That makes a lot of sense. Maybe one way of framing scale + cost-effectiveness could be “how long will a particular cost-effectiveness be applicable in the real world?”, and then two ways of describing that cost-effectiveness are either incorporating costs to raise these limits or not.
In either case, I definitely agree that these should be considered. One other thought—it seems like in certain ways, a donation to a charity will account for their efforts to raise limits, to some extent. I don’t know enough about how ACE does cost-effectiveness analysis (and obviously the degree to which this information is incorporated would definitely depend on that), but I could imagine that if you make a statement like “a donation of $100 to The Humane League will help reduce the suffering of X animals”, in a complete assessment of that donation, some of that funding would be going to their development department (raising the amount of funding available), some might be going to volunteer cultivation (maybe volunteer capacity is another limiting factor).
So the issue is more that while the outcome per dollar we are looking at is based on historical performance, over time that outcome per dollar is actually worse because some of that funding was going towards raising limits, and actually would need to be applied to animals not yet helped, if that makes sense.
Either way, I’m really interested in this—since reading it, I’ve been thinking of how I can incorporate this kind of thinking about cost-effectiveness into my organization—it seems tricky, but definitely worth doing a lot more of. Thanks for posting it!
That makes a lot of sense. Maybe one way of framing scale + cost-effectiveness could be “how long will a particular cost-effectiveness be applicable in the real world?”, and then two ways of describing that cost-effectiveness are either incorporating costs to raise these limits or not.
In either case, I definitely agree that these should be considered. One other thought—it seems like in certain ways, a donation to a charity will account for their efforts to raise limits, to some extent. I don’t know enough about how ACE does cost-effectiveness analysis (and obviously the degree to which this information is incorporated would definitely depend on that), but I could imagine that if you make a statement like “a donation of $100 to The Humane League will help reduce the suffering of X animals”, in a complete assessment of that donation, some of that funding would be going to their development department (raising the amount of funding available), some might be going to volunteer cultivation (maybe volunteer capacity is another limiting factor).
So the issue is more that while the outcome per dollar we are looking at is based on historical performance, over time that outcome per dollar is actually worse because some of that funding was going towards raising limits, and actually would need to be applied to animals not yet helped, if that makes sense.
Either way, I’m really interested in this—since reading it, I’ve been thinking of how I can incorporate this kind of thinking about cost-effectiveness into my organization—it seems tricky, but definitely worth doing a lot more of. Thanks for posting it!