--- title: Counterfactuals and neglect chapter: 5 summary: A gift’s real effect is the difference it makes compared with what would have happened anyway. This chapter covers counterfactual reasoning, neglectedness and the scale, neglectedness and tractability framework, and what changes when you look at them from the system’s point of view. sources: - title: Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours year: 2021 url: https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/ - title: 'Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking' publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours year: 2018 url: https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/ - title: Revisiting leverage publisher: James Snowden, The GiveWell Blog year: 2018 url: https://blog.givewell.org/2018/02/13/revisiting-leverage/ - title: Our Criteria publisher: GiveWell url: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/criteria - title: A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact publisher: Robert Wiblin, 80,000 Hours year: 2016 url: https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/ - title: The Important/Neglected/Tractable framework needs to be applied with care publisher: Robert Wiblin, Effective Altruism Forum year: 2016 url: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/74oJS32C6CZRC4Zp5/the-important-neglected-tractable-framework-needs-to-be - title: A framework for strategically selecting a cause publisher: Benjamin Todd, 80,000 Hours year: 2013 url: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/ --- ## What happens if I don’t give? The second question in the [Giver’s Checklist](/method/#checklist) is a question that can change an answer: what happens if I don’t give? If the work would be funded anyway, the real effect of a gift lands somewhere else. This is [counterfactual](/record/lexicon/#counterfactual) reasoning, and it is the hidden half of every claim about impact. A program’s results are what happened. A gift’s results are the difference between what happened and what would have happened without it. The share of an outcome that would not have happened without a particular gift is its [additionality](/record/lexicon/#additionality). ## The counterfactual in practice Counterfactual reasoning can make a gift look smaller than it seems, or larger, and it can show that something that looks good is doing harm. Benjamin Todd of 80,000 Hours gives the example of a passer-by who pushes trained paramedics aside to perform CPR. The patient lives, but with a permanent spinal injury the paramedics would likely have avoided. The rescuer did good directly and harm counterfactually. Three patterns matter most for givers. **Funding gaps fill.** A charity’s funding gap is not a fixed hole. Todd warns against treating it as if you were the only donor: if others would have filled it, your gift does less than it appears. But assuming your gift does nothing is also a mistake, because filling the gap frees those other donors for other work and saves the charity time spent fundraising. You cannot ignore what everyone else will do. **Other money moves.** A gift can pull in money from others or push it out. GiveWell calls the first *leverage*, a charity’s influence on how governments and other funders spend, and the second *funging*, when spending crowds out money that would have come from elsewhere. Since late 2017 it has estimated both for each charity it recommends, while saying plainly that the estimates involve a lot of guesswork. GiveWell also asks of every charity how much *room for more funding* it has: what extra money would achieve beyond what the charity would raise anyway. **Credit is shared.** Most good outcomes need several contributors. Todd points out that when two groups are each necessary, each can be counterfactually responsible for the whole result, so claimed impacts can add up to more than 100 percent. That is not a logical error, but it creates a practical one: funders who each count the whole result may together pay more than it is worth. Game theory offers ways to divide credit, such as Shapley values, but there is no settled rule. ## Neglectedness The counterfactual question has a shortcut: where are other people not giving? A problem is [neglected](/record/encyclopedia/neglectedness/) when few resources go to it relative to its size. Because the first resources in a field tend to go to its best opportunities, returns diminish as the field fills. 80,000 Hours argues that they most likely diminish logarithmically, so that each doubling of resources buys about the same amount of progress. If so, an extra dollar can do far more in a neglected problem than in a crowded one. The shortcut has limits. Neglect is a good guide only when a problem is neglected for bad reasons; some problems get little money because they are small or nobody knows how to solve them. And Robert Wiblin warns that the factors overlap: a problem can stay important precisely because nobody is working on it. ## Scale, neglectedness and tractability One tool for combining these ideas is the [scale, neglectedness and tractability framework](/record/encyclopedia/scale-neglectedness-tractability/). It grew out of the work of GiveWell Labs; in 2013 Benjamin Todd proposed a version for 80,000 Hours, crediting GiveWell Labs for the names, and in 2016 Wiblin set out the formal version. It asks how good solving a problem would be, how many resources already go to it and what fraction of it more effort would solve. Charitology uses the framework inside each moral lens rather than once for everyone, because *scale* needs a unit, and choosing a unit is a moral choice. Chapter 6 takes up that problem. ## The system’s point of view Counterfactual reasoning is usually applied to one decision at a time. Charitology adds two observations from the level of the system. First, Charitology proposes testable patterns of neglect. The [Story Bias](/diagnosis/story-bias/) predicts that problems without faces or headlines will be underfunded. The [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) predicts the same for distant need, and the [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) for goods that the dominant frameworks cannot see. Charitology’s founding hypothesis, the [Symptom Trap](/diagnosis/symptom-trap/), predicts that work at the structure and source levels is neglected relative to relief. If that is true, depth is one of the most important dimensions of neglect. Charitology has not established that depth mix; that is [the Depth Census](/open-problems/the-depth-census/). Second, counterfactual reasoning works best when givers coordinate. If every donor chases the most neglected gap alone, gaps can be overfilled, abandoned or fought over. Todd calls the habit of ignoring other actors single-player thinking. The [Fragmentation Problem](/diagnosis/fragmentation/) is what single-player thinking can look like across a whole sector, and whether coordination layers would help is [Open Problem 11](/open-problems/the-fragmentation-question/). ## What remains open A giver may not have a credible counterfactual estimate for a particular gift. Producing one cheaply, with an error range, at a cost small relative to the gift, is [Open Problem 4, the Counterfactual Problem](/open-problems/the-counterfactual-problem/). Until it is solved, a giver can still ask the checklist questions: what happens if I don’t give, and who else is already funding this? The [Impact Calculator](/tools/impact-calculator/) and the [Compare Tool](/tools/compare-tool/) are places to start.