In charge of several nonprofit campaigns #WoDEF #EndOfSpeciesism and organizer of Les Estivales de la question animale 🏳️🌈
Mata'i Souchon
Karma: 60
Hi Vasco,
I find it worthwhile to try to illustrate counterfactual reasoning and expected value calculations in the various decisions one may have to make. Thanks for this post! I have comments on the figures in two places:
A freelance math tutor of high school students was 10.0 k$ (= (0 + 10.0)*10^3). I got this adding:
0 from direct work, as I guessed the impact from donations to be way larger.
10.0 k$ from donations. I calculated this from the difference between:
The net salary of 10.0 k$ (= 15.0*10^3*(1 − 0.33)). I assumed a gross salary of 15.0 k$ (= 1*10^3*15), which is 1 k hours times 15 $/h, as guessed by me having a quick look into what people listed on Superprof charge in my area, and a 33 % (= 0.22 + 0.11) reduction due to income tax and social security in Portugal. In hindsight, I should probably have assumed less than 1 k hours per year of work.
10 k$, which was my rough guess for my annual expenditure excluding donations.
How can you make $10k in donations as a math tutor if your net salary is $10k and your annual expenses excluding donations are also $10k?
A fund manager at the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF) was 211 k$ (= (186 + 25.2)*10^3). I got this adding:
186 k$ (= 930*10^3*0.2) from direct work. I calculated this multiplying:
930 k$ (= (555 + 375)*10^3) granted in 2024 to help wild animals and shrimp in 2024.
Annual impact relative to the 2nd best hire equivalent to moving 20 % of the above per year to SWP.
25.2 k$ (= (35.2 − 10)*10^3) from donations (assuming the impact of my donations would be much larger than those of the 2nd best hire because they would not donate much to helping shrimp or wild animals).
Unless we accept double counting (donors who clicked on the GWWC site to donate $930k claim $930k of impact, then GWWC claims to have generated this $930k of value (thanks to $31,000 in donations for their operations, given their giving multiplier of 30x, so that the GWWC donors who provided the $31k also claim $930k of impact), then AWF claims $930k of impact, then the grantees claim $930k of impact), it seems to me that the counterfactual impact actually resulting from the direct work of a fund manager is much lower. I would tend to consider that the bulk of the impact is at the level of the organization that carries out the work useful to the animals and at the level of its funders. For example, for $930k spent by a selection of nonprofits to help shrimps ($930k total impact), I would imagine a distribution along the lines of:
60% specific to grantee nonprofits (if they didn’t exist, the initial donors as well as AWF would give much less money due to lack of cost-effective impact opportunities, and much fewer animals would ultimately be helped),
30% specific to AWF donors (if they did not exist, AWF and the charities would do their best to find donors, but would still get less money because it is not easy to create new donors for wild animals),
10% specific to the work of AWF (if they did not exist, the EA-oriented donors who fund the work on shrimp would be a little less successful in identifying good impact opportunities, although they could count on other funds or evaluators, and the charities would be a little less successful in their fundraising, because they would seek funds from funders who do not recognize so well the high value of their work in comparison with shelters for example).
So we would have $93k of impact actually attributed to AWF as a whole, and then we would have to look at how it is distributed among the work of the different people who make the existence of the fund possible (the original founders, even if they are no longer there, because the fund might not exist if they had not been there; the thinkers who influenced their ideas—because they probably would never have done that if they hadn’t come across EA literature; the various people involved in managing the fund, etc.).
Then if we assume that the fund manager position is responsible for 30% of AWF’s impact (which seems very optimistic to me), we arrive at an impact of $27,900.
Finally, we still need to apply your 20% ratio (which seems high to me given how this kind of position is likely to attract very similar qualified profiles) to get the counterfactual impact of the person who occupies the position compared to the next candidate, and we arrive at a specific individual impact of $5,580 (97% less than your estimate).
Obviously, my percentages depend on how much we think the movement is constrained relatively by the lack of effective interventions vs. the lack of donors vs. the lack of funds vs. the lack of talented fund managers within the funds, etc., but I think you see my point.
I find this article very well written and respectful of the opposite point of view. However, it seems to me that it does not sufficiently analyze the vision that supports the “drop the assured scheme” claim.
Consumers in rich countries have a choice in the supermarket between animal products from the worst farms, animal products from certified farms that are a little less worse, and plant-based products that completely resolve the issue of suffering.
Among consumers as a whole, some still buy the worst products for price reasons, and will only turn away from them when they are no longer on the market. Others, with a more or less pronounced ethical or ecological conscience, want to spend a little more money to buy a product that doesn’t harm (or doesn’t harm too much) animals.
The question then is how to convince these consumers to turn away from the worst products, and here opinions differ:
Some think that an excellent solution would be to ensure that for every animal product produced using the worst practices, there is an animal product labeled by an animal advocacy organization, which avoids the worst practices. They feel that getting consumers to turn away from the meat aisle altogether and seek out the plant-based alternative instead is too difficult an objective, and one that has already failed (organizations have been promoting veganism for some time, and it remains an ultra-minority practice). They believe that the counterfactual scenario in which the animalist label would be dropped is one in which consumers would shift to even worse products, with less demanding certifications, and that the impact of such a decision would be net negative.
Others believe that the most effective way to help animals is rather to convey a simple, clear message, encouraging the purchase of plant-based alternatives only (even if the step seems higher for reasons of price and taste quality), leaving all animal products in the same “don’t buy” basket. They point out that the industry is very good at humanewashing, and that by creating false labels that give the illusion of quality, the message to consumers becomes too complex (“buy labelled meat, but remember that one label is a scam and another a real improvement”). Above all, in this skeptical perspective on labels, there is a crucial concern to attack the very idea of ethical meat, and to ensure that no animal product benefits from positive qualifications on its label (“humane”, “assured” by an animal advocacy organization, “free-range”...), to maximize the chances that consumers will buy plant-based alternatives (which, on the other hand, benefit from assumed positive communication). In the end, the counterfactual scenario of the proponents of this position does not consist of simply doing away with the animalist label and then sitting back while consumers redirect themselves to less demanding labels. It’s about directing as many of our resources as possible towards communicating to consumers in a way that unambiguously encourages them to turn away from animal products altogether.
I find that the article doesn’t really address this fundamental difference in strategic views, and that by simply stating at the outset that the RSPCA Assured label “certifies animal products as being less cruelly produced”, it fails to recognize that this is probably not what consumers understand. The logo printed on products doesn’t say “less cruelly produced”, it just says “RSPCA Assured”. I think the spontaneous intuition that 99% of people must have here when they have no prior knowledge of the subject, is that if an animal welfare organization gives a certification for the product, it’s validating that buying it is ethical. In fact, on the label’s website, the page explaining the meaning of the logo (https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/about-us/the-rspca-assured-logo/ ) reads:
The RSPCA Assured label is the RSPCA’s ethical farm animal welfare assurance label. The label tells you that a product has come from suppliers that have been assessed by the RSPCA’s independent assurance provider to check they meet the RSPCA’s strict standards of welfare for farmed animals.
The RSPCA Assured label on products makes it easy to spot products from animals that had a better life so you can feel confident about your choice.
This public formulation is clearly more positive and less realistic than the “less cruelly produced” formula presented in the article to define the label.
Finally, it seems to me incomplete to describe this campaign by Animal Rising and Peta as “infighting”. This campaign against the RSPCA Assured label is not simply directed at the RSPCA. It is also (and perhaps above all) aimed at the public, with posters in public places advising people to go to welfarewashing.org, which has two calls to action: ask the RSPCA to drop its logo, and sign up to a vegan challenge.
What’s the point of such a public campaign? One hypothesis is that by attacking the most demanding label and showing that animals endure severe suffering even in farms and slaughterhouses benefiting from the best possible label, they intend to make a striking demonstration that ethical meat doesn’t exist. This sends a clear message to ethically-minded consumers: if you want to make an ethical purchase, you can’t rely on labelled animal products. You have no alternative but to turn away from animal products altogether.
I think the question is whether this strategy is more or less effective than labeling the least bad animal products, and the answer doesn’t seem obvious to me at first.
I’m also leaning towards thinking of the movement’s objectives in terms of “reducing as much animal suffering as possible” rather than “ending factory farming”. That said, I’m more hesitant about what you draw from this distinction, concerning the more or less reasonable levels of ambition we might want to aim for.
When I hear animal sanctuary managers criticize effective altruism and justify their appeals for donations by explaining that “each one counts”, I’m hardly convinced: sure, every animal saved is a victory, but is it really the best we can do with these donations? It seems doubtful, given the derisory impact compared to the scale of the problem.
I find myself raising a similar objection here to the question of how ambitious we should be. Definitely, “If only 30% of the companies fail to meet their cage-free goals because of our work, instead of 60%, that is a win to celebrate.”, but is that really the best we can do with the money we spend? Maybe it is, yes. But the low impact relative to the scale of the problem still makes me wonder if we can’t do better than that, by looking for other ideas for even more cost-effective interventions, including those directed towards a longer-term impact, which seek to take us towards a society where we’ve reduced suffering so much that there’s no more factory farming (or even no more farming at all, or where we actively seek to take animals’ preferences into account beyond the simple avoidance of suffering). And it seems to me that this questioning stems from the very principles of EA: to seek an ambitious impact, without stopping at what we’ve already tried so far, even if it didn’t seem so bad.
The harsh reality for funders and project leaders is that it’s excruciatingly difficult to predict what might have the greatest impact in reducing suffering, even if only on the scale of a few decades. Could redirecting all the money devoted to corporate campaigns towards a patient effort of cultural influence through elite education and lobbying to spread antispeciesist values reduce suffering much more dramatically on the scale of a few decades, with greater cost-effectiveness? The uncertainty is so large that I have the impression that we’re tipping over into a debate of confronting more or less optimistic intuitions, in which it’s really difficult to reach firm conclusions.
Therefore, I find it hard to be convinced by the passage where you emphasize your doubts about interventions aimed at long-term abolition (“The hope of ending factory farming is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which I think are often a poor use of resources compared to other interventions.”). It seems to me that one could say something quite similar based on the same uncertainties: the hope of reducing suffering in the short term is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which may be a poor use of resources compared to other interventions (which aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but over a longer period of time).
Since in the end, we still have to choose which interventions to fund or engage in, I believe it’s best to recognize that these choices are based on intuitions, and to make them explicit (while trying to assess their relevance): do I have the intuition to be risk-averse and focus on interventions whose impact can be measured in the short term? Or am I prepared to risk allocating fewer resources to avoiding hours of intense suffering for today’s hens, in order to fund projects that aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but on a century-long scale, and with an expected value that becomes absurd to calculate, as it can both hit the ceiling or turn out to be negative? Do I have a hunch that we should choose our battles using RP’s moral weights, or am I having trouble with the postulates on which their calculations are based? Etc.
In this respect, I find it interesting to move forward in this debate by asking:
- How each of us goes about approximating the probability of finding interventions that would be so effective in reducing suffering as to bring about the end of factory farming in, say, 50 years’ time?
- How does one go about assessing what does or does not constitute a “poor use of resources”?
Thanks for this post!
Organisations would be forced to make significant cuts in their staff and reduce salaries, impacting their ability to achieve programme goals, and retain and attract the talent it so desperately needs.
I witnessed this kind of consequence first-hand in one of the organizations I work for, when funding of around $20k that ACE had been giving us annually for 4 years was not renewed.
On an organization-wide scale, one solution would have been to make a greater effort to diversify our funding. The obstacle to this is that funders tend to want to allocate their donations to the project itself, and not to diversification fundraising efforts. What’s more, as funding is scarce and competitive, the amounts allocated are frequently lower than the amounts requested, which means that we can barely afford to run the project, and not actually develop the overall capacity of the organization to fundraise.
So we find ourselves relying on the same funder(s) every year, with no time to look for new ones. When we asked ACE if they would be willing to support us in our fundraising diversification efforts, we were told that they generally consider it a “risk strategy” (without ruling it out). I can hear that, but I still think it’s essential for the future of the movement to diversify its funding sources to avoid the pitfalls you describe so well in your post.
Perhaps the current funders of EAA, aware of their monopolistic position, should agree to bet more on this “risk strategy” by explicitly and publicly expressing their interest in funding monitoring, evaluation and fundraising positions in grantee organizations?
Thank you for these interesting insights!
As a worker in community building for animal welfare, I concur with this observation:
Social conditions are not very favourable for animal advocacy at this point in time: Let’s leave the numerical estimates for a while and look at the state of the “movement”. It is rare to see continuous gatherings with waves of people advocating for animal welfare. Protests for farmed animals gather at best a hundred people or slightly more. Usually, there are only ten or so people—and some of them are the paid staff members of the organisations, and some of them are EA conference attendants
That said, I think a main question is whether this can be overcome (and at what cost). My perception is that we’ve barely tried to massify the movement and bring about a cultural change in society: for the moment, the bulk of funding has gone towards lobbying efforts targeting companies and politicians, but not so much towards the general public. I sometimes dream of seeing Open Phil publish a call for projects for efforts of this kind, with significant funding at stake: then perhaps we could start to see to what extent these social and cultural conditions are immutable or not.
On average, respondents allocated the following shares to each cause: Global Health and Development (29.7%), AI Risks (23.2%), Farm Animal Welfare (FAW) (18.7%), Other x-risks (16.0%), Wild Animal Welfare (5.1%), and Other causes (7.3%).
In the traditional breakdown used in EA, the animal cause is split into two (Farm Animal Welfare and Wild Animal Welfare), but if we consider the two together, it appears that concern for animals actually reaches 23.8%, ahead of AI-related risks (23.2%).
I’m rather surprised by this result, as it is quite different from the funding breakdown.
Well, I structured my comment by discussing the problem of double counting on the $930k amount and then talking about the impact of the position (20% of the $930k), but in fact it might have been clearer if I had proceeded the other way around (commenting directly on your figure of $186k of “value”).
If I understand your post correctly, you are saying that by being recruited as fund manager for AWF, you will direct $186k to SWP, whereas if you are not recruited, the next candidate will allocate these funds to other interventions whose impact is comparatively negligible, so that the value of your work for 1 year in this position will be 186-0 = $186k.
The point on which I am unsure is that by attributing all the funds moved to the value of your work in this role, I suspect there is double counting, because I fear that:
you would end up saying, “By working at AWF for a year, I have moved $186k towards much more effective interventions than before, so the direct impact of my work for animals has been $186k (without me, this money would not have been moved),”
and meanwhile, SWP would say, “This year, we spent an additional $186k on animals, so the direct impact of our work on animals has increased by $186k (without us, this money would have helped far fewer shrimps, if any at all),”
and furthermore, GWWC would say, “This year again, we found donors who enabled $186k to go to AWF and then to SWP, which cost us $6,200 for a value of $186k (without us, these donations would not have been made),”
a GWWC donor would say, “This year again, I donated $6,200 to GWWC, which allowed $186k to go to SWP (without me, these donations would not have been made),”
some AWF donors would say “This year, we collectively donated $186k to AWF on the GWWC site, and that money ended up in SWP’s account (without us, they wouldn’t have had that money)”.
This does not necessarily invalidate the conclusions of this section of your post (the ranking of the various positions in terms of direct impact of the work would be unchanged).
In fact, I would have had no objection to this section if you had avoided talking about “value” and only talked about “amounts moved to SWP”, instead of presenting these terms as equivalent.
Where it may become more debatable is when you sum these redirected amounts with the amounts of donations you make thanks to salaries that are higher than your living expenses, as if in both cases they were “values” that could be added together in the same calculation. Following this logic, $100 redirected to SWP because of your direct work + $100 that you yourself donate to SWP = $200 of value.
However, at this stage of my reflection, it seems to me that to avoid any double counting, we would need to break down the responsibilities of the various actors in the final impact for each of the two terms of the sum:
Let’s consider the $100 redirected to SWP. Using the assumptions from my previous comment regarding the distribution of responsibilities among the various actors in the production of the final value, we can attribute $60 of specific value (i.e. without double counting) to SWP, $30 of specific value to AWF donors and $10 of specific value to AWF (including $3 of value specifically produced by the fund manager and $7 of value specifically produced by other employees).
Now let’s consider the $100 that you donate directly to SWP, without an intermediary (I then assume 60% responsibility of SWP in the final impact and 40% responsibility of the donor in the final impact). Your donation produces $40 of value.
The overall value produced by your work in this position, specifically attributable to you, is therefore 3+40 = $43, which is very different from the sum 100+100 = $200.
What do you think?