How tractable are animal welfare problems compared to global health and development problems?
I’m asking because I think animal welfare is a more neglected issue, but I still donate for global health and development because I think it’s more tractable.
I think that it’s very tractable. For example, I estimated that corporate campaigns improve 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent and this improvement seems to be very significant. It would likely cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to improve a life of one human to such a degree, even in developing countries. There are many caveats to this comparison that I can talk about upon request but I don’t think that they change the conclusion.
Another way to see tractability is to look at the big wins for animal advocacy in 2021 or 2020. This progress is being achieved with only about $200 million spending per year (with a lot of it being non-EA money, I think).
I believe they are largely tractable, there’s a variety of different intervention types (Policy, Direct work, Meta, Research), cause areas (Alt Proteins, Farmed Animals, Wild animal suffering, Insects), organisations and geographies to pursue them in. Of particular note may be potentially highly tractable and impactful work in LMIC (Africa, Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe)
I will say animal welfare is a newer and less explored area than global health but that may mean that your donation can be more impactful and make more of a difference as there could be a snowball effect from funding new high-potential intervention or research.
If you are quite concerned about traceability, perhaps you could consider donating to organisations that are doing more research or meta-work to discover more tractable interventions
Either way, it’s not entirely clear and highly depends on your philosophy, risk tolerance, knowledge and funding counterfactuals.
How tractable are animal welfare problems compared to global health and development problems?
I’m asking because I think animal welfare is a more neglected issue, but I still donate for global health and development because I think it’s more tractable.
I think that it’s very tractable. For example, I estimated that corporate campaigns improve 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent and this improvement seems to be very significant. It would likely cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to improve a life of one human to such a degree, even in developing countries. There are many caveats to this comparison that I can talk about upon request but I don’t think that they change the conclusion.
Another way to see tractability is to look at the big wins for animal advocacy in 2021 or 2020. This progress is being achieved with only about $200 million spending per year (with a lot of it being non-EA money, I think).
I believe they are largely tractable, there’s a variety of different intervention types (Policy, Direct work, Meta, Research), cause areas (Alt Proteins, Farmed Animals, Wild animal suffering, Insects), organisations and geographies to pursue them in. Of particular note may be potentially highly tractable and impactful work in LMIC (Africa, Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe)
I will say animal welfare is a newer and less explored area than global health but that may mean that your donation can be more impactful and make more of a difference as there could be a snowball effect from funding new high-potential intervention or research.
If you are quite concerned about traceability, perhaps you could consider donating to organisations that are doing more research or meta-work to discover more tractable interventions
Either way, it’s not entirely clear and highly depends on your philosophy, risk tolerance, knowledge and funding counterfactuals.