If you are one of the 166 million Americans who wear glasses, take them off. Now imagine going your whole life like that. Not fun, right? Whether due to prohibitive cost or a lack of awareness/education, over a billion people are estimated to be living with avoidable vision impairment.
Sounds like a promising cause area! GiveWell has done a few analyses on eyeglasses provision and is funding an ongoing RCT that will provide our best evidence yet on the effects of correcting vision impairment. They’ve concluded the evidence is stronger for productivity effects than for educational effects; the RCT will focus on productivity. In this post, I’ll review their glasses -> productivity cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), summarizing what GiveWell found and adding some new wrinkles. In a subsequent post, I’ll take a stab at an education-focused CEA, which GiveWell has not yet done.
