Great follow up and love the clear, concise writing! That graph of cage free percent eggs is incredible, from 5% in 2015 to 40% - this must be one of the biggest 10 year changes in farming practises on record? What an incredible achievement. Going to share it with a bunch of people.
Maybe a weird question but what percent of that do you think EA funding/work might be responsible for? More like 1%? 10%? 20%?
Thinking about it for 5 minutes from a global perspective,[1] EA funding would be >85% responsible. It’s hard to say what “work” means here, but most of the strategy was created by The Humane League,[2] not effective altruism.
But counterfactuals here are hard, people who pushed for this could maybe find new donors, but back then animal advocacy wasn’t too excited about cage-free work. So it could take some effort to find funding and most of the current funding would definitely not be found. A good way to think about it is that if Open Philanthropy disappeared now I think there would be no one to step in and fill the gap. And this despite it being 2025 and despite how tractable we now know this work is.
I agree in the large change in a short amount of time. Small thing, my colleagues at THL recently wrote a blog on an update on USDA numbers which slightly changed the data.
I don’t know! But from putting some things together, to me it doesn’t seem clearly related to EA funding? It seems to me that the first cage-free funding from OP was a million dollars to THL in Feb. 2016. So, there were many fast food commitments before that. Many grocery commitments happened that month and in the next couple months: February—Target, Trader Joe’s, Ahold March—Safeway, Kroger, Delhaize, Save a lot, Aldi April—Walmart June—Grocery Outlet July—Publix Someone else would have to say if those were due to changes from the new funding..?
As for quick changes in farming, I think of factory farming as developing pretty fast, but I don’t know much about the history! I feel like there’s gotta be some other practice that went from 0 to > 50% in less than a decade somewhere at some point :P Thanks again!
Great follow up and love the clear, concise writing! That graph of cage free percent eggs is incredible, from 5% in 2015 to 40% - this must be one of the biggest 10 year changes in farming practises on record? What an incredible achievement. Going to share it with a bunch of people.
Maybe a weird question but what percent of that do you think EA funding/work might be responsible for? More like 1%? 10%? 20%?
Thinking about it for 5 minutes from a global perspective,[1] EA funding would be >85% responsible. It’s hard to say what “work” means here, but most of the strategy was created by The Humane League,[2] not effective altruism.
But counterfactuals here are hard, people who pushed for this could maybe find new donors, but back then animal advocacy wasn’t too excited about cage-free work. So it could take some effort to find funding and most of the current funding would definitely not be found. A good way to think about it is that if Open Philanthropy disappeared now I think there would be no one to step in and fill the gap. And this despite it being 2025 and despite how tractable we now know this work is.
In my very personal take, EA was crucial for modern animal advocacy to achieve what it achieved. I wrote more about it here—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GCaRhu84NuCdBiRz8/ea-s-success-no-one-cares-about
Note that I may be not answering your question, because I think you are asking specifically about USA.
Although, to be fair, in early 2000s similar approach was applied in policymaking in Austria by Martin Balluch.
I agree in the large change in a short amount of time. Small thing, my colleagues at THL recently wrote a blog on an update on USDA numbers which slightly changed the data.
Edit (forgot to add the link)
And I agree with Jakub’s take.
Thank you so much!
I don’t know! But from putting some things together, to me it doesn’t seem clearly related to EA funding?
It seems to me that the first cage-free funding from OP was a million dollars to THL in Feb. 2016. So, there were many fast food commitments before that. Many grocery commitments happened that month and in the next couple months:
February—Target, Trader Joe’s, Ahold
March—Safeway, Kroger, Delhaize, Save a lot, Aldi
April—Walmart
June—Grocery Outlet
July—Publix
Someone else would have to say if those were due to changes from the new funding..?
As for quick changes in farming, I think of factory farming as developing pretty fast, but I don’t know much about the history! I feel like there’s gotta be some other practice that went from 0 to > 50% in less than a decade somewhere at some point :P Thanks again!