Their ratings (higher = better) for their recommended charities are
Is there a single page with all the scores, or did you check the cost-effectiveness sheet of each recommended charity?
My personal advice would be that I think the EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund is probably the expected value maximizing option, while The Humane League is probably the best option if you’re somewhat risk-averse.
I used to prefer the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) too, but now think THL may well be the best option. It looks like AWF pays to little attention to cost-effectiveness. From Giving What We Can’s evaluation of AWF (emphasis mine):
Fourth, we saw some references to the numbers of animals that could be affected if an intervention went well, but we didn’t see any attempt at back-of-the-envelope calculations to get a rough sense of the cost-effectiveness of a grant, nor any direct comparison across grants to calibrate scoring. We appreciate it won’t be possible to come up with useful quantitative estimates and comparisons in all or even most cases, especially given the limited time fund managers have to review applications, but we think there were cases among the grants we reviewed where this was possible (both quantifying and comparing to a benchmark) — including one case in which the applicant provided a cost-effectiveness analysis themselves, but this wasn’t then considered by the PI in their main reasoning for the grant.
I checked the pages for each charity to get the scores.
I agree that AWF doesn’t directly evaluate cost-effectiveness, but I still think there’s a good chance they’re likely to be the EV maximizing option over THL. THL estimates that it costs them $2.63 to move a hen from a conventional to a cage-free system, or about 0.57 yr/$ given a 1.5-year lifespan. Last year, Emily Oehlsen from Open Phil said “We think that the marginal [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis.” Saulius’s 2019 analysis estimated that corporate campaigns pre-2019 impacted 41 chicken-years per dollar, so at a 5x reduction that’s 8.2 yr/$. I don’t want to take Emily’s numbers too literally, but that implies a >10x gap between the cost effectiveness values of OP’s marginal funding opportunity and THL. Since I’d expect AWF’s opportunities to look somewhat similar to OP’s, that leads me to guess that they’re likely to be on net more cost-effective than THL. This directionally agrees with some of the comments by insiders such as @James Özden on the GWWC evaluations thread as well. But I’d be very curious to hear more from folks who are more plugged in, this is just an outsider’s guess.
For what it’s worth, I do actually give to both AWF and THL, but give much more to AWF.
Interesting! Open Philanthropy (OP) granted 8.3 M$ to THL in 2023, and Animal Charity Evaluators’ 2023 review of THL mentioned a funding gap for 2024 and 2025 of 10.5 M$. So I assume OP’s last $ going to THL each year is either at or above OP’s cost-effectiveness bar (it could be above because OP may not want to provide more than a certain fraction of the total funding of THL). However, in this case, I do not understand why the cost-effectiveness implied by Emily’s statement differs from THL’s estimate. @Martin Gould or @EmmaTheresa may have thoughts on this.
I clicked on the link over “just $2.63 to spare a hen” on the page from THL you linked, but it is broken[1].
I sent an email to info@thehumaneleague.org informing THL about it, and asking them if they could share how they obtained their cost-effectiveness estimate.
Please don’t treat cost-effectiveness estimates as such an exact science. There are so many subjective choices you make in them. For example, you could say that cage-free campaigns speed up changes by 5 years, or 50 years. Both choices are defensible but the result will be 10 times different just based on this choice alone.
It’s impossible to tell without seeing the THL’s estimate, but they probably were conservative when estimating their cost-effectiveness. It’s what I would do if I was doing such estimate for THL. $2.63 per hen impacted is already high enough for most people to want to donate. Maybe it’s even better because it’s more believable. And if they make it less conservative, someone might criticize them. In any case, THL took down the $2.63 estimate, so that’s a strong reason not to treat it seriously.
Thanks for the context, MHR.
Is there a single page with all the scores, or did you check the cost-effectiveness sheet of each recommended charity?
I used to prefer the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) too, but now think THL may well be the best option. It looks like AWF pays to little attention to cost-effectiveness. From Giving What We Can’s evaluation of AWF (emphasis mine):
Thanks Vasco!
I checked the pages for each charity to get the scores.
I agree that AWF doesn’t directly evaluate cost-effectiveness, but I still think there’s a good chance they’re likely to be the EV maximizing option over THL. THL estimates that it costs them $2.63 to move a hen from a conventional to a cage-free system, or about 0.57 yr/$ given a 1.5-year lifespan. Last year, Emily Oehlsen from Open Phil said “We think that the marginal [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis.” Saulius’s 2019 analysis estimated that corporate campaigns pre-2019 impacted 41 chicken-years per dollar, so at a 5x reduction that’s 8.2 yr/$. I don’t want to take Emily’s numbers too literally, but that implies a >10x gap between the cost effectiveness values of OP’s marginal funding opportunity and THL. Since I’d expect AWF’s opportunities to look somewhat similar to OP’s, that leads me to guess that they’re likely to be on net more cost-effective than THL. This directionally agrees with some of the comments by insiders such as @James Özden on the GWWC evaluations thread as well. But I’d be very curious to hear more from folks who are more plugged in, this is just an outsider’s guess.
For what it’s worth, I do actually give to both AWF and THL, but give much more to AWF.
Interesting! Open Philanthropy (OP) granted 8.3 M$ to THL in 2023, and Animal Charity Evaluators’ 2023 review of THL mentioned a funding gap for 2024 and 2025 of 10.5 M$. So I assume OP’s last $ going to THL each year is either at or above OP’s cost-effectiveness bar (it could be above because OP may not want to provide more than a certain fraction of the total funding of THL). However, in this case, I do not understand why the cost-effectiveness implied by Emily’s statement differs from THL’s estimate. @Martin Gould or @EmmaTheresa may have thoughts on this.
I clicked on the link over “just $2.63 to spare a hen” on the page from THL you linked, but it is broken[1].
I sent an email to info@thehumaneleague.org informing THL about it, and asking them if they could share how they obtained their cost-effectiveness estimate.
Please don’t treat cost-effectiveness estimates as such an exact science. There are so many subjective choices you make in them. For example, you could say that cage-free campaigns speed up changes by 5 years, or 50 years. Both choices are defensible but the result will be 10 times different just based on this choice alone.
It’s impossible to tell without seeing the THL’s estimate, but they probably were conservative when estimating their cost-effectiveness. It’s what I would do if I was doing such estimate for THL. $2.63 per hen impacted is already high enough for most people to want to donate. Maybe it’s even better because it’s more believable. And if they make it less conservative, someone might criticize them. In any case, THL took down the $2.63 estimate, so that’s a strong reason not to treat it seriously.
Yeah this is a really good point, I have no idea how to square the numbers with big grants from OP to THL