Do you have a sense of what the appropriate pricing for what “OpenPhil’s last pro-animal dollar” is or should be? Either grounded concretely in terms of specific interventions that you’d fund, or in terms of how much animal welfare can be “bought” per dollar.
Also, how much does relatively abstract reasoning on benchmarks and metrics like the above factor into your decisions on whether to fund specific interventions?
This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar.
Of course there are many caveats! They take two forms. First we have lots caveats on the number above. There’s lot of empirical uncertainty: about the # of animals impacted by each corporate campaign, the likelihood of implementation of each corporate pledge, how much the campaign sped up the reform relative to the counterfactual, the welfare of animals before the corporate reform, how much the reform improves that welfare, etc. And there’s a lot of moral uncertainty: about how to compare acute and chronic suffering, how to compare welfare improvements with sparing an animal from living in a factory farm at all, how to compare across species etc.
Second, we have caveats on how to apply the benchmark and how much to expect it to reflect the last pro-animal dollar. The biggest uncertainty is the future pace / tractability of reforms. As noted above, our space has proven hard-to-predict on a five year timeline—some campaigns have gone far faster than we expected, some much slower. So it’s of course much harder to predict progress on a 50+ year timeline for a last pro-animal dollar. That said, I think the best we can do is make lots of predictions and continue to score how they go—we’ve been doing that for five years now, and seem well-calibrated even as we remain unsure on lots of specifics. And while I think there are plenty of good reasons why things might get less cost-effective over time, I think there are also plenty of good reasons why things might get more cost-effective.
I’d love to see more EA researchers (a) trying to independently assess the cost-effectiveness of various animal interventions, (b) trying to estimate the cost-effectiveness of the last pro-animal dollar, and (c) making and scoring predictions on key milestones.
Do you have a sense of what the appropriate pricing for what “OpenPhil’s last pro-animal dollar” is or should be? Either grounded concretely in terms of specific interventions that you’d fund, or in terms of how much animal welfare can be “bought” per dollar.
Also, how much does relatively abstract reasoning on benchmarks and metrics like the above factor into your decisions on whether to fund specific interventions?
This is a major question for us, and one we continue to research. Our current very rough estimate is that our average $ spent on corporate campaigns and all supporting work (which is ~40% of our total animal grant-making) achieves the equivalent of ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering. We use this a rough benchmark for BOTECs on new grants, and my best guess is this reflects roughly the range we should hope for the last pro-animal dollar.
Of course there are many caveats! They take two forms. First we have lots caveats on the number above. There’s lot of empirical uncertainty: about the # of animals impacted by each corporate campaign, the likelihood of implementation of each corporate pledge, how much the campaign sped up the reform relative to the counterfactual, the welfare of animals before the corporate reform, how much the reform improves that welfare, etc. And there’s a lot of moral uncertainty: about how to compare acute and chronic suffering, how to compare welfare improvements with sparing an animal from living in a factory farm at all, how to compare across species etc.
Second, we have caveats on how to apply the benchmark and how much to expect it to reflect the last pro-animal dollar. The biggest uncertainty is the future pace / tractability of reforms. As noted above, our space has proven hard-to-predict on a five year timeline—some campaigns have gone far faster than we expected, some much slower. So it’s of course much harder to predict progress on a 50+ year timeline for a last pro-animal dollar. That said, I think the best we can do is make lots of predictions and continue to score how they go—we’ve been doing that for five years now, and seem well-calibrated even as we remain unsure on lots of specifics. And while I think there are plenty of good reasons why things might get less cost-effective over time, I think there are also plenty of good reasons why things might get more cost-effective.
I’d love to see more EA researchers (a) trying to independently assess the cost-effectiveness of various animal interventions, (b) trying to estimate the cost-effectiveness of the last pro-animal dollar, and (c) making and scoring predictions on key milestones.