During the animal welfare vs global health debate week, I was very reluctant to make a post or argument in favor of global health, the cause I work in and that animates me. Here are some reflections on why, that may or may not apply to other people:
1. Moral weights are tiresome to debate. If you (like me) do not have a good grasp of philosophy, it's an uphill struggle to grasp what RP's moral weights project means exactly, and where I would or would not buy into its assumptions.
2. I don't choose my donations/actions based on impartial cause prioritization. I think impartially within GHD (e.g. I don't prioritize interventions in India just because I'm from there, I treat health vs income moral weights much more analytically than species moral weights) but not for cross-cause comparison. I am okay with this. But it doesn't make for a persuasive case to other people.
3. It doesn't feel good to post something that you know will provoke a large volume of (friendly!) disagreement. I think of myself as a pretty disagreeable person, but I am still very averse to posting things that go against what almost everyone around me is saying, at least when I don't feel 100% confident in my thesis. I have found previous arguments about global health vs animal welfare to be especially exhausting and they did not lead to any convergence, so I don't see the upside that justifies the downside.
4. I don't fundamentally disagree with the narrow thesis that marginal money can do more good in animal welfare. I just feel disillusioned with the larger implications that global health is overfunded and not really worth the money we spend on it.
I'm deliberately focusing on emotional/psychological inhibitions as opposed to analytical doubts I have about animal welfare. I do have some analytical doubts, but I think of them as secondary to the personal relationship I have with GHD.
I am organizing a fundraising competition between Philosophy Departments for AMF.
You can find it here: https://www.againstmalaria.com/FundraiserGroup.aspx?FundraiserID=9191
Previous editions have netted (badum-tschak) roughly $40.000:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/FundraiserGroup.aspx?FundraiserID=9189
Any contributions are very welcome, as is sharing the fundraiser. A more official-looking announcement is on Dailynous, a central blog of academic philosophy: people found this ideal for sharing via e.g. department listservs.
https://dailynous.com/2024/12/02/philosophers-against-malaria-a-fundraising-competition/
These are relatively low-effort to set up - I spend maybe 10-20h a year on them. If you are interested in setting up a similar thing for your discipline/social circles, feel very welcome to reach out for help.
Has anybody changed their behaviour after the animal welfare vs global health debate week? A month or so on, I'm curious if anybody is planning to donate differently, considering a career pivot, etc. If anybody doesn't want to share publicly but would share privately, please feel free to message me.
Linking @Angelina Li's post asking how people would change their behaviour, and tagging @Toby Tremlett🔹 who might have thought about tracking this.
The value of re-directing non-EA funding to EA orgs might still be under-appreciated. While we obsess over (rightly so) where EA funding should be going, shifting money from one EA cause to another "better" ne might often only make an incremental difference, while moving money from a non-EA pool to fund cost-effective interventions might make an order of magnitude difference.
There's nothing new to see here. High impact foundations are being cultivated to shift donor funding to effective causes, the “Center for effective aid policy” was set up (then shut down) to shift governement money to more effective causes, and many great EAs work in public service jobs partly to redirect money. The Lead exposure action fund spearheaded by OpenPhil is hopefully re-directing millions to a fantastic cause as we speak.
I would love to see an analysis (might have missed it) which estimates the “cost-effectiveness” of redirecting a dollar into a 10x or 100x more cost-effective intervention, How much money/time would it be worth spending to redirect money this way? Also I'd like to get my head around how much might the working "cost-effectiveness" of an org improve if its budget shifted from 10% non-EA funding to 90% non- EA funding.
There are obviously costs to roping in non-EA funding. From my own experience it often takes huge time and energy. One thing I’ve appreciated about my 2 attempts applying for EA adjacent funding is just how straightforward It has been – probably an order of magnitude less work than other applications.
Here’s a few practical ideas to how we could further redirect funds
1. EA orgs could put more effort into helping each other access non-EA money. This is already happening through the AIM cluster, but I feel the scope could be widened to other orgs, and co-ordination could be improved a lot without too much effort. I’m sure pools of money are getting missed all the time. For example I sure hope we're doing whatever we can through our networks to hel
I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health.
The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.)
Matthew Yglesias wrote a Giving Tuesday piece about GiveDirectly that makes a compelling case for effective giving to a general audience. The article addresses why one should consider directing charity to the Global South, what makes cash transfers an appealing intervention, and how this approach can be reconciled with the desire to volunteer locally.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-help-the-poorest-people-in
The IHME have published a new global indicator for depression treatment gaps—the ‘minimally adequate treatment rate’.
It’s defined using country-level treatment gap data, and then extrapolated to missing countries using Bayesian meta-regression (combined with other GBD data; there’s already a critique paper on this methodology FWIW).
Pretty funny CGD blog post by Victoria Fan and Rachel Bonnifield: If the Global Health Donors Were Your Parents: A (Whimsical) Comparative Perspective. Quoting at length (with some reformatting):