My estimation of the cost-effectiveness of rescuing a broiler had an error which I have now corrected. I was assuming the rescue would not change the lifespan of the broiler, but it would live longer in a sanctuary. Assuming 7.5 years (see 1st footnote above), corporate campaigns are just hundreds of times as cost-effective as the rescue (instead of thousands).

Thanks for the follow-up!

We already have more jobs in absolute numbers in Global Health & Development - as this is a major area of focus for us and for a large portion of our audience.

I wonder whether 80 k would be open to adding the positions in global health and development which they are missing and you are listing. I have also noticed AAC's job board has around 83 positions listed, which is more than the 51 in 80 k's board, so I have encouraged them to consider adding the missing positions.

Fair. I was not clear above, but, by "in the same way that one can currently activate a feature to hide the names of users", I meant that karma could be invisible by defaul if the feature is activated, but then show up once one hovers over the karma placeholder.

Thanks for the update!

Help people find more promising job opportunities, including in cause areas that aren’t as thoroughly covered by other impact-focused boards such as 80,000 Hours and Animal Advocacy Careers.

Could you elaborate on which opportunities would be on your board, but not on 80,000 Hours' or Animal Advocacy Careers'? 80,000 Hours has opportunities in many areas in their job board. Do you think they would not be open to including the ones you think they are missing? For reference, here are the opportunities they are currently listing by area:

Great analysis, Hauke! Strongly upvoted.

One note. Higher real GDP per capita is associated with greater human welfare as you point out, but I think the impact on animal welfare is unclear due to the meat eater problem. I believe boosting economic growth leads to more animal suffering nearterm, as there is a correlation between meat supply per capita and real GDP per capita:

I suspect boosting economic growth decreases animal suffering longterm via making it peak earlier, and therefore decrease faster. Relatedly, many countries have decoupled economic growth from CO2 emissions.

However, I think greater economic growth would lead to a greater relative decrease in the cost-effectiveness of human welfare interventions than in that of animal welfare interventions. Humans currently prioritise human welfare over animal welfare, so increases in purchasing power are mostly spent on human welfare, which makes them become relatively less neglected. In any case, this does not affect my prioritisation much, as I already consider the best animal welfare interventions to be 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

I see, although I think one can argue it should not be possible to hide users' names based on the same argument.

Thanks for the follow-up! It prompted me to think about relevant topics.

Do you have a sense of what "advocacy multiplier" this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?

By helping animals directly, are you talking about rescuing animals from factory-farms, and then supporting them in animal sanctuaries? I am not aware of cost-effectiveness analyses of these, but here is a quick estimate. I speculate it would take 2 h to save one broiler. In this case, for 20 $/h, the cost to save a broiler would be 40 $ (= 2*20). Broilers in a conventional scenario live for 42 days, so saving one at a random time would in expectation avoid 21 days (= 42/2) of life in a conventional scenario, and contribute to perhaps 7.5 years of life in a sanctuary^[1], such that the remaining life expectancy would become 130 (= 7.5*365.25/21) times as long. Based on my assumptions here, and supposing the welfare of a broiler in a sanctuary as a fraction of chickens' welfare range is similar to the welfare of a typical human as a fraction of humans' welfare range, I estimate going from a conventional scenario to a sanctuary is 22.8 (= (3.33*10^-6*130 + 2.59*10^-5)/(-5.77*10^-6 + 2.59*10^-5)) times as good as going from a conventional scenario to a reformed scenario. So the rescue would have a benefit equivalent to changing 479 days (= 21*22.8) of a broiler in a conventional scenario to one in a reformed scenario. Assuming the cost of maintaining the broiler in the sanctuary is much smaller than the cost of the rescue, which may be optimistic, the cost-effectiveness would be 0.0328 chicken-years/$ (= 479/365.25/40). If so, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be 250 (= 8.20/0.0328) times as cost-effective.

Relatedly, I have a draft where I Fermi estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 112 times as cost-effective as School Plates (note I more or less made up the cost; I am waiting from feedback from someone from School Plates). This is an organisation in the United Kingdom which aims to increase the number of plant-based meals at schools and universities, and is seemingly regarded as having been successful in advancing their intervention. It makes sense to me their cost-effectiveness is higher than that I estimated for rescuing broilers, but lower than that of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare. A direct rescue operations targets a single animal, School Plates presumably targets a university or schools in a given small region, and corporate campaigns target companies, which intuitively affect even more animals than the latter.

The 2 shallow analyses above seem qualitatively in agreement with what Founders Pledge's approach of focussing on impact multipliers would predict. On the other hand, I would be nice to have more monitoring and evaluation of animal welfare interventions to calibrate heuristics.

I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are -- to a significant degree -- not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.

I suspect Ben Todd's analysis underestimates variations in cost-effectiveness within causes, at least if one excludes indirect effects^[2]. At the same time, it still seems like animal welfare interventions are generally more cost-effective than climate and global health and development ones. If corporate campaigns really are in the ballpark of 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities as I estimated, and Open Philanthropy's human welfare grants in their Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio, which supposedly takes advantage of multipliers, are 2 times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities, then corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are around 720 (= 1.44*10^3/2) times as cost-effective as such grants.

FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.

Thanks for sharing!

1. ^{^}

   According to Goodheart Animal Sanctuaries:

   Most chickens have a natural lifespan of around 10 years but same may live up to 15 years! Hens rescued from industry sadly may not live this long, even when kept as pets, due to their stressful start in life.

2. ^{^}

   As an example of an indirect effect, rescues of farmed animals can be filmed, and the videos used to pressure companies to sign and fulfill their animal welfare pledges.

Thanks for the comment, Christian!

I think the 80K profile notes (in a footnote) that their $1-10 billion guess includes many different kinds of government spending. I would guess it includes things like nonproliferation programs and fissile materials security, nuclear reactor safety, and probably the maintenance of parts of the nuclear weapons enterprise -- much of it at best tangentially related to preventing nuclear war. 

Most of these are relevant to preventing nuclear war (even if you do not think they are the best way of doing it):

• More countries having nuclear weapons makes nuclear war more likely.
• Fissile materials are an input to making nuclear weapons.
• Malfunctioning nuclear systems/weapons could result in accidents.

So I think the number is a bit misleading (not unlike adding up AI ethics spending and AI capabilities spending and concluding that AI safety is not neglected). You can look at the single biggest grant under "nuclear issues" in the Peace and Security Funding Index (admittedly an imperfect database): it's the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (a former government funder) paying for spent nuclear fuel storage in Maryland... 

According to the footnote in the 80,000 Hours' profile following what I quoted, the range is supposed to refer to the spending on preventing nuclear war (which is not to say the values are correct):

The resources dedicated to preventing the risk of a nuclear war globally, including both inside and outside all governments, is probably $10 billion per year or higher. However, we are downgrading that to $1–10 billion per year quality-adjusted, because much of this spending is not focused on lowering the risk of use of nuclear weapons in general, but rather protecting just one country, or giving one country an advantage over another. Much is also spent on anti-proliferation measures unrelated to the most harmful scenarios in which hundreds of warheads are used. It is also notable that spending by nongovernment actors represents only a tiny fraction of this, so they may have some better opportunities to act.

A way to get at a better estimate of non-philanthropic spending might be to go through relevant parts of the State International Affairs Budget, the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability (ADS, formerly Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance), and some DoD entities (like DTRA), and a small handful of others, add those up, and add some uncertainty around your estimates. You would get a much lower number (Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance budget was only $31.2 million in FY 2013 according to Wikipedia -- don't have time to dive into more recent numbers rn).

For reference, the range mentioned by 80,000 Hours suggests the spending on nuclear risk is 4.87 % (= 4.04/82.9) of the 82.9 billion $ spent on nuclear weapons in 2022.

All of which is to say that I think Ben's observation that "nuclear security is getting almost no funding" is true in some sense both for funders focused on extreme risks (where Founders Pledge and Longview are the only ones) and for the field in general 

I think one had better assess the cost-effectiveness of specific interventions (as GiveWell does) instead of focussing on spending. You estimated doubling the spending on nuclear security would save a life for 1.55 k$, which corresponds to a cost-effectiveness around 3.23 (= 5/1.55) times that of GiveWell's top charities. I think corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.44 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities, and therefore 446 (= 1.44*10^3/3.23) times as cost-effective as the cost-effectiveness you got for doubling the spending on nuclear security.

Thanks for clarifying, Johannes. Strongly upvoted.

Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.

I think estimates of the chicken-years affected per $ spent in corporate campaigns for chicken welfare may be more resilient than ones of the cost-effectiveness of CCF in t/$. According to The Humane League:

• Nearly 2,500 corporate cage-free welfare policies, which protect hens from the most intensive forms of confinement, have been secured around the world.
• 1,157 companies have successfully transitioned away from using battery cages, resulting in meaningful change for millions of animals.
• 89% of all corporate cage-free commitments with a 2022 deadline (meaning companies promised to completely phase out battery cages by 2022 or earlier) have been fulfilled.
• Just 4% of companies that pledged to be cage-free by 2022 are not yet fully cage-free (though they are publicly reporting on their progress), while only 7% are not yet publicly reporting on the status of their transition.
• We’ve seen a complete transition to cage-free systems across industry sectors: 509 restaurants, 269 manufacturers, 174 retailers, 118 foodservice and caterers, 95 hospitality companies, 53 producers, and 19 distributors

As a side note:

• Saulius estimated campaigns for broiler welfare are 27.8 % (= 15/54) as cost-effective as the cage-free campaigns concerning the above.
• OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
• However, I accounted for both of these effects in my analysis.

Thanks, Abby. I knew MacArthur had left the space, but not that Carnegie Endowment had recently decreased funding. In any case, I feel like discussions about nuclear risk funding often implicitly assume that a large relative decrease in philanthropic funding means a large increase in marginal cost-effectiveness, but this is unclear to me given it is only a small fraction of total funding. According to Founders Pledge's report on nuclear risk, "total philanthropic nuclear security funding stood at about $47 million per year ["between 2014 and 2020"]". So a 100 % reduction in philantropic funding would only be a 1.16 % (= 0.047/4.04) relative reduction in total funding, assuming this is 4.04 G$, which I got from the mean of a lognormal distribution with 5th and 95th percentile equal to 1 and 10 G$, corresponding to the lower and upper bound guessed in 80,000 Hours’ profile on nuclear war.