Funding is very heavy towards corporate welfare campaigns… I’m planning on writing more about this shortly but my first impression is that we have been and potentially are slightly still over-invested in this area relative to other advocacy methods.
I’m unsure about the value of this statement and the implied perspective and understanding.
In general, in farm animal welfare, there’s reason to see access to funding as more of a “bar” to meet instead of a pool of funds to compete over. Indeed, I think there’s eagerness to find new interventions that might be cost effective, or to fund certain foundational causes that seem extremely important.
So if there is not a fixed pool of funds, the meaning of “over invested” is unclear.
Also, there’s just a lot packed into that statement. It’s unusual for anyone in EA to make a statement about overfunding any class of interventions, anywhere. I think it’s equally valuable and demanding of skill, to make useful broad meta statements about existing, operational classes of interventions. It’s plausible this requires at least as much insight, judgement, and management skill as running a successful intervention itself.
Wild Animal Welfare is really taking off. It is now the second biggest area almost now after corporate campaigns. It went from 0.9% of total funding in 2019 to 28% of total funding in 2021 (so far).
I think there’s some value to giving higher resolution when reading some of the statements by the OP.
For example, the most recent grant of wild animal funding is for two years of funding. This has a different meaning than “28% of total funding”.
I think this lumpiness applies to other grants.
For this and other reasons, granting can be somewhat noisy (despite, or because it’s optimal). So it can be hard to get signal by analyzing past grants.
People might be looking at this data to understand future funding and what interventions/areas seems particularly valuable. To try to answer this directly, I think that a reasonable guess is that if you want to know of areas where there is funding interest (including by Open Phil), the statements by the EA Animal Welfare is a really good guess:
Agreed, it’s a relatively information loaded statement with little explanation (yet). I’m planning on following up with some more thoughts on that soon but I just wanted to publish this data first. I’ve also added the original FB post where there’s more discussion on this issue.
To clarify, I’m not saying we’re overfunding it or we should fund less corporate campaigns, rather than I’m surprised at how the proportion of our resources being spent then relative to other interventions. “Over invested” is probably a bad use of phrase so my bad there.
Agreed about the lumpiness of grants—I did mention it and I’ve tried to clarify it further so hopefully it’s a more accurate depiction of events now.
The requests for proposals are definitely useful for people trying to understand future funding so thanks for linking those!
EDIT: On reflection, I thought my initial statement was stronger than I wanted to so I’ve reworded it to:
I’m planning on writing more about this shortly but my first (not fully developed) impression is surprise at how much we’re funding these campaigns & related research relative to other advocacy methods. See some information on potential reasons why in this post.
I’m unsure about the value of this statement and the implied perspective and understanding.
In general, in farm animal welfare, there’s reason to see access to funding as more of a “bar” to meet instead of a pool of funds to compete over. Indeed, I think there’s eagerness to find new interventions that might be cost effective, or to fund certain foundational causes that seem extremely important.
So if there is not a fixed pool of funds, the meaning of “over invested” is unclear.
Also, there’s just a lot packed into that statement. It’s unusual for anyone in EA to make a statement about overfunding any class of interventions, anywhere. I think it’s equally valuable and demanding of skill, to make useful broad meta statements about existing, operational classes of interventions. It’s plausible this requires at least as much insight, judgement, and management skill as running a successful intervention itself.
I think there’s some value to giving higher resolution when reading some of the statements by the OP.
For example, the most recent grant of wild animal funding is for two years of funding. This has a different meaning than “28% of total funding”.
I think this lumpiness applies to other grants.
For this and other reasons, granting can be somewhat noisy (despite, or because it’s optimal). So it can be hard to get signal by analyzing past grants.
People might be looking at this data to understand future funding and what interventions/areas seems particularly valuable. To try to answer this directly, I think that a reasonable guess is that if you want to know of areas where there is funding interest (including by Open Phil), the statements by the EA Animal Welfare is a really good guess:
Sept 3, 2021: EA Animal Welfare Fund: Request for Proposals Regarding Scoping Research/Project(s) on Neglected yet Large-Scale Animal Populations
May 7, 2021: Request For Proposals: EA Animal Welfare Fund
Hey Charles, thanks for the response!
A few quick points:
Agreed, it’s a relatively information loaded statement with little explanation (yet). I’m planning on following up with some more thoughts on that soon but I just wanted to publish this data first. I’ve also added the original FB post where there’s more discussion on this issue.
To clarify, I’m not saying we’re overfunding it or we should fund less corporate campaigns, rather than I’m surprised at how the proportion of our resources being spent then relative to other interventions. “Over invested” is probably a bad use of phrase so my bad there.
Agreed about the lumpiness of grants—I did mention it and I’ve tried to clarify it further so hopefully it’s a more accurate depiction of events now.
The requests for proposals are definitely useful for people trying to understand future funding so thanks for linking those!
EDIT: On reflection, I thought my initial statement was stronger than I wanted to so I’ve reworded it to:
So thank you for raising this Charles.