cm2012 11 hours ago

You can pretty reliably save a life in a 3rd world country for about $5k each right now.

How? I'm curious because the numbers are so specific ($5000 = 1 human life), unclouded by the usual variances of getting the money to people at a macro scale and having it go through many hands and across borders. Is it related to treating a specific illness that just objectively costs that much to treat?

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cm2012 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Here is a detailed methodology: https://www.givewell.org/impact-estimates. It convinced me that $5k is a reasonable estimate.

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bombcar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A weird corollary to this is that if you work for one of these charities, you’re paid in human lives (say you make $50k, that’s ten people who could have been saved).

	▲	lmm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's an extremely weird way to think about it. The same logic applies to anyone doing any job - whatever money you spend on yourself could be spent saving lives instead, if you really want to think about it that way. There's no reason that people working for an effective charity should feel more guilty about their salaries than people working for any other job - if anything it's the opposite, since salaries usually do not reflect the full value of a person's work.