MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years | Hacker News Reader

MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years

maxghenis.com

70 points383toast45 comments

"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.

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.

There's room for lots of improvement to our world, and "lives saved" is not the only metric.

For the cost to develop the polio vaccine, March of Dimes could have bought enough iron lungs to save 12,000 lives. Of course, they had no idea what the actual number would be beforehand; all they knew is that they were spending enormous sums of money on something that could turn out to be a catastrophic waste, rather than saving thousands of lives. At the end of the day, they felt that was a worthwhile risk. With hindsight, we can see that they right.

Sure and if she was funding high cost high risk high reward research I'd say that's a good case for that being higher in expected value but higher variance than GiveWell, but she is mostly not doing that, instead giving to basically normal causes and institutions to spend money on the things they were anyway.

The value of a billionaire lies on their ability to concentrate large sums of capital on high risk projects with enormous upside. Spending money instead on fairly pedestrian applications of money for philanthropy doesn't do that, she has more closely approximated taking an index fund or generic philanthropy. That's fine but has none of the benefits of concentrated wealth to kick us over local maximuma and none of the enormously higher utility of genuinely effective causes.

Interesting that I could _immediately_ tell the model visualization was built with Claude

same. i see the unadulterated Claude Design-ness everywhere then i start eating burnt sienna crayons and before you know it my commode has a style guide

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.

Smells like EA. The "Evidence stance" measure in particular, which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage, is rank pseudoscience.

It's just trying to visualize bang for buck. Not science, much less pseudoscience.

EA ended up getting coopted by people who weren't interested in altruism at all but that doesn't seem like this.

It's an arbitrary metric that creates an illusion of rigor. That looks to me like an instance of the quantitative (or McNamara) fallacy, and a pretty typical application of pseudoscience.

effective altruism is about saying to yourself "I deserve this" and then pretending there's some divine right to deserve it because you'll go outrace capitalisms broad damage.

> which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage

That's not what it does.

Some of the studies showed a causal relationship clearly. Some showed merely an association with a plausible argument about why it was mostly causal. You can decide what proportion of the unproven effects to include.

In reality, there's more causal effects than those that are proven, but not all of these measured associations are causal.

Speaking for myself, just knowing there is someone in the billionaire class who is still an incandescent beacon of humanity, humility, and hope has in some nontrivial way increased the quality of my years since she started on this path.

She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

Right, but she is not pathologically like the other billionaires. She married a man who became one. Same with Melinda Gates. So I guess our hope is that more billionaires will lust after young Russians or hot newscasters and get divorced, so their normal wives can do what normal people do with more money than they’d even need and help others.

Hard to square these guys antics with the whole meritocracy of wealth business. Losing half your empire falling for a uh, socialite, on a business trip to LA? Tagged in a log book on the way to an island of ill repute? Getting high out of your mind and picking a fight with your boss who is the President?

These are depressingly average ways to screw up. Been there done that, but I don't claim to be John Galt either.

Precisely, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to have 100 million dollars and decide that you need to "keep going".

> She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy is great, and I'm both glad she exists and glad that her existence apparently upsets the Garry Tans and the Elon Musks of the world, but I don't think this conclusion is the take away at all.

She's an anomaly in the system, not proof that the system isn't horrendously harmful.

She is an outlier in the sense that she is both “new money” and also “old money” (she did the equivalent of inheriting money in her settlement with Bezos).

She was, at one time, a normal person, with normal friends and normal parents. However unlike most other “new money” billionaires she acquired her wealth without the corrupting influence of being a master of the universe business person where everyone in your circle is falling over themselves to gas up your ego.

She wasn’t a passive housewife who inherited money in a divorce. She was an early Amazon investor and helped build the first stage of the company. She’d be a billionaire even without the divorce.

I’m not trying to dismiss the investments she made (both time and money), but more point out that she was not driven by the same corrupting motivations you get with typical billionaires. If she was, she’d have taken her wealth and done more capitalism with it.

Would she have made money from Amazon had she not married Bezos? Or even from any dotcom?

Would Bezos have made Amazon if he hadn’t married Scott? The answer seems to be no. She was an instrumental early contributor, and she supported him while he lost enormous amounts of money for many years before Amazon became profitable.

Fair enough. I think the most likely scenario is probably neither of them would have become wealthy, or at least nearly as wealthy. So much of success in tech up til the early through even sorta late-90s ('97-'99) was timing and what could pass as luck. And people weren't nearly as vicious. So few people, relatively, were in a position to start online companies back then. I am sure many of us have moments we look back at and just cringe at opportunities we didn't follow through on.

I do wonder who would have been Bezo's alternate (someone would have built something like Amazon). I wonder less who would have been Scott's, at least up until 2003/2005 when she started being known more as a name of her own.

Given she was also on the fast track at D.E. Shaw in the mid nineties she was going to be a lot fucking richer than you no matter who she married.

I'm not seeing any evidence that she was an early Amazon investor. Where is that claim from? Of course she was an investor through her marriage, but you claim she'd be a billionaire without the divorce, so presumably you're referring to investment other than through her husband.

the worlds GDP is like $120,000,000,000,000. Her work is worthless in comparison. the only possible benefit of concentrated wealth is taking concentrated bets on a new research or technology or social organization. But to give to generic charities is a waste of time and reveals a profound lack of creativity on her part.

Would you agree that buying / getting a mega yacht build is even less creative and definitely countless times less impactful ?

Amazon has generated hundreds of billions in value. She has no interest in generating anything useful. Her charity is lazy unoriginal and self aggrandizing

Someone else would have won the everything store / market if bezos had never been born...

Most definitely would not have been someone of her caliber though!

Not sure I understand what you mean... Anyway have a pleasant evening/day

Even if all her donations were a complete waste, one can argue every $1B taken from the oligarch class is a win - less money to buy media outlets and politicians.

Along these lines, I’d almost rather she’d bought major media outlets and newspapers and set them up under nonprofits with strict governance against taking corrupting donations.

Vanguard, black rock, fidelity etc own /manager 3x the AMZN that bezos does, so more concretely you're taking $3 out of random Americans retirement funds for every dollar you take out of bezos' pocket

those funds sit on far more than just Amazon and are hedged across many different companies entirely for the purposes of avoiding the risks associated with one company.

most Americans have trivial amounts of money in retirement anyway; the median balance is at about $38,176

Do you find the end figures believable against other claims? I found them overly pessimistic but thats a non-scientific vibe view. Even on the most optimistic setting the $ per QALY seemed excessive.

Many of MacKenzie Scott's interventions are early age. The multiplier effect on the economy and life adjusted years should be huge by both supression of excess pregnancies and avoided child death and disease. Every avoided pregnancy is economically that woman being productive back in the workforce or managing the family on a lower overhead. Every avoided child death is 40-50 years of productive labour from that child. The soap and vaccines is $low. The life tail is enormous. If you figure the QALY for the woman lower since she's survived into post puberty, I get that but for the kids, its 50x or more on the spend.

I just found the $ per QALY way low. But, perhaps people with experience of delivery of services and aid into marginalised economies can explain?

> Every avoided pregnancy is economically that woman being productive back in the workforce or managing the family on a lower overhead

The child who would’ve been born is assumed to have had zero economic value? lol

How many additional jobs can I give you before I gain little positive in economic value? This is what forcing mothers to have more unwanted children is doing.

> Every avoided pregnancy is economically that woman being productive back in the workforce or managing the family on a lower overhead.

> Every avoided child death [or additional child born] is 40-50 years of productive labour from that child.

Opinions about abortion and birth control aside, these two seem to be opposing calculations. If that's controversial, perhaps the conclusion should be that economic value is the wrong metric.

No, these are the right metrics.

You're missing choice. When a woman chooses to have a child, or chooses to not have a child, we ascribe the economic impact based on her intent.

I think a great many women and a great many economists (and women who are economists for that matter) would take issue with the notion that raising a child is the alternative to being productive.

Ask any policy maker in South Korea how they feel about the social value in raising children. It's not a film adaptation of a book starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, it's 2055 or thereabouts in the China, the US isn't so far behind.

I don’t disagree, but there is a vast difference between a wanted and an unwanted child. This is well studied and well understood. See freakonomics episode 394.

I was not in any way intending to imply I thought that, I was using the language above about economic value. I've edited my post to avoid the misunderstanding, I think you and I are aligned.

Some people are net consumers and other people are net producers over their lifetime. If you abort the net consumers and invest in the net producers it's an economic gain. What's controversial is identifying who will be the net producers and net consumers that early because it's essentially eugenics.

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