“A cost-effectiveness of decreasing GHG emissions of 3.41 tCO2eq/$, with a plausible range of 0.182 to 31.4 tCO2eq/$.”
This is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
It is based on an assumption that CATF nuclear advocacy will result in cheap enough reactors to replace coal in thermal electric power production. That is not credible now, and it wasn’t at the time when the BOTEC was made. Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that. Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%. I made a copy of the sheet when it came out to capture any changes or alterations—my copy has some cells labeled that are missing in yours.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions. I see it as even odds whether CATF nuclear advocacy increases or reduces emissions in expectation. But extremely likely (>95%) that CATF’s nuclear program was a total waste of philanthropic dollars.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs—use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
While I think it is a mistake to motivate this estimate with a 2017 BOTEC (here we agree!), it is also mistaken to claim that such a range – spanning more than two OOMs and high and fairly low cost-effectiveness – is implausible as a quite uncertain best guess.
As discussed many times, CCF grantmaking does not rely on 2017 BOTECs and neither does my best guess on cost-effectiveness (Vasco operationalized it one specific way I am not going to defend here, I am just defending a view that expected cost-effectiveness is roughly in the 0.1 USD/t to to 10 USD/t range).
Why an estimate in this range seems plausible
This seems plausible for many reasons, none of which depending on the specific BOTEC:
I. Outside-view multiplier reasoning
(1) It is clearly possible to reduce tons of CO2eq for USD 100/t through direct and high-certainty action.
(2) If you only assumed a conventional advocacy multiplier – of the form that many EA orgs assume when modeling policy work (e.g. OP) and that is well-substantiated by empirical political science research and many studies on successes in philanthropy – you would assume a 10x multiplier.
(3) You now “only” need another 10x multiplier to get to USD 1/t and there seem many plausible mechanisms to get there – e.g. focusing on actions with transformative potential such as innovation, avoiding carbon lock-in etc. or – more meta – driving in additional funding from other donors / foundations when supporting early-stage organizations.
(4) Obviously, one also needs to discount for things like funding additionality, execution risk. Etc.
(5) This will result in a very uncertain range, but it is well-approximated by what Vasco has chosen to model this.
Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.
II. Observations of grants and inside-view modeling
(1) While I generally put less stock in them than in comparative analysis, we also do more inside-view cost-effectiveness analyses that often have a range close to USD 0.1-USD 10t/CO2e.
(2) While the CCF does not exist long enough to be confident in long-run emissions outcomes – we generally invest in theories of change that need time – there is a lot of reason to expect that some of those bets will pay off at the very high cost-effectiveness:
(a) Many of the charities supported – such as TerraPraxis, Future Cleantech Architects etc. – have crowded in multiples of the funding we allocated to them often as a direct result of our recommendation and/or organizational development we enabled with early grants.
(b) While hard to disentangle, they also play key roles in many policy changes – e.g. Carbon180 was a leading advocacy org on carbon removal in the IRA/IIJA window, two of our grantees are pushing a conversation on repowering with advanced heat sources (nuclear or geothermal) and one of our grantees (FCA) had several policy wins in the EU (not all they can talk about).
(c) More nascent work is focused electricity market liberalization to advance renewables in emerging economies (Energy for Growth), a stronger climate civil society on the right (DEPLOY/US), as well as geothermal innovation in Canada (Cascade).
(d) This is a diversified sets of bets that leverages different mechanisms, with the uniting theme of leveraging advocacy, the focus on actions / spaces that are neglected, that have the potential to change trajectories, and that have a risk-reducing quality (hedging).
III. Learning from other areas of philanthropy
Most areas of philanthropy seem structured such that, when being alright with risk neutrality and leveraged theories of change, one can get significant multiplier.
For example, I am quite confident that the implied multiplier for the case of chicken welfare campaigns compared to direct action is likely similarly large for what we are assuming for the case of Climate Fund. I also do not think any nuclear risk grant-maker would find it implausible that they could reduce nuclear risk 100x more cost-effectively (in expectation) than whatever the direct action equivalent would be. Or a global health grant-maker that would expect that their grants are 100x more cost-effective by influencing advocacy to have government invest in vaccine RD&D rather than buying equipment for their local hospital.
Bottom line: This cost-effectiveness range as a risk-neutral best guess does not depend on a 2017 BOTEC, but rather can be motivated via different streams of reasoning and evidence.
(I also think the critique of the 2017 BOTEC is way over-confident but this would be a separate comment)
Thanks for clarifying, Johannes. Strongly upvoted.
Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.
I think estimates of the chicken-years affected per $ spent in corporate campaigns for chicken welfare may be more resilient than ones of the cost-effectiveness of CCF in t/$. According to The Humane League:
Nearly 2,500 corporate cage-free welfare policies, which protect hens from the most intensive forms of confinement, have been secured around the world.
1,157 companies have successfully transitioned away from using battery cages, resulting in meaningful change for millions of animals.
89% of all corporate cage-free commitments with a 2022 deadline (meaning companies promised to completely phase out battery cages by 2022 or earlier) have been fulfilled.
Just 4% of companies that pledged to be cage-free by 2022 are not yet fully cage-free (though they are publicly reporting on their progress), while only 7% are not yet publicly reporting on the status of their transition.
We’ve seen a complete transition to cage-free systems across industry sectors: 509 restaurants, 269 manufacturers, 174 retailers, 118 foodservice and caterers, 95 hospitality companies, 53 producers, and 19 distributors
As a side note:
Saulius estimated campaigns for broiler welfare are 27.8 % (= 15⁄54) as cost-effective as the cage-free campaigns concerning the above.
OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
However, I accounted for both of these effects in my analysis.
Thanks, this updates me, I had cached something more skeptical on chicken welfare campaigns.
Do you have a sense of what “advocacy multiplier” this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?
I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are—to a significant degree—not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.
FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.
Thanks for the follow-up! It prompted me to think about relevant topics.
Do you have a sense of what “advocacy multiplier” this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?
By helping animals directly, are you talking about rescuing animals from factory-farms, and then supporting them in animal sanctuaries? I am not aware of cost-effectiveness analyses of these, but here is a quick estimate. I speculate it would take 2 h to save one broiler. In this case, for 20 $/h, the cost to save a broiler would be 40 $ (= 2*20). Broilers in a conventional scenario live for 42 days, so saving one at a random time would in expectation avoid 21 days (= 42⁄2) of life in a conventional scenario, and contribute to perhaps 7.5 years of life in a sanctuary[1], such that the remaining life expectancy would become 130 (= 7.5*365.25/21) times as long. Based on my assumptions here, and supposing the welfare of a broiler in a sanctuary as a fraction of chickens’ welfare range is similar to the welfare of a typical human as a fraction of humans’ welfare range, I estimate going from a conventional scenario to a sanctuary is 22.8 (= (3.33*10^-6*130 + 2.59*10^-5)/(-5.77*10^-6 + 2.59*10^-5)) times as good as going from a conventional scenario to a reformed scenario. So the rescue would have a benefit equivalent to changing 479 days (= 21*22.8) of a broiler in a conventional scenario to one in a reformed scenario. Assuming the cost of maintaining the broiler in the sanctuary is much smaller than the cost of the rescue, which may be optimistic, the cost-effectiveness would be 0.0328 chicken-years/$ (= 479⁄365.25/40). If so, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 250 (= 8.20/0.0328) times as cost-effective.
Relatedly, I Fermi estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 22.5 times as cost-effective as School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the number of plant-based meals at schools and universities in the United Kingdom that is seemingly regarded as successful in advancing their intervention. It makes sense to me its cost-effectiveness is higher than that I estimated for rescuing broilers, but lower than that of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. A direct rescue operations targets a single animal, School Plates presumably targets a university or schools in a given small region, and corporate campaigns target companies, which intuitively affect even more animals than the latter.
The 2 shallow analyses above seem qualitatively in agreement with what Founders Pledge’s approach of focussing on impact multipliers would predict. On the other hand, I would be nice to have more monitoring and evaluation of animal welfare interventions to calibrate heuristics.
I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are—to a significant degree—not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.
I suspect Ben Todd’s analysis underestimates variations in cost-effectiveness within causes, at least if one excludes indirect effects[2]. At the same time, it still seems like animal welfare interventions are generally more cost-effective than climate and global health and development ones. If corporate campaigns really are in the ballpark of 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities as I estimated, and Open Philanthropy’s human welfare grants in their Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio, which supposedly takes advantage of multipliers, are 2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, then corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are around 720 (= 1.44*10^3/2) times as cost-effective as such grants.
FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.
Most chickens have a natural lifespan of around 10 years but same may live up to 15 years! Hens rescued from industry sadly may not live this long, even when kept as pets, due to their stressful start in life.
As an example of an indirect effect, rescues of farmed animals can be filmed, and the videos used to pressure companies to sign and fulfill their animal welfare pledges.
My estimation of the cost-effectiveness of rescuing a broiler had an error which I have now corrected. I was assuming the rescue would not change the lifespan of the broiler, but it would live longer in a sanctuary. Assuming 7.5 years (see 1st footnote above), corporate campaigns are just hundreds of times as cost-effective as the rescue (instead of thousands).
This [3.41 tCO2eq/$] is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
What is your best guess for the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of CCF? For the purpose of this analysis, it does not matter much whether it is 10 % or 10 times that I assumed, because I think in this case the qualitative conclusions would be the same.
You may be right that Founders Pledge no longer stands behind the cost-effectiveness analysis (it would be helpful if you could link to where they say that). However:
Johannes Ackva, who is the manager of CCF, “thinks this [3.41 tCO2eq/$] is in the right ballpark and not worth getting more precise for an analysis like this (where most parameters are much more uncertain)”.
Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that.
Interesting. In that case, GiveWell’s interventions would be better than CCF, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CCF.
Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%.
Great point! I do think this is a major source of error in cost-effectiveness analysis, and quantitive analyses more broadly:
In general, I suspect there is a tendency to give probabilities between 1 % and 99 % for events whose mechanics we do not understand well [unlike e.g. lotteries], given this range encompasses the vast majority (98 %) of the available linear space (from 0 to 1), and events in everyday life one cares about are not that extreme. However, the available logarithmic space is infinitely vast, so there is margin for such guesses to be major overestimates.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions.
Note the goal is decreasing cumulative deaths rather than GHG emissions. I think there is no difference if one conditions on a given emissions trajectory, but the goals may come apart accounting for uncertainty in the emissions trajectory. It is more valuable to decrease emissions in scenarios where emissions and temperature are higher, and nuclear power may be specially valuable here if those are scenarios where renewables did not scale as much as is currently anticipated.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs—use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
I agree all of these are useful. Just one note. I often use probability distributions in my analyses, but at the end of the day one has to compare interventions by boiling down their cost-effectiveness distributions to a single number corresponding to the expected cost-effectiveness. If one decides to fund A over B, one is implictly saying the expected cost-effectiveness of A is higher than or equal to that of B.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
This is one reason I do not conclude CCF is better than TCF even though I estimated the cost-effectiveness of CCF is 3.28 times as high. However, I think one can robustly conclude that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective than TCF because I calculated their cost-effectiveness is 1.44 k times as high, which is a lot (similar to the ratio between the cost-effectiveness of TCF and unconditional cash transfer in high income countries, as TCF is 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty, and people in high income countries earn around 100 times as much as people in extreme poverty, which leads to a multiplier of around 1 k).
“A cost-effectiveness of decreasing GHG emissions of 3.41 tCO2eq/$, with a plausible range of 0.182 to 31.4 tCO2eq/$.”
This is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
It is based on an assumption that CATF nuclear advocacy will result in cheap enough reactors to replace coal in thermal electric power production. That is not credible now, and it wasn’t at the time when the BOTEC was made. Note the 0.5%/1%/2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that. Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%. I made a copy of the sheet when it came out to capture any changes or alterations—my copy has some cells labeled that are missing in yours.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions. I see it as even odds whether CATF nuclear advocacy increases or reduces emissions in expectation. But extremely likely (>95%) that CATF’s nuclear program was a total waste of philanthropic dollars.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECs—use probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
While I think it is a mistake to motivate this estimate with a 2017 BOTEC (here we agree!), it is also mistaken to claim that such a range – spanning more than two OOMs and high and fairly low cost-effectiveness – is implausible as a quite uncertain best guess.
As discussed many times, CCF grantmaking does not rely on 2017 BOTECs and neither does my best guess on cost-effectiveness (Vasco operationalized it one specific way I am not going to defend here, I am just defending a view that expected cost-effectiveness is roughly in the 0.1 USD/t to to 10 USD/t range).
Why an estimate in this range seems plausible
This seems plausible for many reasons, none of which depending on the specific BOTEC:
I. Outside-view multiplier reasoning
(1) It is clearly possible to reduce tons of CO2eq for USD 100/t through direct and high-certainty action.
(2) If you only assumed a conventional advocacy multiplier – of the form that many EA orgs assume when modeling policy work (e.g. OP) and that is well-substantiated by empirical political science research and many studies on successes in philanthropy – you would assume a 10x multiplier.
(3) You now “only” need another 10x multiplier to get to USD 1/t and there seem many plausible mechanisms to get there – e.g. focusing on actions with transformative potential such as innovation, avoiding carbon lock-in etc. or – more meta – driving in additional funding from other donors / foundations when supporting early-stage organizations.
(4) Obviously, one also needs to discount for things like funding additionality, execution risk. Etc.
(5) This will result in a very uncertain range, but it is well-approximated by what Vasco has chosen to model this.
Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.
II. Observations of grants and inside-view modeling
(1) While I generally put less stock in them than in comparative analysis, we also do more inside-view cost-effectiveness analyses that often have a range close to USD 0.1-USD 10t/CO2e.
(2) While the CCF does not exist long enough to be confident in long-run emissions outcomes – we generally invest in theories of change that need time – there is a lot of reason to expect that some of those bets will pay off at the very high cost-effectiveness:
(a) Many of the charities supported – such as TerraPraxis, Future Cleantech Architects etc. – have crowded in multiples of the funding we allocated to them often as a direct result of our recommendation and/or organizational development we enabled with early grants.
(b) While hard to disentangle, they also play key roles in many policy changes – e.g. Carbon180 was a leading advocacy org on carbon removal in the IRA/IIJA window, two of our grantees are pushing a conversation on repowering with advanced heat sources (nuclear or geothermal) and one of our grantees (FCA) had several policy wins in the EU (not all they can talk about).
(c) More nascent work is focused electricity market liberalization to advance renewables in emerging economies (Energy for Growth), a stronger climate civil society on the right (DEPLOY/US), as well as geothermal innovation in Canada (Cascade).
(d) This is a diversified sets of bets that leverages different mechanisms, with the uniting theme of leveraging advocacy, the focus on actions / spaces that are neglected, that have the potential to change trajectories, and that have a risk-reducing quality (hedging).
III. Learning from other areas of philanthropy
Most areas of philanthropy seem structured such that, when being alright with risk neutrality and leveraged theories of change, one can get significant multiplier.
For example, I am quite confident that the implied multiplier for the case of chicken welfare campaigns compared to direct action is likely similarly large for what we are assuming for the case of Climate Fund. I also do not think any nuclear risk grant-maker would find it implausible that they could reduce nuclear risk 100x more cost-effectively (in expectation) than whatever the direct action equivalent would be. Or a global health grant-maker that would expect that their grants are 100x more cost-effective by influencing advocacy to have government invest in vaccine RD&D rather than buying equipment for their local hospital.
Bottom line: This cost-effectiveness range as a risk-neutral best guess does not depend on a 2017 BOTEC, but rather can be motivated via different streams of reasoning and evidence.
(I also think the critique of the 2017 BOTEC is way over-confident but this would be a separate comment)
Thanks for clarifying, Johannes. Strongly upvoted.
I think estimates of the chicken-years affected per $ spent in corporate campaigns for chicken welfare may be more resilient than ones of the cost-effectiveness of CCF in t/$. According to The Humane League:
As a side note:
Saulius estimated campaigns for broiler welfare are 27.8 % (= 15⁄54) as cost-effective as the cage-free campaigns concerning the above.
OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
However, I accounted for both of these effects in my analysis.
Thanks, this updates me, I had cached something more skeptical on chicken welfare campaigns.
Do you have a sense of what “advocacy multiplier” this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?
I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are—to a significant degree—not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.
FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.
Thanks for the follow-up! It prompted me to think about relevant topics.
By helping animals directly, are you talking about rescuing animals from factory-farms, and then supporting them in animal sanctuaries? I am not aware of cost-effectiveness analyses of these, but here is a quick estimate. I speculate it would take 2 h to save one broiler. In this case, for 20 $/h, the cost to save a broiler would be 40 $ (= 2*20). Broilers in a conventional scenario live for 42 days, so saving one at a random time would in expectation avoid 21 days (= 42⁄2) of life in a conventional scenario, and contribute to perhaps 7.5 years of life in a sanctuary[1], such that the remaining life expectancy would become 130 (= 7.5*365.25/21) times as long. Based on my assumptions here, and supposing the welfare of a broiler in a sanctuary as a fraction of chickens’ welfare range is similar to the welfare of a typical human as a fraction of humans’ welfare range, I estimate going from a conventional scenario to a sanctuary is 22.8 (= (3.33*10^-6*130 + 2.59*10^-5)/(-5.77*10^-6 + 2.59*10^-5)) times as good as going from a conventional scenario to a reformed scenario. So the rescue would have a benefit equivalent to changing 479 days (= 21*22.8) of a broiler in a conventional scenario to one in a reformed scenario. Assuming the cost of maintaining the broiler in the sanctuary is much smaller than the cost of the rescue, which may be optimistic, the cost-effectiveness would be 0.0328 chicken-years/$ (= 479⁄365.25/40). If so, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 250 (= 8.20/0.0328) times as cost-effective.
Relatedly, I Fermi estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 22.5 times as cost-effective as School Plates, which is a program aiming to increase the number of plant-based meals at schools and universities in the United Kingdom that is seemingly regarded as successful in advancing their intervention. It makes sense to me its cost-effectiveness is higher than that I estimated for rescuing broilers, but lower than that of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. A direct rescue operations targets a single animal, School Plates presumably targets a university or schools in a given small region, and corporate campaigns target companies, which intuitively affect even more animals than the latter.
The 2 shallow analyses above seem qualitatively in agreement with what Founders Pledge’s approach of focussing on impact multipliers would predict. On the other hand, I would be nice to have more monitoring and evaluation of animal welfare interventions to calibrate heuristics.
I suspect Ben Todd’s analysis underestimates variations in cost-effectiveness within causes, at least if one excludes indirect effects[2]. At the same time, it still seems like animal welfare interventions are generally more cost-effective than climate and global health and development ones. If corporate campaigns really are in the ballpark of 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities as I estimated, and Open Philanthropy’s human welfare grants in their Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio, which supposedly takes advantage of multipliers, are 2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, then corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are around 720 (= 1.44*10^3/2) times as cost-effective as such grants.
Thanks for sharing!
According to Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries:
As an example of an indirect effect, rescues of farmed animals can be filmed, and the videos used to pressure companies to sign and fulfill their animal welfare pledges.
My estimation of the cost-effectiveness of rescuing a broiler had an error which I have now corrected. I was assuming the rescue would not change the lifespan of the broiler, but it would live longer in a sanctuary. Assuming 7.5 years (see 1st footnote above), corporate campaigns are just hundreds of times as cost-effective as the rescue (instead of thousands).
Thanks for the comment, Matthew.
What is your best guess for the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of CCF? For the purpose of this analysis, it does not matter much whether it is 10 % or 10 times that I assumed, because I think in this case the qualitative conclusions would be the same.
You may be right that Founders Pledge no longer stands behind the cost-effectiveness analysis (it would be helpful if you could link to where they say that). However:
Interesting. In that case, GiveWell’s interventions would be better than CCF, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CCF.
Great point! I do think this is a major source of error in cost-effectiveness analysis, and quantitive analyses more broadly:
Note the goal is decreasing cumulative deaths rather than GHG emissions. I think there is no difference if one conditions on a given emissions trajectory, but the goals may come apart accounting for uncertainty in the emissions trajectory. It is more valuable to decrease emissions in scenarios where emissions and temperature are higher, and nuclear power may be specially valuable here if those are scenarios where renewables did not scale as much as is currently anticipated.
I agree all of these are useful. Just one note. I often use probability distributions in my analyses, but at the end of the day one has to compare interventions by boiling down their cost-effectiveness distributions to a single number corresponding to the expected cost-effectiveness. If one decides to fund A over B, one is implictly saying the expected cost-effectiveness of A is higher than or equal to that of B.
This is one reason I do not conclude CCF is better than TCF even though I estimated the cost-effectiveness of CCF is 3.28 times as high. However, I think one can robustly conclude that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective than TCF because I calculated their cost-effectiveness is 1.44 k times as high, which is a lot (similar to the ratio between the cost-effectiveness of TCF and unconditional cash transfer in high income countries, as TCF is 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty, and people in high income countries earn around 100 times as much as people in extreme poverty, which leads to a multiplier of around 1 k).