This chart gives me the impression that farmed animal welfare and large global poverty charities are very well funded, just like AI safety and longtermist EA community-building. But I thought that global poverty and farmed animal welfare did have significant funding gaps, whereas the effect of AI safety donations is more like funging with Open Philanthropy. Could you clarify the situation here?
My understanding is that there is still more money within farmed animal welfare and global poverty than opportunities for funding.
For example, GiveWell is aiming to move $1B/yr by 2025 and doesn’t currently have enough opportunities identified to cover that. Open Philanthropy also has many millions of global development cash to spend and are still working to identify areas to fund.
Less clear in animal advocacy but my sense is that OP and the EA Animal Welfare Fund are still mainly bottlenecked by getting good funding proposals and that good opportunities generally can get funded …though maybe I’m missing something—I’m not on the EA Animal Welfare Fund and I don’t have access to all their decision making.
Anyone who does have a funding gap in these cause areas is welcome to correct me either in the comments here or via email (peter@rethinkpriorities.org) and I’ll try to explore why it isn’t getting funded.
My understanding is that there is still more money within farmed animal welfare and global poverty than opportunities for funding.
For farmed animal welfare, as per the title: ”We need more nuance regarding funding gaps”, I think it is indeed more nuanced than “there is more money than opps for funding in farmed animal welfare.”
Quickly consider the likes of:
Some of the more outstanding bigger orgs can absorb much more funding, pretty productively (think e.g. THL, GFI, CIWF, MFA, etc.) Across those outstanding big groups alone, quite likely we could easily do an additional ~>$10M/yr on what we do right now.
Also, there are some programs that could be scaled up a lot. E.g., pumping further $’s into open access PB research.
As a concrete example, right now finding opps in parts of SE Asia or the Middle East seems much more of a bottleneck than finding the funding for that.
Similarly so, as you probably know, for work on invertebrates ;)
So both opportunity and funding bottlenecks apply at the movement level for farmed animal welfare. But, the nuance is that they really apply to quite differing extents to different parts of the movement.
We aim to find and fund around $1 billion of highly cost-effective giving opportunities annually by 2025. […]
We’ve set the target of $1.5 billion in funding opportunities identified by 2025 with the goal of exceeding the amount of funding we raise while maintaining a relatively high cost-effectiveness bar. If we raise significantly more—for example, $2 billion in 2022—we expect we’d drop our cost-effectiveness bar more quickly to keep pace with our growth.
It sounds like there is significant room for more funding here (which Open Phil’s neartermist budget wouldn’t be enough to completely cover for very long). This seems like a very different funding situation than how the EA Infrastructure Fund and Long-Term Future Fund are generously granting funding to good proposals. I think it’s important for the table to distinguish these two scenarios.
This chart gives me the impression that farmed animal welfare and large global poverty charities are very well funded, just like AI safety and longtermist EA community-building. But I thought that global poverty and farmed animal welfare did have significant funding gaps, whereas the effect of AI safety donations is more like funging with Open Philanthropy. Could you clarify the situation here?
My understanding is that there is still more money within farmed animal welfare and global poverty than opportunities for funding.
For example, GiveWell is aiming to move $1B/yr by 2025 and doesn’t currently have enough opportunities identified to cover that. Open Philanthropy also has many millions of global development cash to spend and are still working to identify areas to fund.
Less clear in animal advocacy but my sense is that OP and the EA Animal Welfare Fund are still mainly bottlenecked by getting good funding proposals and that good opportunities generally can get funded …though maybe I’m missing something—I’m not on the EA Animal Welfare Fund and I don’t have access to all their decision making.
Anyone who does have a funding gap in these cause areas is welcome to correct me either in the comments here or via email (peter@rethinkpriorities.org) and I’ll try to explore why it isn’t getting funded.
For farmed animal welfare, as per the title: ”We need more nuance regarding funding gaps”, I think it is indeed more nuanced than “there is more money than opps for funding in farmed animal welfare.”
Quickly consider the likes of:
Some of the more outstanding bigger orgs can absorb much more funding, pretty productively (think e.g. THL, GFI, CIWF, MFA, etc.) Across those outstanding big groups alone, quite likely we could easily do an additional ~>$10M/yr on what we do right now.
Also, there are some programs that could be scaled up a lot. E.g., pumping further $’s into open access PB research.
For some specific types of promising work, like monitoring and evaluation, the bottlenecks do seem to be more about funding (e.g., see FAF’s recent state of the movement report)
On the other hand:
As a concrete example, right now finding opps in parts of SE Asia or the Middle East seems much more of a bottleneck than finding the funding for that.
Similarly so, as you probably know, for work on invertebrates ;)
So both opportunity and funding bottlenecks apply at the movement level for farmed animal welfare. But, the nuance is that they really apply to quite differing extents to different parts of the movement.
My understanding of GiveWell’s post “We aim to cost-effectively direct around $1 billion annually by 2025” is that there are significant funding gaps, but they will probably drop the funding bar from 8× the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers to 5–8× (roughly speaking).
It sounds like there is significant room for more funding here (which Open Phil’s neartermist budget wouldn’t be enough to completely cover for very long). This seems like a very different funding situation than how the EA Infrastructure Fund and Long-Term Future Fund are generously granting funding to good proposals. I think it’s important for the table to distinguish these two scenarios.