Thanks, Grace. Have you (GWWC) considered highlighting your animal welfare recommendations as more cost-effective than your recommendations in other areas? From GWWCâs recommendations page:
What do we mean by âeffectiveâ?
Not all charities are equal. Your choice of where to donate can lead to significant differences in impact.
Our research team estimates that you can often do 100x more good with your dollar by donating to the best charities, and sometimes this multiplier is even greater.
If this comes as a surprise, youâre not alone. Many donors vastly underestimate the difference between âgoodâ and âgreatâ charities, which explains why many of the best charities to donate to remain underfunded.
I believe the same applies to GWWCâs recommendations, in the sense I think your animal welfare recommendations are over 100 times as cost-effective as your recommendations in other areas. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is 64.3 k times as cost-effectivene as GiveWellâs top charities.
I also have a sense that people working on cause prioritisation would agree that the best interventions in animal welfare are more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development. For example, Ambitious Impactâs estimates suggest this, and so does the votes in Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week.
I understand people supporting global health and development may be a little distanced by GWWC highlighting animal welfare as more cost-effective. However, people donating to local organisations helping which are 1 % as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities (e.g. supporting people with low income in high income countries) are way more distanced by not even having their preferred options on GWWCâs platform, and I believe the cost-effectiveness gap between such organisations and GiveWellâs top charities may well be smaller than that between the best animal welfare organisations and GiveWellâs top charities.
Thanks for your questionâI think itâs a good one!
I was going to write up a response but then I remembered we had this nice explanation on our research and approach page:
Some other organisations in the effective giving space advocate a particular âworldviewâ; for example, they might believe it is most impactful to focus on safeguarding the long-term future and as such, recommend giving to organisations working to reduce existential risk, rather than other high-impact causes like global health. Others may believe it is best to focus on non-human animal wellbeing, because the scale of the problem (if you value all sentient beings equally) is so enormous compared to human wellbeing and the solutions are much more tractable than attempting to safeguard the long-term future.
At Giving What We Can, we believe there are compelling arguments and reasons for focusing on any of the high-impact cause areas we recommend, and that no matter which one you choose, youâll have the capacity to help solve some of the worldâs most pressing problems and prevent the suffering of many. Weâve outlined why the cause areas we recommend are particularly impactful (and why we encourage supporting these over others) but we donât currently take a view on which of our high-impact cause areas we deem most impactful as we think this is quite value-specific. Instead, we wish to provide the public with a variety of highly effective giving options, and then empower them to determine which ones best align with their own worldviews/âvalues. Some of our donors feel strongly that theyâll have more impact by prioritising one of these cause areas; others prefer to diversify their giving portfolio across several cause areas.
So I think the TL;DR of this answer is that we provide recommendations across a number of worldviews but donât currently want to weigh in on what we think is the âcorrectâ worldview. This means that weâll be unlikely to create a ranked link of recommendations across our cause areas unless we change our view on how we think about worldview diversity.
Thanks, Grace. Have you (GWWC) considered highlighting your animal welfare recommendations as more cost-effective than your recommendations in other areas? From GWWCâs recommendations page:
I believe the same applies to GWWCâs recommendations, in the sense I think your animal welfare recommendations are over 100 times as cost-effective as your recommendations in other areas. I estimate:
Broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) is 64.3 k times as cost-effectivene as GiveWellâs top charities.
I also have a sense that people working on cause prioritisation would agree that the best interventions in animal welfare are more cost-effective than the best ones in global health and development. For example, Ambitious Impactâs estimates suggest this, and so does the votes in Animal Welfare vs Global Health Debate Week.
I understand people supporting global health and development may be a little distanced by GWWC highlighting animal welfare as more cost-effective. However, people donating to local organisations helping which are 1 % as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities (e.g. supporting people with low income in high income countries) are way more distanced by not even having their preferred options on GWWCâs platform, and I believe the cost-effectiveness gap between such organisations and GiveWellâs top charities may well be smaller than that between the best animal welfare organisations and GiveWellâs top charities.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your questionâI think itâs a good one!
I was going to write up a response but then I remembered we had this nice explanation on our research and approach page:
So I think the TL;DR of this answer is that we provide recommendations across a number of worldviews but donât currently want to weigh in on what we think is the âcorrectâ worldview. This means that weâll be unlikely to create a ranked link of recommendations across our cause areas unless we change our view on how we think about worldview diversity.