Oh and this is similar to the approach that the Gates foundation is taking. As far as I can tell Gates approached this as an optimisation problem: given that he

Oh and this is similar to the approach that the Gates foundation is taking. As far as I can tell Gates approached this as an optimisation problem: given that he has X billion dollars to give to charity, how can he maximise the effect that his donations have? How many lives can he save* with that money? * lives saved is of course the wrong metric: no-one has ever saved a live, just prolonged it, but it's a convenient shorthand for maximising the number of quality adjusted life years (QALYs)[1] that a donation could buy. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year