Saving expected lives at $10 apiece?

By Denkenberger🔸 @ 2016-12-14T15:38 (+15)

On this forum, I have referred several times to a paper showing striking cost-effectiveness of getting prepared for global agricultural catastrophes. It is now published here. I acknowledge several EAs who reviewed the paper. The abstract is below; we also analyze return on investment and find extremely high values. We do not quantitatively compare to the effectiveness of working on other global catastrophic risks, but because this is such a leveraged opportunity, it is likely to compare favorably. The number of expected lives lost per day delay of getting prepared is what convinced me to give significant fraction of my own money to the effort.

I am interested in your feedback on the assumptions, and also how to communicate the cost-effectiveness to EAs and the general public. The charity we are starting would not only do the direct work to get prepared, but it would also hopefully motivate additional funding. This should be even more cost-effective than the direct interventions, but I would probably be conservative and ignore that. For most audiences, I would also be conservative and ignore far future benefits. Another source of conservatism is that our budget will be small compared to the tens of millions of dollars required to do significant preparation, so we can choose the most cost-effective activities. Much of the preparations for ~10% global agricultural shortfalls would be valuable to prepare for ~100% global agricultural shortfalls (large comet/asteroid, super volcanic eruption, and nuclear winter). Ignoring these benefits is another source of conservatism. There also sources of conservatism that affect overall cost-effectiveness, but not cost per life saved, including preserving biodiversity. We also ignore the reduction of the cost of food during the catastrophe for the people who would have survived anyway. Preliminary calculations indicate that this would make the cost to developed countries (assumed to be the donors) of getting prepared net negative, meaning net negative cost to save expected lives. But I have not yet written that paper, so let's return to the conclusions of the published paper.

The general public typically does not do very well with uncertainty, so I was thinking of using the median value of $10 to save an expected life. I think the media would fixate on the lower bound of saving expected lives for $.30 apiece. Might this be ok because of the large conservatism above?

 

Abstract

The literature suggests there is about a 1 % risk per year of a 10 % global agricultural shortfall due to catastrophes such as a large volcanic eruption, a medium asteroid or comet impact, regional nuclear war, abrupt climate change, and extreme weather causing multiple breadbasket failures. This shortfall has an expected mortality of about 500 million people. To prevent such mass starvation, alternate foods can be deployed that utilize stored biomass. This study developed a model with literature values for variables and, where no values existed, used large error bounds to recognize uncertainty. Then Monte Carlo analysis was performed on three interventions: planning, research, and development. The results show that even the upper bound of USD 400 per life saved by these interventions is far lower than what is typically paid to save a life in a less-developed country. Furthermore, every day of delay on the implementation of these interventions costs 100–40,000 expected lives (number of lives saved multiplied by the probability that alternate foods would be required). These interventions plus training would save 1–300 million expected lives. In general, these solutions would reduce the possibility of civilization collapse, could assist in providing food outside of catastrophic situations, and would result in billions of dollars per year of return.

undefined @ 2016-12-15T01:01 (+7)

I haven't previously engaged with your writing on this topic; I appreciate your calling attention to the promise of this as a cause area, and your persistent, rational engagement with the topic.

First of all, I was thrilled to see an acknowledgment of the inconsistency of the VSL with the underfunding of global charities. I myself have considered writing a paper specifically on this topic and the implications with regard to CEA/CBA.

Second, looking at the paper, it seems that the conclusions in the final table are without discounting future lives saved. If you were to apply discounting, how are your CEA conclusions affected? Would be interested in seeing the sensitivity analysis there.

Third, which component of the 1% risk would you find most questionable / possibly affecting the overall CEA conclusion? I generally buy that number, and that this is a promising cause area, but I'd like to investigate it a bit more myself, and your writing thus far implies that your response would be trustworthy on this.

With regard to your main question in this post: "How to communicate the cost-effectiveness to EAs and the general public. The charity we are starting would not only do the direct work to get prepared, but it would also hopefully motivate additional funding."

You are doing the right things to communicate to EAs. You are taking a statistical, skeptical, researched approach. The next steps would just be to make a stable, promising organization in this space with a solid plan for people to engage with and then move beyond just the forum and work on directly engaging with the meta charities and EA donors yourself.

I doubt that communicating with the general public should be a goal of yours. Instead, you most likely intend to communicate with those who are outside the EA community but are interested in food security, ag issues, and global risks. Many of them will already be predisposed to agree with your conclusion and many of its components, though they often will not be as quantitatively adept and engaged. Case-studies can be quite appealing to this audience; referring to regional and global food shortages of the past and the inadequacy of current preparation can be compelling.

In general it's easier to provide feedback on established messaging, such as a website, fundraising prospectus, or mission statement, which I'd be happy to do. Will also be happy to discuss future plans and steps for moving forward if helpful; I do believe I could help with regard to organizing, founding, and messaging.

undefined @ 2016-12-15T22:41 (+4)

Interesting paper, I'm glad you're looking in to this!

I took a look, here is some feedback.

Thus, conventional approaches to a 10% global agricultural shortfall would not be adequate to stop an escalation in current hunger-related disease and death (UNICEF 2006).

I had a hard time finding this citation, is there any chance you could quote the relevant section?

To evaluate this claim, we need to know the short-run price elasticity of supply for calories. In other words, how much can the supply of food respond over the interval of time it would take for stockpiled food to run out. My guess is that it would take at least another whole paper to answer this question.

I was doing background research on this, and it looks like just recently a paper was published on the topic of whether Africa can feed itself. Press coverage. Looks like Africa could dramatically increase its crop yields by investing in existing agricultural technology. If these efficiency improvements aren't implemented, Africa will likely see widespread deforestation (due to cropland expansion) as its population grows 2.5x in the next 34 years.

I don't get the impression that population growth is going to slow down after 2050, either. Here are some relevant links:

(I highly recommend these articles. The more I read about this topic, the more confident I get that family planning and African women's empowerment should be a top EA cause area.)

Anyway, this article has a quote from an agriculture expert:

After international food prices soared in 2008, both donors and African governments invested more in agriculture, but investments fell once the prices leveled off, he said.

In your paper, you write that a 10% global agricultural shortfall would "roughly triple the price of grain". Looks to me like this is roughly what happened in 2008.

You mention the possibility of price speculation. I think this sort of speculation is generally a good thing, because it creates incentives to increase food production in advance of a crunch. I know in the US we have anti-price-gouging laws that work against this incentive; I'm not sure if these laws exist in other countries. If so, it might be wise to work on repealing them.

Food price increases are easier to solve than food shortages, because philanthropists can, at least theoretically, step in and cover the price differences for the world's poorest. (Which apparently already happened in 2008?)

Many of these alternate food solutions, if ramped up quickly to cover a 100 % agricultural shortfall individually, could be much more expensive than the new high grain price. However, in a 10 % agricultural shortfall, each food source would only have to provide a relatively small amount of food.

I would expect economies of scale to apply. Probably we'd be best off concentrating all our energy on a single alternative food source and trying to make it as cheap as possible.

If alternative food sources could be produced as cheaply per calorie as grain, I'm surprised entrepreneurs haven't already started companies to commercialize them. Maybe this is something you could do? In general, I think if you have the choice between starting a for-profit and a non-profit, the for-profit is a better option because it lets you make money and donate to other causes.

Speculation: the key issue for an alternative food source is the short-run price elasticity of supply--how responsive is supply to price changes? For a crop that has a long growing cycle, the supply can't respond very quickly. So the question is: can we invent a new food source that's cheap and can be ramped up quicker than any existing source?

But I'm not sure any of this even matters if current crop growing cycles are shorter than the length of time it would take for stored food to run out.

Anyway, it might be worthwhile to get economists and agriculture experts to give you more feedback. Doing so will hopefully increase the chance that your ideas are taken seriously by the "West Coast smart-philanthropy set".

undefined @ 2016-12-16T15:45 (+1)

Thanks for the feedback!

We are using the UNICEF quote for the current number of people who die from undernutrition related causes. There was indeed a significant price run-up in 2008, and that caused greater malnutrition. But the actual shortfall was only around 1% of global agricultural production. So our point is that if we had a 10% global agricultural shortfall, the situation would be much worse. When we say triple, this would mean based on current higher prices, so the overall price would be much higher. We do not have a direct quote saying that conventional measures would not be able to handle a 10% shortfall. However, talking with places like the World Food Program, they are struggling with current crises and really cannot imagine a 10% shortfall.

Price speculation is a double-edged sword. I agree that higher prices are good in developed countries because it spurs production and discourages waste. It can also be good for poor farmers, but generally not the poorest who are subsistence (and not selling their food). However, if this prices the global urban poor out of food, that is not good. I agree that if philanthropists step in to subsidize the food price for the poor, then that would be the best scenario.

I generally do not expect that alternate foods would be lower cost than grain is now. The one possible exception is turning agricultural residues into sugar with enzymes, because in order to be competitive as a fuel, the price needs to be similar to grain (because we currently turn a lot of grain into fuel). But I think for the 10% shortfall, it is more about alternate feed. So this could mean feeding agricultural residues to cellulose digesting animals such as cows, sheep, and goats. This could also mean municipal collection of food waste to feed two pigs. I don't expect these things to be economical on a large scale now, but if grain prices triple, we would have a shot. There may very well be some avenues that are cost-effective now, but I'm guessing existing companies would be better positioned to take advantage of them.

Yes, economies of scale would apply and so would learning based on cumulative production. But I don't know if these factors are more important than the factor of high cost associated with rushing to produce a lot of food quickly. For instance, if we are retrofitting existing industrial processes, we would choose first of those processes with the least opportunity cost.

You are correct that tree-based crops would be slower to respond to this price changes. It is plausible that conventional ramp-up of crops could be done fairly quickly, but food price remained fairly high from 2007 to 2014, until we finally caught up with demand. So basically if we have more options to ramp up food supply, this would reduce the price. How much is important future work.

undefined @ 2016-12-15T23:25 (+2)

It was interesting to see you mention ocean fertilization. I know this has been proposed as a solution for global warming as well. It seems like scientists are mostly against it on precautionary principle grounds, which is frustrating. If we just had better ocean property rights, fishing companies might be incentivized to fertilize, which could improve food security while helping to reverse global warming as a side effect. It definitely seems to me like a concept that deserves further study. The best argument against it probably involves wild animal suffering.

undefined @ 2016-12-16T19:51 (+2)

Ocean fertilization is another alternative food that might be economical right now, though only with the correct property rights as you point out. In areas of the ocean with low nutrients, many trophic levels including zooplankton are required to get to fish. However, where we fertilize, we could go directly from algae to fish (as happens for natural upwelling). So if you are worried about "insect" (actually arthropod) suffering, ocean fertilization could be better than existing ocean ecosystems (I have made this point to Brian, but it did not end up in his essay).