Astral Codex Ten

Dispensers for Safe Water

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Dispensers for Safe Water

Article

Dispensers for Safe Water is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 28, 2023 and January 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Evidence Action says Dispensers for Safe Water is currently reaching four million people in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda”; “GiveWell’s pick Dispensers For Safe Water”; “a good charity, like GiveWell’s pick Dispensers For Safe Water”. It most often appears alongside GiveWell, Kenya, #57.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 28, 2023
  • Last seen: January 04, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Source: this page. See “Evidence Action says Dispensers for Safe Water is currently reaching four million people in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda, and this grant will allow them to expand that to 9.5 million.” Cf the charity’s website, which says it costs $1.50 per person/year. GiveWell’s grant is for $64 million, which would check out if the dispensers were expected to last ~10 years.
Inline links: this page, the charity’s website
Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 04, 2024 · Original source
Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I agree that overall capitalism has produced more good things than charity. But when I try to think at the margin, in Near Mode, I can’t make this argument hang together. Here’s my basic objection: Consider some company. I’m going to pick Instacart, because I like it and use it often. Instacart is like Uber for groceries. It delivers them to your house, so you don’t have to go shopping. It’s great if you’re lazy, or if you’re sick and don’t want to leave the house. I’m not putting my finger on the scales by choosing Instacart here. Instacart is great. Instacart makes yearly profit of $500 million, yearly revenue of $2.5 billion, and has 10 million yearly customers (who I guess pay $250 each per year?) and a market cap of $10 billion. For complicated reasons I’ll relegate to a footnote1, I’m going to summarize the deal that Capitalism offers by allowing Instacart to exist to “For $1 million, you can give 2,000 people a great deal on grocery delivery”. Compare this to a good charity, like GiveWell’s pick Dispensers For Safe Water. If I understand their claim right, per $1 million they can give 50,000 people clean water for ten years, which would probably save about 1,500 lives. So which is a better use of $1 million? Give it to Capitalism, and give 2,000 people a great deal on grocery delivery? Or give it to Charity, and give 50,000 people clean water and save 1,500 lives? Even without being able to exactly quantify the value of grocery delivery deals vs. clean water, common-sensically Charity wins on first-order effects. So the argument for Capitalism must go through something about second-order effects. But what are these? I can think of a few possibilities: Job creation: Along with helping its customers, Instacart employs 10,000 full-time employees and 600,000 gig workers, so our $1 million investment might produce a few dozen jobs. That still doesn’t seem to counterbalance the advantage of Charity. But also (and I admit I have trouble thinking about this), it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to think spending the money on Instacart creates more jobs than spending it on those other things would. So how many jobs does Instacart create over replacement? I’m not sure but I think it must be much less than the official number of employees.
Inline links: 1
Replaceability: I actually think this one favors Charity. If nobody had invested in Instacart, surely “grocery delivery” wouldn’t remain an unfilled niche forever. But there’s lots of room for more money in Dispensers For Safe Water, and I think any money you don’t send to them simply won’t be spent on water dispensing.
Permanence: Instacart is self-sustaining: after some initial investment, its profits pay for its benefits to continue forever. But Dispensers For Safe Water only promises that its water dispensers will last for ten years. So this is a genuine benefit for Instacart, depending on how you count “forever” in your calculations. On the other hand, the lives saved by Dispensers are saved forever (at least until the person dies for other reasons).