> The average animal-cause donor gave to 5.8 charities; the average donor gave to 4.2 charities. Animal-cause donors were almost twice as likely as average donors to give money to more than eight charities.
I note with some amusement that this could be true for every charity, as the act of conditioning on donating to a specific charity implicitly overweights people who donate more widely.
For instance, suppose we had 9 charities and 10 people, each of whom donate to a single different charity, apart from one person who donates to all of them. The "average donor" gives to ~2 charities (1*9/10+9*1/10), but if you pick *any* of those charities and ask what the "average donor" gives, you find it has gone up to 5! (1*1/2+9*1/2)
"Number of charities I donate to" doesn't seem like a useful metric. I donate thousands of dollars to charities like AMF, but only a couple of dollars to whatever charity the local grocery store is supporting this week. It doesn't make sense to treat those as equal. And also I'm might or might not remember the latter, so any self-report data would just be measuring how well I remember my small donations.
I wonder if the issue is that donating to animal charities may not seem like an effective way to help farm animals even for people who care about their welfare.
I agree with you that farm-animal welfare is one of the most important issues in the world today. But from my own perspective, donating to global poverty charities seems like it's doing more *immediate, undeniable* good than donating to farm-animal welfare charities.
With GiveDirectly, you can *know* that specific people living in extreme poverty have been given money because of your donation. Public-health charities are slightly more "indirect"--hence the statistical claims about how many thousands of dollars you have to give before you'll have statistically saved a life--but still seem much more direct and undeniable in their positive effects than any of the recommended farm-animal welfare charities I've read about.
It seems like farm-animal-welfare charities typically devote themselves to highly indirect methods like vegan outreach, whose effectiveness many have questioned. Estimates of how many animal lives have been saved, or how much animal suffering prevented, by each charity seemed to vary *massively* in all the sources I looked at--it just seemed much harder to actually evaluate effectiveness than for global poverty/health charities.
You undoubtedly know infinitely more about this than I do--but how does people's willingness to donate to political campaigns for causes they support compare to their willingness to donate to conventional charity?
Lobbying for improved animal-welfare laws seems like perhaps the most effective thing farm-animal-welfare charities are currently doing, and I wonder if people would be more receptive to donating to an animal-welfare-oriented political campaign that was trying to get a specific law passed than to a general farm-animal-welfare charity.
> The average animal-cause donor gave to 5.8 charities; the average donor gave to 4.2 charities. Animal-cause donors were almost twice as likely as average donors to give money to more than eight charities.
I note with some amusement that this could be true for every charity, as the act of conditioning on donating to a specific charity implicitly overweights people who donate more widely.
For instance, suppose we had 9 charities and 10 people, each of whom donate to a single different charity, apart from one person who donates to all of them. The "average donor" gives to ~2 charities (1*9/10+9*1/10), but if you pick *any* of those charities and ask what the "average donor" gives, you find it has gone up to 5! (1*1/2+9*1/2)
"But I don't care about factory farmed animals! I want to help Chihuahuas!" - my wife
"Number of charities I donate to" doesn't seem like a useful metric. I donate thousands of dollars to charities like AMF, but only a couple of dollars to whatever charity the local grocery store is supporting this week. It doesn't make sense to treat those as equal. And also I'm might or might not remember the latter, so any self-report data would just be measuring how well I remember my small donations.
I wonder if the issue is that donating to animal charities may not seem like an effective way to help farm animals even for people who care about their welfare.
I agree with you that farm-animal welfare is one of the most important issues in the world today. But from my own perspective, donating to global poverty charities seems like it's doing more *immediate, undeniable* good than donating to farm-animal welfare charities.
With GiveDirectly, you can *know* that specific people living in extreme poverty have been given money because of your donation. Public-health charities are slightly more "indirect"--hence the statistical claims about how many thousands of dollars you have to give before you'll have statistically saved a life--but still seem much more direct and undeniable in their positive effects than any of the recommended farm-animal welfare charities I've read about.
It seems like farm-animal-welfare charities typically devote themselves to highly indirect methods like vegan outreach, whose effectiveness many have questioned. Estimates of how many animal lives have been saved, or how much animal suffering prevented, by each charity seemed to vary *massively* in all the sources I looked at--it just seemed much harder to actually evaluate effectiveness than for global poverty/health charities.
You undoubtedly know infinitely more about this than I do--but how does people's willingness to donate to political campaigns for causes they support compare to their willingness to donate to conventional charity?
Lobbying for improved animal-welfare laws seems like perhaps the most effective thing farm-animal-welfare charities are currently doing, and I wonder if people would be more receptive to donating to an animal-welfare-oriented political campaign that was trying to get a specific law passed than to a general farm-animal-welfare charity.