I was going through Animal Charity Evaluatorsâ reasoning behind which countries to prioritize (https://ââanimalcharityevaluators.org/ââcharity-review/ââthe-humane-league/ââ#prioritizing-countries) and I notice they judge countries with a higher GNI per capita as more tractable. This goes against my intuition, because my guess is your money goes further in countries that are poorer. And also because Iâve heard animal rights work in Latin America and Asia is more cost-effective nowadays. Does anyone have any hypotheses/ââarguments? This quick take isnât meant as criticism, Iâm just informing myself as Iâm trying to choose an animal welfare org to fundraise for this week (small, low stakes).
When I have more time Iâd be happy to do more research and contact ACE myself with these questions, but right now Iâm just looking for some quick thoughts.
Hey Jeroen! Iâm a researcher at ACE and have been doing some work on our country prioritization model. This is a helpful question and one that weâve been thinking about ourselves.
The general argument is that strong economic performance tends to correlate with liberalism, democracy, and progressive values, which themselves seem to correlate with progressive attitudes towards, and legislation for, animals. This is why itâs included in Mercy For Animalsâ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI), which we previously used for our evaluations and which our current country prioritization model is still loosely based on.
The relevance of this factor depends on the type of intervention being usedâe.g., economic performance is likely to be particularly relevant for programs that depend on securing large amounts of government funding. For a lot of programs it wonât be very relevant, and for some a similar but more relevant indicator of tractability could be the percentage of income not spent on food (which we also use), as countries are probably more likely to allocate resources to animal advocacy if their money and mental bandwidth arenât spent on securing essential needs. (Because of these kinds of considerations, this year we took a more bespoke approach when considering the likely tractability of each charityâs work, relying less on the quantitative outputs of the country prioritization framework.)
Your intuition about money going further in poorer countries (everything else being equal) makes sense. We seek to capture this where possible on a charity-by-charity basis in our Cost-Effectiveness Assessments. For country prioritization more broadly, in theory itâs possible to account for this using indices like the OECDâs Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) Index. Various issues have been raised with the validity of PPP measurements (some examples here), which is one of the reasons we havenât included it to date in our prioritization model, but for next year we plan to explore those issues in more detail and what the trade-offs are.
Glad this question-and-answer happened! A meta note that sometimes people post questions aimed at an organization but donât flag it to the actual org. I think itâs a good practice to flag questions to the org, otherwise you risk: - someone not at the org answers the question, often with information thatâs incorrect or out of date - the org never sees the question and looks out-of-touch for not answeringâ comms staff at the org feel they need to comb public spaces for questions and comments about them, lest they look like theyâre ignoring people
(This doesnât mean you canât ask questions in public places, but email the org sending them the link!)
Thanks for pointing this out! I wasnât really sure where my question fell on the axis of âgeneral EA animal welfare knowledgeâ (ex. prioritizing chickens > cows) to âspecific detail about how ACE evaluates charitiesâ. By posting a quick take on the forum, I was hoping it was closer to the former, that I was just missing something obvious and that ACE wouldnât even have to be bothered. I shouldnât have overlooked the possibility that it might be more complicated!
I was going through Animal Charity Evaluatorsâ reasoning behind which countries to prioritize (https://ââanimalcharityevaluators.org/ââcharity-review/ââthe-humane-league/ââ#prioritizing-countries) and I notice they judge countries with a higher GNI per capita as more tractable. This goes against my intuition, because my guess is your money goes further in countries that are poorer. And also because Iâve heard animal rights work in Latin America and Asia is more cost-effective nowadays. Does anyone have any hypotheses/ââarguments? This quick take isnât meant as criticism, Iâm just informing myself as Iâm trying to choose an animal welfare org to fundraise for this week (small, low stakes).
When I have more time Iâd be happy to do more research and contact ACE myself with these questions, but right now Iâm just looking for some quick thoughts.
Hey Jeroen! Iâm a researcher at ACE and have been doing some work on our country prioritization model. This is a helpful question and one that weâve been thinking about ourselves.
The general argument is that strong economic performance tends to correlate with liberalism, democracy, and progressive values, which themselves seem to correlate with progressive attitudes towards, and legislation for, animals. This is why itâs included in Mercy For Animalsâ Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI), which we previously used for our evaluations and which our current country prioritization model is still loosely based on.
The relevance of this factor depends on the type of intervention being usedâe.g., economic performance is likely to be particularly relevant for programs that depend on securing large amounts of government funding. For a lot of programs it wonât be very relevant, and for some a similar but more relevant indicator of tractability could be the percentage of income not spent on food (which we also use), as countries are probably more likely to allocate resources to animal advocacy if their money and mental bandwidth arenât spent on securing essential needs. (Because of these kinds of considerations, this year we took a more bespoke approach when considering the likely tractability of each charityâs work, relying less on the quantitative outputs of the country prioritization framework.)
Your intuition about money going further in poorer countries (everything else being equal) makes sense. We seek to capture this where possible on a charity-by-charity basis in our Cost-Effectiveness Assessments. For country prioritization more broadly, in theory itâs possible to account for this using indices like the OECDâs Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) Index. Various issues have been raised with the validity of PPP measurements (some examples here), which is one of the reasons we havenât included it to date in our prioritization model, but for next year we plan to explore those issues in more detail and what the trade-offs are.
Hope that helps!
Thank you so much for this elaborate and insightful response, Max! I understand the argument much better now.
Glad this question-and-answer happened!
A meta note that sometimes people post questions aimed at an organization but donât flag it to the actual org. I think itâs a good practice to flag questions to the org, otherwise you risk:
- someone not at the org answers the question, often with information thatâs incorrect or out of date
- the org never sees the question and looks out-of-touch for not answeringâ
comms staff at the org feel they need to comb public spaces for questions and comments about them, lest they look like theyâre ignoring people
(This doesnât mean you canât ask questions in public places, but email the org sending them the link!)
Thanks for pointing this out! I wasnât really sure where my question fell on the axis of âgeneral EA animal welfare knowledgeâ (ex. prioritizing chickens > cows) to âspecific detail about how ACE evaluates charitiesâ. By posting a quick take on the forum, I was hoping it was closer to the former, that I was just missing something obvious and that ACE wouldnât even have to be bothered. I shouldnât have overlooked the possibility that it might be more complicated!