Altruism and Development — It’s Complicated… (Shruti Rajagopalan)

“The very act of impact evaluation requires narrowing down the problem to make it legible and, in the process, other complex and unwieldy problems, that might be more pressing, will be left out. Impact evaluations only encompass the highest impact philanthropic efforts that we can measure and publish with confidence. Halfway into comparing air pollution and malaria, I had a renewed appreciation for James C. Scott’s ideas on the tradeoff between legibility and complexity. Air pollution mitigation institutions don’t make it to the top five of the GiveWell list because both the causes of air pollution and the interventions to mitigate pollution are complicated.”