The impact of the work itself is roughly neutral, but you can have a large positive impact through donations, so the net impact is positive.

I think you should remove that item from your list.

Forgive me if this sounds like a libertarian rant – it’s certainly plausible that in fact healthy govts do spend their tax revenues more beneficially for society than the rich do, and I’d be open to evidence for that. I really just mean it’s an important, non-obvious question that deserves to be studied, and to me the Piketty et al paper looks too broad to be conclusive: eg, not taking into account where the untaxed money of the rich goes.

As with so much in EA, I feel like here one consequence of tackling an important question that’s received too little thought is that our first attempts to answer it may be full of holes… That’s just how life is on the frontier! Hope to see many further iterations of this question.

Here is the CDC report on the 38% of Americans who use any form of complementary/alternative medicine, only 1.8% of whom use homeopathy: https://nccih.nih.gov/…/2007/72_dpi_CHARTS/chart4.htm

But what are they using it for?
https://nccih.nih.gov/…/2007/72_dpi_CHARTS/chart6.htm

Assuming they’re mostly going to chiropracters for the backaches, meditating away the anxiety, and taking fish oil for cholesterol, they’re using it for the common cold.

So when we realize the main function of homeopathy today is to reduce the length of the common cold about a quarter of a day, assuming the placebo effect http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21747102 , we have a net of 50,000 days less suffering from colds per year among adults who we’ll also assume would not have otherwise taken Nyquil (conventional cold treatment).

In conclusion, I would argue that the net effect of responsibly administered homeopathy (i.e. referring critically sick people to a hospital or an M.D.) is on the level of fortune-telling, which is basically just a substitute for conventional psychological counseling and may be overall positive, despite the modest fees charged usually to people who can afford it.

Fraudulent medicine is a different story, and we can find that scattered everywhere throughout medicine and pharmaceuticals. When a company can massage the clinical data and sell a drug without a single warning on the bottle or the drug’s website that the drug has been scientifically proven to have a 0% chance of working for people over a certain BMI, or when a doctor prescribes a topical corticosteroid for a fungal infection without even looking at a scraping under a microscope because they don’t have the time to bother, I would say that’s just as fraudulent. And remembering that not two centuries ago, blood letting was the order of the day, it would be enlightening to see an analysis estimating total harm brought on by conventional medical practices.

And of course, if you had different, more accurate/relevant data to do your estimation of total harm on this one, I’d be interested to see it.

I questioned the marginal social value of government revenue and whether loopholes do in fact cause real tax rates on the rich to equilibrate at a different point, not whether higher paper rates are so economically destructive as to result in lower government revenue.