Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Two crazy-ish charitable global poverty project ideas” by MathiasKB🔸
Description
I am writing up two crazy-ish charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
A paper by two University of Chicago economists came to the surprising conclusion that the decline of vultures increased human mortality by 4% (!!) leading to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. That number peaked my attention.
After reading it, I reached out to the authors of the paper as well as some people working on vulture preservation in India to learn more.
My takeaway (this was almost two years ago, so my memory is fuzzy) was that the chemicals responsible for the decline of vultures (particularly diclofenac) had cheap alternatives and that lethargy alongside regulation imposing minor switching costs to industry has kept regulation from being taken up and enforced.
Doing LEEP style policy advocacy to adopt [...]
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Outline:
(00:25) Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
(02:47) Radio infotainment on responsible income planning in developing countries
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First published:
August 18th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.