Over the next few weeks, the Centre for Effective Altruism will be reaching out to the community to raise funds to support our next year of work.
So far, more than 300 effective altruists have contributed to CEA. If it were not for your help, we would not have been able to create a community of effective givers who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to charity, guide hundreds of graduates into careers that make a difference, advise policy-makers around the world on effective policy, or support the effective altruist movement through events like EA Global. Now we need your continued support to help us build on that work. You can find much more detail in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
As a whole, CEA is committed to making sure that effective altruist ideas reach their potential to shape the world's future for the better. Each of the parts of CEA addresses a different component of that challenge.
- Giving What We Can supports effective donation to charity
- 80,000 Hours helps people lead effective altruist careers
- EA Outreach enables the effective altruist community to grow healthily
- Global Priorities Project helps policy-makers apply EA ideas in their work
Supporting all of this is our operations team which delivers shared services that let each project focus on delivering their core objectives.
Each part of CEA will be raising more this winter to help us hire great people, cover our costs for the year ahead, and make our existing work better and bigger.
- Giving What We Can aims to raise £475,000 and still needs £282,000 to reach that goal.
- 80,000 Hours aims to raise £220,000 and still needs £48,000 to reach that goal.
- EA Outreach aims to raise £474,000 and still needs £274,000 to reach that goal.
- Global Priorities Project aims to raise £300,000 and still needs £160,000 to reach that goal.
- CEA shared services aim to raise £200,000 and still need £150,000 to reach that goal.
Each organisation will be communicating more about their plans and funding needs. You can find an overview of all of our work in the 2015 CEA Winter Prospectus.
I'm happy to answer any of your questions here. You can find details on how to donate here. You can also contact us to discuss donations. You can contact any of the project leaders directly using the details available in our prospectus.
It's a good question, and one that we ask ourselves a lot. If we thought we were worse than AMF and that wasn't likely to change, we would close up shop. I am fairly confident that we produce more value than AMF, partly because our activities raise more for AMF than they take away. However, I think it's right to be uncertain about this and Owen makes some good points.
In addition, I think most of the value of CEA's activities comes from long term potential of our projects and EA as a whole - as Ben discusses here.
Our positive effect on AMF is clearest at Giving What We Can which has a return of roughly 100:1 in high-value donations (counterfactually adjusted and time-discounted, but not all to AMF). Even if you assume that not a single member of GWWC gives another penny ever, the ratio is still 5:1. It is unclear if the marginal return on a donation to GWWC is higher or lower than the average return. It would be higher if we thought that GWWC could still realise increasing economies of scale. It would be lower if we thought most of the value comes from the idea itself and not execution on it. I tend to think marginal funds are more effective than average funds, but I'm very uncertain. A fuller discussion is here (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/ql/giving_what_we_can_needs_your_help_this_christmas/)
At 80k, the metrics are less directly comparable. At the last review we estimated it cost £1,670 to achieve a significant plan change (and these costs have been coming down every review cycle, indicating we are getting more cost-effective). It's unclear how much each plan change is worth - but it seems very likely that getting someone to earn-to-give or move to do valuable direct work will be worth far more than £1,670 to AMF even within one year.
GPP impact is extremely hard to estimate because idea change and policy-work are chaotic and complex. In order to get a lower bound, we can focus on just one policy that we advocated which was successfully implemented - increasing the research budget for treatment and vaccines for malaria, TB, and NTDs and pandemic prevention by £2.5bn over 5 years. If our calculations are correct this move was worth $1.5bn-$30bn in donations to AMF. Even if we are only responsible for a very small part of this, it isn't hard to imagine our 2015 budget outperformed a donation to AMF. (See discussion here http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2015/12/new-uk-aid-strategy-prioritising-research-and-crisis-response/)
EA Outreach is probably hardest to compare directly against AMF-type charities because much of our estimate of its value depends on the fact that we think effective altruism and its ideas have huge upside potential. Any attempt to calculate the direct impact within the first year of its running in terms of money to AMF would short-change the value of the work.
Because most of the money that goes to CEA has a huge counterfactual positive impact on funding for AMF, I'm quite confident in recommending giving to CEA.
With respect to your question about growth in costs - I think Owen has some good thoughts here. It seems, however, that the unit costs of CEA outputs are stable or decreasing so the growth in costs represents expanding outputs rather than decreasing marginal returns.
That's precisely what's at issue. For one I don't find it all convincing, having talked with people who have been experienced with the organisation. And prima facie it's implausibly profitable. So it needs more justification than the prospectus gives.