answers. I think it'd be hard for anyone to answer those questions and then doing it like via translation, often with people who have like less sophisticated numeracy than others. I think it made it really challenging.

But, you know, we're just trying to do what we can and bring it all together to come up with a number of the teams, what should I say, like willing to work with or use in our operation.

Cameron Passmore: And how much do you worry about whether or not your moral weights are right?

Elie Hasenfeld: Well, I guess we know they're like not right, because, you know, that's kind of impossible. But yeah, I mean, how much do we worry about the fact that it's just this, like, I don't know what to sort of unempirical philosophical input that makes a big difference. On some level, like it's a big worry.

And then so we just want to do more. And at the same time, I think we're just like limited in what we're able to do to get an answer to this question. But it's something that we are, as a team, you know, it's a very present topic, where we're asking the question, what else could we do empirically to get better answers.

And I think the pathway in our future is just continuing to get more information from people in the communities that we're trying to help. I think that's the input that I think we have the least of and could make the biggest difference. It's also like the hardest information to access.

And then at the same time, like thinking about whether there are other ways, and I don't know what the answer would be here, but just in sort of like the set of possibilities, like other ways we could set up our work to direct funds without having to deal with this kind of question. But at least for now, it seems pretty critical.

Ben Felix: Well, what can individual donors do to assess the effects of their own moral weights, if they think they may be different from GiveWells on their individual giving strategy?

Elie Hasenfeld: We created a tool where people could like plug in their own weights, and then they'd be in a position to see how that might change where they want to give. Another thing that we've done, and we're doing this year, is because of how our moral weights were set, and because of the programs that we were finding, we just put significantly less time into poverty reducing programs or like what we call livelihoods programs than we otherwise might. And so consistent with this theme of uncertainty, we're trying to hire someone to focus on livelihood programs.

Specifically, we're going to direct some amount of money to it, even though it might not be competitive according to the moral weights we set. But the idea here is if we sort of have this systematic reason that we're never looking at it, well, we're not going to learn. And so we want to put some energy into learning because we know that one of the reasons we're not looking into it is this number that is not right.

And then over the next couple of years, having put more energy into it, I think we'll have a better sense of the quality and the promise of programs in livelihoods and can decide whether we want to do more or less.

Cameron Passmore: I'm curious how you assess or whether you assess your top charities if they're saving the same lives, thus reducing the, I guess, the per dollar efficiency of grants.

Elie Hasenfeld: The thing you could be worried about here is there are a lot of causes of death for children under five in low income countries. Kids die from malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea. And let's say that when you save the life of someone from malaria, they would just go on to die from pneumonia or go on to die from diarrhea.

And this could happen if death is so prevalent that that's a problem. We did like sort of a real deep dive on this last year. And we think we might have been overestimating, kind of under appreciating this problem to a small extent.

But overall, we think the deaths are like pretty independent. And the basic reason is that the odds of death for any one child are extremely low in the scheme of things. And the window in which people are at risk of death and are dying is like fairly narrow.

So we talk about under five mortality, but mortality is really concentrated in the first month of life. And then there's another concentration in the first year of life. And then it really peters out after that.

And people who are surviving those first few years, if you look at life expectancy, tend to go on to live like fairly long lives, not at the length of people in high income countries, but into deep adulthood and older age. And so when we looked at this question, we felt like this was the kind of thing that had come up. We were worried that maybe our analysis was just missing this. And when we dug in, we feel like we've answered that question.

Ben Felix: On the stock price analogy that we talked about earlier, how do you actually determine whether an organization has enough capacity to use the dollars that you're planning to grant to them?

Elie Hasenfeld: So it's a combination of a lot of due diligence upfront. So that means asking a lot of questions and it's like, well, what do you plan to do? Where are you going to go?

Why do you need the money? Who else might you get the money from? What'll happen?

And then over time, seeing what occurs. And when time passes, especially when we've worked with organizations over time, for us, I think ideally we're operating in a sort of like a repeated game framework where organizations have the incentive to be truthful with us, because if they're truthful, we'll see the results of that over time. And that will then be conducive to more giving over time.

For me, it's like some significant upfront due diligence, but then following up after the fact is absolutely critical. And I guess in my opinion, that's the thing that sometimes gets missed a little too much. It's like doing a lot of research is great, but you got to see the results of what you thought because as careful as we've been, we've just made so many mistakes in our history.

And then I think what has really helped us is that we've been there to learn and learn from them and see what happens so we can do better. And so in this case, just like, all right, well, what did happen with the money? Did you deliver the number of things that you expected?

How much money do you have in the bank? Like, are you spending the money that we have? Are you expanding into other areas?

And then there can be more like sneaky ways in a sense that this happens where maybe organizations aren't building a fundraising team because they're like, oh, GiveWell's got it covered. And that's another thing we'd want to be looking out for, because that's maybe a subtler way in which we're pushing out other donors, but it's just a big focus of what we do after the fact.

Ben Felix: Wow. You’re talking to them. Do you ever go to Africa or wherever they are and audit the location? Talk to people?

Elie Hasenfeld: Yeah, we talked to them a lot.

I'm actually heading to Malawi this Sunday to be there for a few days with other members of the team. But yeah, like right now we have folks in Uganda looking at programs. Another group got back from Sierra Leone.

It's not as big a part of our work as it is, I think, like other funders. I would say on average, people on our research team, so that's like the team making these giving decisions, would spend about a week in-country looking at programs in the course of a year. And I think that makes, it's like about the right balance.

Like I think most, I believe that like most of what we need to know to make these decisions are like zoomed out questions. Like do you focus on high-income countries versus low-income countries? Do you focus on India versus Kenya versus Democratic Republic of Congo?

Do you focus on the program that has like zero evidence behind it or more evidence? You know, all of that you can do from your desk and you can have a lot of conversations, but then you always learn things by going on the ground and just seeing, like last year I was in Kenya and I was looking at a water program and we had supported an organization to put chlorine in the water. I mean, they were just like running up in chlorine.

It's a program that allows people to like access chlorine to clean their water. And, you know, interestingly, only about 50% of people were, you know, accessing that chlorine. Some people just skipped it.

But the thing the organization has to do is then measure, you know, monitor like is chlorine actually in the water to get at that number. And there's three different ways they measure it. One is this like color strip.

One is a kind of a handheld dial where they're like comparing colors between two vials. And then one is digital. And I think that like we knew that vaguely, but there's something about like getting there and seeing it in your hand.

You're like, this is really error prone. You know, the comparing the level of pink in these two vials is much more prone to error than digital device that reads out a number of like chlorine content in the water. And that's just like one example of the kind of thing that you might not think to ask about.

Like what is the mechanism through which you measure? I mean that I could tell other stories about that whole topic, but being there on the ground, it's really helpful to just like see things with my eyes, talk to people directly and hear from them.

Ben Felix: So would you then tell the organization that like you guys should be using the digital thing more?

Elie Hasenfeld: So they were there. We talked a lot about it with them. And, you know, one of the ways that we were good at asking questions, but also like they often know the answers.

And when you're trying to operate in these low-income contexts, there's the question of like, is the, I might be getting this wrong, but I think the digital device cost a hundred dollars. And if they were going to like roll that device out to like all their teams, it's not clear that that would be the right decision because you're trying to balance getting good data and understanding against the fact that like every hundred dollars you spend on monitoring and evaluation is a hundred dollars you're not spending on chlorine for water and learn it. And so I don't remember the answer in that case, but what we see our job is doing is like asking lots of questions and then evaluating the answers rather than thinking that like we know the best way to run a water program.

We definitely don't know that like they are the experts. And so we can do is poke and poke and poke and then, you know, ensure that we're satisfied with the answers we're getting.

Ben Felix: Second to last question for you here, giving seems like a pretty subjective act. Like someone might give to cancer research because their parent or whatever family member had cancer or to animal shelters because they like cats. Why do you think it's important to place such a heavy emphasis on evidence and quantification?

Elie Hasenfeld: I mean, first off, I think I'm not here telling people what they should do with their money. You know, people spend their charitable money, their non charitable and all sorts of things. It's their money, your money, like do what you want.

That's kind of my starting point. Second, for me, like the subjective part of giving or like the motivation comes from comes from the like emotional subjective place. You know, it's people are suffering.

People can be helped and I want to help them. And that motivation, I think for some people, like leads them to want to give to the particular cause where that motivation comes from. And so that's like, oh, I know this person who suffered from this, I want to give to this or like, I know this person who this happened to them, or I can see them right now.

And instead, like, to me, I try to imagine, instead of thinking about this person suffered from cancer, or this person had this problem, instead say like, this person suffered, like, what can I do to alleviate suffering? I'm a parent, I have young children. And I just think about the what what I would want someone to do for me if I were in a different position to like help my children.

And, you know, the fact is, the people who have the greatest needs like that are people that we don't get to see every day and who live 10,000 miles away. So the reason we put the heavy focus on evidence is just, I don't know, I don't know of a better way to like do this seriously and to do it well. And in the same way that when I decide what I do with my savings, or what treatment and medicine my kid is going to get if they need it, I want that to be based on like the best possible evidence and data because I really care about the outcomes.

To me, it just like seems like the same thing here. And then even for me, like the vast majority of the charitable giving that my family, my wife and I and I guess our kids do goes to get well, I think what we do is great. But we get to like a lot of other things in smaller ways we give to the local community we're in and things we're a part of.

And, yeah, I don't know, I'm glad that we're doing that too. It's in my head, it's not part of the project of like trying to help people as much as possible. But, you know, just being a good community member, it's participating in the parent teachers association at my kid's school.

And we do all those things too. We're just like really prioritizing in this section of our charitable giving this part of our giving portfolio where we're just trying to do the most we can with the best results.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, it makes sense. Elie, how do you define success in your life?

Elie Hasenfeld: I love this question. And I have no idea. I was like, what? It's a good question. I mean, I guess like there's like three things that I think are really important to me. So I'd say it's like deep relationships, personal growth, and then direct impact.

So it's like, am I present? Am I engaged? Am I deepening relationships with my family, my colleagues, my friends, when I like look back sometimes, I don't know, had some management coaches and they're like, you know, what are you most excited about in your past?

I'm like, Oh, I had like, really built up this relationship with this colleague, or I have children, and it's, I don't know, really fulfilling to just be like spending time with them and understanding them and having them show me all the ways that I'm wrong about so many things, you know, when you see your kids, and they're like, like, why are you doing that? I'm like, Oh, God, I do that too. You know, just like that whole thing is, you know, really meaningful for me.

Another is just I really enjoy like learning new things and getting better. And so, you know, my growing as a parent, as a leader, as a person, I guess, and then finally, just is the work that GiveWell is doing, improving people's lives around the world in a direct, demonstrable way. Those are the things I'm looking at, and then haven't come up with the quantitative metric to pull them all together. So, you know, those are, I don't know, maybe more like still a question more than answers.

Ben Felix: It's a great answer. All right, Elie, that's it. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. We really appreciate it. I think this is a great conversation.

Cameron Passmore: Great conversation.

Elie Hasenfeld: My pleasure.

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