I estimated the cost-effectiveness of farmed fish slaughter commitments to be between $10.4K and $114M per DALY averted.
Animal welfare is often conceptualised as just one area, but the above illustrates the cost-effectiveness can vary a lot depending on the species and type of intervention. So I think it is great that you are willing to estimate the cost-effectiveness in terms of DALY/$[1]. It makes me more willing to donate to Rethink Priorities instead of Animal Charity Evaluators' (ACE's) recommended charities or the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF), because these are not estimating cost-effectiveness in terms of DALY/$ (or similar). Both ACE and AWF assess cost-effectiveness based on heuristics[2], but I am not confident they are sufficient to figure out which are the best animal welfare interventions. I see GiveWell's cost-effectiveness analyses as quite important to determine the best interventions in global health and development, so I assume having similar analyses in the context of animal welfare is quite useful too.
To put these numbers in context, $50 per DALY averted [or 0.02 DALY/$ (= 1/50)] is considered a proxy for some of the most promising human global health and development interventions. The best animal interventions are often considered to be even more competitive than this.
For reference, I guess the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare is 13.6 DALY/$ (= 0.01*1.37*10^3), i.e. 680 (= 13.6/0.02) times Open Philanthropy's bar. I got that multiplying:
- The cost-effectiveness of GiveWell's top charities of 0.01 DALY/$ (50 DALY per 5 k$), which is half of Open Philanthropy's bar of 0.02 DALY/$.
- My estimate for the ratio between cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare and GiveWell's top charities of 1.37 k (= 1.71*10^3/0.682*2.73/5):
- I calculated corporate campaigns for broiler welfare increase neaterm welfare 1.71 k times as cost-effectively as the lowest cost to save a life among GiveWell’s top charities then of 3.5 k$, respecting a cost-effectiveness of 0.286 life/k$ (= 1/(3.5*10^3)).
- The current mean reciprocal of the cost to save a life of GiveWell’s 4 top charities is 0.195 life/k$ (= (3*1/5 + 1/5.5)*10^-3/4), i.e. 68.2 % (= 0.195/0.286) as high as the cost-effectiveness I just mentioned.
- The ratio of 1.71 k in the 1st bullet respects campaigns for broiler welfare, but Saulius estimated ones for chicken welfare (broilers or hens) affect 2.73 (= 41/15) as many chicken-years.
- OP thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis”.
- ^
Although I think you are underestimating the cost-effectiveness.
- ^
In addition, from Giving What We Can's evaluation of AWF:
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.
Thanks for sharing, Sagar!
I do think your methodology greatly underestimates the value of averting extreme suffering. You say:
The assumptions in the 1st of the above paragraphs make sense to me if I interpret the welfare range as i) the difference between the welfare per unit time of the best and worst possible experience of 1 second, rather than ii) the difference between the welfare per unit time of the best and worst possible experience of 1 year (this can also be thought of as the difference between the welfare per unit time of the best and worst typical experience). However, for the 2nd paragraph to make sense, one has to interpret the welfare range as ii). So I think there is a contradiction:
Am I missing something?
I agree with this comment. It's worth nothing that the methodology used in this analysis isn't the same as the methodology used in the CURVE sequence. In the "How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization" report, @Laura Duffy weighted 1 year of disabling pain at 2 to 10 DALYs and 1 year of excruciating pain at 60 to 150 DALYs. I expect that dying is at least disablingly painful and potentially excruciatingly painful, so these weights would imply a >5x improvement in cost-effectiveness (but even at the upper end, this probably wouldn't be cost-competitive with top EA interventions).
In general, I think it's a good step to try and actually put interventions from different cause areas on the same scale, but I continue to think that because DALYs are a unit of health status and not a unit of utility, trying to use them as a unit of comparison is unlikely to be optimal (see here and here for more)
Thank you for your comments, Matt!
I would agree on that this intervention would look better (in $/DALY space) if I were to have adopted the same assumptions as @Laura Duffy and come up with some plausible assumptions how much time in various pain intensities that would be averted through the intervention. I also think its very unlikely the intervention would look competitive the top AW and GHD interventions. Under the assumptions where this intervention were to look very competitive, I'd suspect shrimp stunning interventions would look even better.
Thanks also for your very valid comments on using DALYs as a unit to compare interventions (and your general engagement on the research that @Rethink Priorities does!).
Thank @Vasco Grilo you for your thoughtful comments. Appreciate it!
I don’t think you’ve missed anything. I think you've identified a very valid critique of the assumptions I used to express cost-effectiveness as a cost per DALY averted range. Expressing the welfare ranges in units of seconds or years is a great way of bringing this out – so thank you for doing that.
Some comments: