Thanks for sharing, really energising to see. Their blog post has really nice illustrations, sharing some of them below.

These are some of the results from the $50M they've donated so far to GiveDirectly to every adult in the Khongoni subdistrict of Malawi:

This was what they spent it on:

This is the framework Canva came up with to track impact on recipients via continuous surveys:

In the next phase with their $100M commitment to GiveDirectly, these are some of the research questions they're helping GD explore:

And from GiveDirectly's side of the story — the first 2 phases were funded entirely by Canva:

Despite doubling Khongoni's local GDP, inflation was negligible; quoting GD:

Markets were able to absorb large-scale transfers without driving significant price inflation. That gives us strong evidence that this model can be scaled responsibly and rapidly without triggering harmful inflation.

This stability was a product of how recipients and markets responded:

• 🗓️ Recipients didn’t spend all at once: Findings showed households did not spend all of the transfer immediately and gradually increased their spending over months.
• 🚲 They also shopped around: Recipients had access to multiple markets, locally and in nearby Lilongwe city, allowing them to choose between sellers if someone didn’t have what they needed or tried to raise prices.
• 🤝 Vendors chose not to raise prices: Traders reported keeping prices steady to maintain trust, saying opportunistic hikes would damage their reputation once the cash was gone.
• 📦 Markets adapted to demand: Many vendors simply ordered more stock and new traders entered markets, both without significantly driving up prices.

I'm a fan of cash transfers and think it's a tad underrated in EA circles, so I'll end by quoting Canva on cash:

In over 500 randomised controlled trials, direct cash transfers have significantly improved lives:

• Child mortality dropped by 48%, and infant mortality dropped by 57% (Walker et al.,2025) .
• Incomes more than doubled (McIntosh et al., 2023)
• School enrolment rose by 23% (Baird et al., 2014)
• Domestic violence dropped by 3% (Haushofer et al., 2019)
• Illness dropped by 27% (Pega et al., 2017)
• Wellbeing and mental health significantly improved (Zimmerman et al., 2021)
• Economic activity increased by $2.50 for every $1.00 transferred in rural Kenya (Egger et al., 2022)

You might be wondering why cash transfers are able to have an impact in so many different areas. We believe the impact lies in giving people the autonomy to choose what they need most. In all the examples we’ve seen, each person put the money towards ensuring they and their families were able to access their most basic needs while also putting the money to work to generate income in an ongoing manner.

Research shows the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers continues to be elevated upwards to show more impact. Last year, GiveWell reviewed the latest evidence from GiveDirectly and increased their estimates of cost-effectiveness by 3 to 4 times.

re: the inhuman bar, is that also a reassessment of your views on formidability? 

You might appreciate these reflections too.

This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:

Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.

Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.

(This was a really nice "lightning lit review", do consider saving it on something like a personal site instead of leaving it here :) I've seen a fair number of the writings you cited, but (being a lay outsider) hadn't made sense of the "landscape" they constituted so to speak, why and how they're important, etc until I read your answer here.)

On this note, Probably Good's Civil Service in LMICs as a High-Impact Career Path is a great first stop for EAs from LMICs. Their job board is great too.

Someone could still make that estimate if they wanted to, but nobody has done it.

My impression was Nuno Sempere did a lot of this, e.g. here way back in 2021?

But if ň=1.5, then theory will predict changes on the scale of 0.076x to 0.128x that of the GD experiments. Ie, exactly in the boundary of whether it's possible to detect an effect at all or not!

Might be misreading, on a quick skim Sam Nolan's analysis seemed pertinent but noticed you'd already commented. Sam's reply still seems useful to me, in particular the data here

 In London, it was found to be 1.5, in 20 OECD countries, it was found to be about 1.4. James Snowden assumes 1.59. 

although none of those countries are low-income so your concern re: OOD generalisation still applies.

Probably Brian Tomasik. I think about his essay On triage every once in a while:

Triage as "warm and calculating"

But isn't this focus on efficiency cold-hearted? Doesn't strict triage neglect the pain of those who don't get preferential treatment? For example, people sometimes scoff at legitimate concerns about large pecuniary expenditures on the grounds that it's insensitive to care about money when lives are at stake. In the real world, though, we can't do everything. Resources are limited, and we inevitably face choices between helping one being or another. It is precisely the sympathy that we feel for those animals left homeless by a hurricane, for instance, that so fervently motivates us to devote our money toward more efficient ways of ameliorating animal suffering. Triage is not an act of harshness; it represents the highest form of mercy and compassion.

80K to their credit have been trying to push back on single-player thinking since at least 2016 but it doesn't seem to have percolated more widely.

Stuart Buck's new post over at The Good Science Project has one of the hardest-hitting openings I've read in a while: 

Many common medical practices do not have strong evidence behind them. In 2019, a group of prominent medical researchers—including Robert Califf, the former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner—undertook the tedious task of looking into the level of evidence behind 2,930 recommendations in guidelines issued by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. They asked one simple question: how many recommendations were supported by multiple small randomized trials or at least one large trial? The answer: 8.5%. The rest were supported by only one small trial, by observational evidence, or just by “expert opinion only.”

For infectious diseases, a team of researchers looked at 1,042 recommendations in guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. They found that only 9.3% were supported by strong evidence. For 57% of the recommendations, the quality of evidence was “low” or “very low.” And to make matters worse, more than half of the recommendations considered low in quality of evidence were still issued as “strong” recommendations.

In oncology, a review of 1,023 recommendations from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network found that “…only 6% of the recommendations … are based on high-level evidence”, suggesting “a huge opportunity for research to fill the knowledge gap and further improve the scientific validity of the guidelines.”

Even worse, as shown in a great book co-authored by current FDA official Vinay Prasad, there are many cases where not only is a common medical treatment lacking the evidence to support it, but also one or more randomized trials have shown that the treatment is useless or even harmful!

(I'll refrain from quoting the rest and suggest instead you check out his post)