It looks to me like the nuclear security space isn’t in dire need of funding, despite MacArthur ending its nuclear security program. Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) ran a deficit in 2022 (they reported $19.5M in expenses versus $14M in revenues), but they had net assets of $79M, according to their Form 990 which can be found here. Likewise, Carnegie Endowment has no shortage of major funders. Is it important for the EA movement to make up for the funding shortfall?
In any case, I feel like discussions about nuclear risk funding often implicitly assume that a large relative decrease in philanthropic funding means a large increase in marginal cost-effectiveness, but this is unclear to me given it is only a small fraction of total funding. According to Founders Pledge’s report on nuclear risk, “total philanthropic nuclear security funding stood at about $47 million per year [“between 2014 and 2020″]”. So a 100 % reduction in philantropic funding would only be a 1.16 % (= 0.047/4.04) relative reduction in total funding, assuming this is 4.04 G$, which I got from the mean of a lognormal distribution with 5th and 95th percentile equal to 1 and 10 G$, corresponding to the lower and upper bound guessed in 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war.
More importantly, I believe the global catastrophic risk community had better assess the cost-effectiveness of specific interventions (as GiveWell does) instead of focussing on spending. Christian Ruhl from Founders Pledge estimated doubling the spending on nuclear security would save a life for 1.55 k$, which corresponds to a cost-effectiveness around 3.23 (= 5⁄1.55) times that of GiveWell’s top charities. I think corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and therefore 446 (= 1.44*10^3/3.23) times as cost-effective as what Christian got for doubling the spending on nuclear security.
It looks to me like the nuclear security space isn’t in dire need of funding, despite MacArthur ending its nuclear security program. Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) ran a deficit in 2022 (they reported $19.5M in expenses versus $14M in revenues), but they had net assets of $79M, according to their Form 990 which can be found here. Likewise, Carnegie Endowment has no shortage of major funders. Is it important for the EA movement to make up for the funding shortfall?
Thanks for the comment! I commented below that:
More importantly, I believe the global catastrophic risk community had better assess the cost-effectiveness of specific interventions (as GiveWell does) instead of focussing on spending. Christian Ruhl from Founders Pledge estimated doubling the spending on nuclear security would save a life for 1.55 k$, which corresponds to a cost-effectiveness around 3.23 (= 5⁄1.55) times that of GiveWell’s top charities. I think corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, and therefore 446 (= 1.44*10^3/3.23) times as cost-effective as what Christian got for doubling the spending on nuclear security.