I often see claims of an area being neglected, under-supported, or underfunded. But what do these claims really mean? They tend to break down into two categories: 1) neglected compared to how it should be, 2) neglected compared to other areas. I think both these ways of viewing neglectedness are pretty undescriptive and not very useful for making real decisions in philanthropy. However I do think there is a more useful way of considering neglectedness.
Neglected absolutely
“It would take $9.2 trillion per year to stop climate change and we are only spending $15 billion a year on it!”
This pretty common claim is that X area is neglected relative to how it should be funded. In many ways this claim is objectively true! 0 people should die due to lacking a $3 bednet; no easily and cheaply prevented disease or suffering should be around. But really, when a charity makes an appeal like this, it is equally true for virtually every issue in the NGO sector. We can whine all day that the NGO sector should be bigger and more should donate (I agree with this more than most), but in practice charitable giving over time has been pretty fixed for decades (right around 2% of income). Normally when an NGO raises a dollar, it’s moving money from a different NGO. Sadly, this means how neglected something is relative to an ideal utopia where we have enough funding for everything is really far from a useful question.
Neglectedness relative to rich counterparts
“Climate is so neglected. Education gets 5x more funding every year.”
Every area has a richer neighbor that can be used as a comparison. Unless you are literally the best-funded area in NGOs, you will have some areas that get a lot more and some that get less. Even if you’re well-funded, you can make comparisons to trivial for-profit areas (which tend to be way bigger), e.g., ice cream in just the US gets $15 billion a year. In general everything can be made to look under or overfunded relative to who you compare to. The clean energy climate space looks underfunded relative to university education but highly funded relative to farmed animals.
Doing neglectedness right
“Considering the main two areas I am considering, food systems climate is more neglected than clean energy climate.”
I think this sort of comparison makes a lot of sense. It is trying to look at the real oppperuntiy cost of what else would be supported by people (or yourself) considering the area. It makes a case not based on any cherry-picked possible example but relative to real-world options that many people are donating between. I also think the specificity adds useful context. Do we really care about “climate” as a whole? Very few donors are big enough to pick no sub-area from within that large a sector. What if a broad area like climate is overfunded but a sub-area like food systems within it is neglected? Which one trumps? I think generally the more specific the comparison, the better.
Who is on the edge of your circle?
There is a simpler model that one can use to find the “most neglected” area within their possible scope of giving. Peter Singer has an idea of expanding circles of moral concern in summary, the concept that over time humanity has cared about larger and larger groups. Originally only having white landholding family members as worthy of moral care, broadening until more and more groups were included.
However, everyone is broader now; where the edge of this circle lies varies a lot. Caring morally about people who do not own land is pretty darn common at this point; caring morally about bugs is pretty rare. I think a decent proxy for neglect is: what is the group right on the edge? If you care about both people in your own country and those abroad, 9⁄10 the abroad people are more neglected. If you care about animals, particularly unpopular ones, they will be more neglected than humans. Of all the AIM charities started (~50), the one that works on shrimp welfare I have been convinced that this is a worthwhile area, but it’s right on the edge of my circle, and for many, shrimp would be far outside of it. I think this gives a hint as to the “most neglected area I would consider supporting” which I think is the real question of neglectedness.
P.S. I do not think neglectedness should be the only criterion used when making decisions. You also need to look at evidence base, tractability, cost-effectiveness, etc.
I’m still highly sceptical of neglectedness as anything but a first-pass heuristic for how prioritisation organisations might spend their early research—firstly because there are so many ways a field can be ‘not neglected’ and still highly leveraged (e.g. Givewell and Giving What We Can were only able to have the comparative impact they did because the global health field had been vigorously researched but no-one had systemically done the individual-level prioritisation they did with the research results); secondly because it encourages EA to reject established learning in a way I find dangerously hubristic (FTX weren’t irresponsible—they just took a neglected approach to fundraising!).
If we must keep using this heuristic, it helps to introduce supporting heuristics like the one you mention; to which I’d add ‘look at the amount of input relative to the amount of input needed to solve the issue’. Climate has had far more input than AI safety, but it’s unclear to me whether the proportion of input it’s had to what it needs is higher.
Feels like in the real world you describe in which few/no cause areas are actually satiated for funding, neglectedness is of interest mainly in how it interacts with tractability.
If your small amount of effort kickstarts an area of research rather than merely adds some marginal quantity of additional research or funding, you might get some sort of multiplier on your efforts, assuming others find your case persuasive. And certain problems that have being neglected due to the relative obscurity/rarity of who/what they affect might be an indication that more tractable interventions exist (if there is a simple cure for common cancers it is remarkable we have not found it yet; conversely certain obscure diseases have been the subject of comparatively little research). On the other hand, the relationship doesn’t always run that way: some causes like world peace are neglected precisely because however important they might be, there doesn’t appear to be an efficacious solution.
Yeah well a lot of neglectedness discourse does end up being “here’s a big number, here’s a small number, therefore neglected” without asking whether those numbers actually inform anyone’s marginal decision? I think shrimp welfare is also interesting because the bottleneck isn’t “people who care about shrimp don’t know it’s important” it’s that very few people care about shrimp at all.
One thing I’d find useful is more on how to handle cases where something is at the edge of your circle because of empirical uncertainty rather than moral uncertainty. I might be unsure whether to include shrimp because I’m uncertain about their sentience (empirical), or because I’m uncertain how to weigh their interests even if sentient (moral). These feel like they should cash out differently. The first suggests investing in research, the latte4 suggests the “neglected because few include them” logic you allude to.
Thanks for the post, Joey.
I think you are suggesting people say i) “X is more neglected than Y” if ii) “X is more cost-effective than Y at the margin”. I believe it would be better for people to simply say ii) as applied to the relevant context. For example, that funding X with 10 k$ would save more lives than funding Y by the same amount. As you pointed out, i) could be interpreted in many different ways, and therefore can lead to misunderstandings.
This is very unclear to me. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”, and a range of 0.5 to 1.5 for “exponent”, which I believe covers reasonable best guesses, I estimate that the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has increased the welfare of shrimps via increasing the adoption of electrical stunning 0.00167 (= 2.06*10^-5/0.0123) to 1.67 k (= 20.6/0.0123) times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities increase the welfare of humans. So I can easily see HSI increasing the welfare of shrimps much more or less cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charities increase the welfare of humans.
Executive summary: The author argues that most common ways of describing cause areas as “neglected” are unhelpful, and proposes instead evaluating neglectedness relative to realistic alternative donation options and the moral boundaries of a donor’s own concern.
Key points:
The author distinguishes two common notions of neglectedness—relative to an ideal funding level and relative to other causes—and argues that both are generally uninformative for practical philanthropic decisions.
Claims that an area is neglected compared to what it “should” receive are described as trivially true for nearly all causes, given fixed overall charitable giving.
Comparisons between cause areas are often arbitrary, since any area can be framed as underfunded or overfunded depending on the chosen comparator.
The author suggests that neglectedness should instead be assessed relative to realistic alternative causes that donors are actually choosing between.
Greater specificity within broad cause areas (e.g., sub-areas within climate) is argued to make neglectedness comparisons more meaningful.
As a heuristic, the author proposes looking at which moral patients lie at the edge of a donor’s circle of concern, suggesting that groups near this boundary tend to be more neglected.
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Really makes you rethink “neglectedness.” It’s not just about how much money an area gets, but what’s actually overlooked in your own moral circle. Makes cause prioritization way more practical.