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I would suggest that part of the difference between funding and people for global health is the huge non-EA workforce that is already working on the things EAs want to optimize for—so replaceability is very high, and marginal value low, unless we think value alignment is particularly critical.
The same can’t be said about AI risk, biosecurity, and other areas where the EA perspective about what to focus on differs from the perspective of most other people working in the area. (Not to mention EA meta / prioritization, where non-EAs working on it is effectively impossible.)
Good point, I agree that’s a factor.
We should want funding to go into areas where there is more existing infrastructure / it’s easier to measure results / there are people who already care about the issue.
Then aligned people should focus on areas that don’t have those features.
It’s good to see this seems to be happening to some degree!
Though, to be clear, I think this is only a moderate reason (among many other factors) in favour of donating to global health vs. say biosecurity.
Overall, my guess is that if someone is interested in donating to biosecurity but worried about the smaller existing workforce, then it would be better to:
Fund movement building efforts to build the workforce
Invest the money and donate later when the workforce is bigger
I think this is likely true for animal welfare too. For example, looking at animal welfare organizations funded by Open Phil, and thinking about my own experience working at/with groups funded by them, I’d guess that under 10% of employees at a lot of the bigger orgs (THL, GFI) engage with non-animal EA content at all, and a lot fewer than that fill out the EA survey.
For Meta/cause prioritisation/rationality I would downgrade the labour value estimates by ~half because:
Apart from full-time EA staff at meta orgs, the bulk of people/ who would have listed this cause area are volunteer group organisers who would put themselves as working on this area are doing organising part-time
Unlike other causes, it is easier to work on movement building part-time, so I would guess this issue is more or less unique to meta.
At a guess I’d say the number of equivalent full-time people is probably ~450 people (likely less)
I would suggest downgrading the $ value from $88 million to maybe $45 million
This would reduce the portion of meta to 12%, suggesting it’s even further (11% instead of 6%) from the optimal allocation
Seems reasonable.
Salaries are also lower than in AI.
You could make a similar argument about animal welfare, though, I think.
This is interesting, thanks. Do you plan on making funding/people allocation estimates using this methodology in the future? If so perhaps it’d be worthwhile for us to expand Metaculus forecasting on future EA resources to include questions on future funding/people allocation, with the aim of informing efforts to address the gap between ideal future portfolios and expectations for what future portfolios will actually be.
My hope is that someone with more time to do it carefully will be able to do this in the future.
Having on-going metaculus forecasts sounds great too.
Thanks for this! Some minor points.
I’m puzzled by what’s going on in the category “Other near-term work (near-term climate change, mental health)”. The two causes in parentheses are quite different and I have no idea what other topics fall into this. Also, this has 12% of the people, but >1% of the money: how did that happen? What are those 12% of people doing?
Also, shouldn’t “global health” really be “global health and development”? If it’s just “global health” that leaves out the economic stuff, e.g. Give Directly. Further, global health should probably either include mental health, or be specified as “global physical health”.
Yes, sorry I was using ‘global health’ as a shorthand to include ‘and development’.
For other near term, that category was taken from the EA survey, and I’m also unsure exactly what’s in there. As David says, it seems like it’s mostly mental health and climate change though.
I think the figures for highly engaged EAs working in Mental Health, drawn from EA Survey data, will be somewhat inflated by people who are working in mental health, but not in an EA-relevant sense e.g. as a psychologist. This is less of a concern for more distinctively EA cause areas of course.
Among people who, in EAS 2019, said they were currently working for an EA org, the normalised figures were only ~5% for Mental Health and ~2% for Climate Change (which, interestingly, is a bit closer to Ben’s overall estimates for the resources going to those areas). Also, as Ben noted, people could select multiple causes, and although the ‘normalisation’ accounts for this, it doesn’t change the fact that these figures might include respondents who aren’t solely working on Mental Health or Climate Change, but could be generalists whose work somewhat involved considering these areas.
I’d guess that the labor should be valued at significantly more than $100k per person-year. Your calculation suggests that 64% of EA resources spent are funding and 36% are labour, but given that we’re talent-constrained, I would guess that the labor should be valued at something closer to $400k/y, suggesting a split of 31%/69% between funding and talent, respectively. (Or put differently, I’d guess >20 people pursuing direct work could make >$10 million per year if they tried earning to give, and they’re presumably working on things more valuable than that, so the total should be a lot higher than $200 million.)
Using those figures, the overallocation to global poverty looks less severe, we’re over- rather than underallocating to meta, and the other areas look roughly similar (e.g., there still is a large gap in AI).
Regarding the overallocation to meta, one caveat is that the question was multi-select, and many people who picked that might only do a relatively small amount of meta work, so perhaps we’re allocating the appropriate amount.
Link to spreadsheet
I agree that figure is really uncertain. Another issue is that the mean is driven by the tails.
For that reason, I mostly prefer to look at funding and the percentage of people separately, rather than the combined figure—though I thought I should provide the combined figure as well.
On the specifics:
That seems plausible, though jtbc the relevant reference class is the 7,000 most engaged EAs rather than the people currently doing (or about to start doing) direct work. I think that group might in expectation donate several fold-less than the narrower reference class.
Thanks, agreed!
Thanks a lot for this! Do you know if there is an updated version of this?
This isn’t a direct update (I think something along those lines would be useful) but the most up-to-date things in terms of funding might be:
EA Funding Spreadsheet that’s been floating around updated with 2023 estimates. This shows convincingly, to me, that the heart of EA funding is in global health and development for the benefit of people living now, and not in longtermist/AI risk positions[1]
GWWC donations—between 2020 and 2022 about ~two thirds of donations went to Global Health and Animal Welfare
In terms of community opinions, I think the latest EA Survey is probably the best place to look. But as it’s from 2022, and we’ve just come off EA’s worst ever year, I think a lot will have changed in terms of community opinion, and some people will understandably have walked away.
Reading the OP for the first time in 2024 is interesting. Taking the opinions of the Leader’s Forum to cause area and using that to anchor the ‘ideal’ allocation between cause areas.… hasn’t really aged well, let’s just say that.
I’m not actually taking a stand on the normative question. It’s just bemusing to me that so many EA critics go for the “the money used to go to bed nets, now it’s all goes to AI Safety Research” critique despite the evidence pointing out this isn’t true
What do you mean by the last point/that it hasn’t aged well?
I think it’s probably a topic for it’s own post/dialogue I guess, but I think that the last two years (post ~FTX and fallout and the public beating that EA has suffered and is suffering) that ‘EA Leadership’ broadly defined has lost a lot of trust, and the right to be deferred to. I think arguments for decentralisation/democratisation ala Cremer look stronger with each passing month. Another framing might be that, with MacAskill having to take a step back post FTX until legal matters are more finalised (I assume, please correct me if wrong), that nobody holds the EA ‘mandate of heaven’.[1]
It also especially odd to me that Ben takes >50% of resources (defined as money and people) going towards Longtermism as the lodestar to aim for, instead of “hmm isn’t it weird that this doesn’t match EA funding patterns at all?”, like revealed preferences show a very different picture of what EAs value, see the GWWC donations above or the Donation Election results. And the CURVE sequence seems to be one of the few places where we actually get concrete cost effectiveness numbers for longtermist interventions, looking back I’m not sure how much holds up to scrutiny.[2]
I also have an emotional, personal response that in the aftermath to EA’s annus horribilis that a lot of the ‘EA Leadership’ (which I know is a vague term) has been conspicuous by its absence and not stepping up to take responsibility or provide guidance when times start to get tough, and instead direct the blame toward the “EA Community” (also vaguely defined).[3] But again, that’s just an emotional feeling, I don’t have references for it to hand, and it definitely colours my perspective on this whole thing.
This is an idea I want to explore in a post/discussion. If anyone wants to collaborate let me know.
At least from a ‘this is the top impartial priority’ perspective. I think from a ‘exploring underrated/unknown ideas’ perspective it looks very good, but that’s not what the Leaders were asked in this survey
I thought I recalled a twitter thread from Ben where he was talking about being separate from the EA Community as a good thing, and that most of his friends weren’t EAs, but I couldn’t find it, so maybe I just imagined it or confused it with someone else?
Thanks for writing, and I agree it would be great to see more like this in future.
It does seem like ‘ideal portfolio of resources’ vs ‘ideal split of funds donated this year’ can be quite a bit different—perhaps a question for next time?
(see here for some similar funding estimates)
Yes, I agree. Different worldviews will want to spend a different fraction of their capital each year. So the ideal allocation of capital could be pretty different from the ideal allocation of spending. This is happening to some degree where GiveWell’s neartermist team are spending a larger fraction than the longtermist one.
If lots of the people working on ‘other GCRs’ are working on great power conflict, then the resources on broad longtermism could be higher than the 1% I suggest, but I’d expect it’s still under 3%.
This is really great—would love to see more of these in the future. It also made me reconsider the way I currently allocate across EA funds/charities, mostly by shifting funds away from global health.
I do think that what David Manheim mentioned is a strong argument against shifting EA funds away from global health, but I think it makes sense to shift some of my allocation seeing that this issue is not only less neglected by non-EAs but within EA as well.
I think dollars are much more fungible than careers, so for most people, you should move your donations away from global health if and only if you believe that marginal donations to other charities are more cost-effective. “Neglectedness” is just a herustic, and not a very strong one.
Hmm, that’s fair—crowdedness for giving is different from career path, in that I should be thinking about the marginal impact of a dollar for the former rather than overall field neglectedness.
I think this makes me less certain about my reallocation because I believe very strongly in the cost-effectiveness of global health charities, although I’m also wary that that is not solely due to true cost-effectiveness (due to cost-effectiveness being harder to measure across cause areas) and that most people think that way—hence the funding gap.
My impression is that there’s a lot of funding available for stuff other than global health, but not a lot of great places to spend it at the moment. So finding a charity with a robust theory of change for improving the long-term future and donating there can be very valuable—and starting something like that would be even more valuable! - but I’m less sure about the value of taking money you would spend on bednets and donating the the Long-Term Future Fund (or at least I’d recommend reviewing their past grants first).
Disclaimer: I have a much higher bar for funding long-termist charities than many other EAs.
This is a good point! I actually redirected the funding more towards EA Infrastructure instead of the Long-term fund—partly since my giving acts as diversifying my investments (as I’m investing time in building a career oriented towards more longtermist goals), and partly because my existing donations are much smaller relative to what I’m investing to give later on (and hopefully we have more longtermist charities then).
I really appreciate you highlighting the different implications one could draw out from funding disparities.
What were your impressions for the amount of non-Open Philanthropy funding allocated across each longtermist cause area?