I’m Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder of GiveWell. We agree that what you call the “displacement factor” is a concern, and we do consider it in our evaluations.

We discuss it generally here and have a “Possible negative/offsetting impact” for each charity we review.

Also, concerns similar to yours about displacement significantly affected our views of charities that provide corrective surgery (more here).

Great links. Not sure where you find the time to turn out so many papers, books, articles and still surf the web.

A few quick comments:

Re USAID Administrator. It’s not just the vetting process. It is also not clear what the job description is any more and what authority this person will have now that PEPFAR, MCC, PMI, CDC and State have taken up so much of what used to be the USAID mandate.

Re ratings for NGO’s. Givewell seems to have a pretty good system but they have one major gap– what I call the displacement factor. How much of what they do could and should be (or would have been done) by the local government, by local NGO’s or by local private commercial entities if the NGO was not doing what they are doing. This is hard to measure, but NGO’s can at least be rated on their local ownership component to assess how they support and strengthen local institutions rather than compete with them.

William Easterly

Good advice, Laura. Perhaps this could also be applied to this blog (ref: orphan story below).