How Effective is Effective Altruism? A Deep Dive Into Two of Open Philanthropy’s EA-Inspired Programs
/
Farm animal welfare is one of open philanthropy’s most successful programs. David Tadevosian/shutterstock
The sands may seem to be shifting under the effective altruism movement these days, but it’s hard to argue with its bedrock philosophy: to do as much good as you can with the resources available. Those goals guide most of today’s strategic philanthropists and loom far larger than the actions of any one player or industry.
So while the rise and fall of the giving philosophy’s most infamous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, has cast a shadow and prompted much soul-searching within the movement, effective altruism remains a huge force in modern philanthropy. To gain a better understanding of exactly what EA looks like in execution these days, we need look no further than its steadiest and most compelling practitioner — Open Philanthropy.
We’ve followed Open Philanthropy closely, even before it became an independent entity in 2017, and it seemed like a good time to set aside the noise and take a closer look at some of this fast-growing philanthropy’s EA-inspired programs.
The organization is led by a couple who were among the movement’s earliest adopters: Cari Tuna, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook and Asana. After deciding to give their fortune away during their lifetimes as effectively as possible, Tuna and Moskovitz began a journey that put them at the vanguard of the movement.
Today, they’re the primary funders of Open Philanthropy, which makes grants and other investments in two broad categories: global health and wellbeing, and longtermism, or the moral imperative to consider future generations.
Here, we look at OP’s evolution and effectiveness by exploring a focus area within each main funding category — farm animal welfare in global health, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness within longtermism.
Beginnings
Effective altruism can be defined in many ways, but in short, it uses evidence and reason to maximize the impact of social investments. In a sector where decisions are subject to tugged heartstrings, enlightened self-interest, parochial worldviews and time constraints, EA seeks an objective approach to doing good for all the planets’ living creatures, human and animal, now and for generations to come.
Open Philanthropy’s origin story dates back to the year effective altruism got its name. In 2011, Moskovitz and Tuna cofounded what’s now known as Good Ventures in partnership with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), with the simple goal of helping humanity thrive.
In 2012, that grew to become the Good Ventures Foundation and the Good Ventures LLC. Tuna turned to the work full time and assumed the role of president, overseeing strategy and grantmaking.
Open Philanthropy was incubated as a partnership with another group wrestling with the same basic question of where to give. In 2007, hedge funders Elie Hassenfeld and Holden Karnofsky cofounded the charity evaluator GiveWell to help others who were long on interest but short on time to find fully vetted, evidence-backed — and often overlooked — charities to support.
The two organizations realized a shared vision and values, and forged a collaboration in 2014 called the Open Philanthropy Project. Three years later, after finding that Good Ventures and GiveWell teams and approaches were changing, Open Philanthropy began operating as an independent LLC. In some ways, the symbiosis continues, particularly in the area of global health and development. In 2020, for example, Open Philanthropy accepted recommendations from GiveWell totaling $100 million. In 2021, the number increased to $300 million.
Through the end of 2022, total grantmaking paid out through Good Ventures totals $2.1 billion.
Setting priorities
Tuna believed from the get-go that choice of sector is the most important decision funders make. To maximize impact, Open Philanthropy lined up behind causes that met three main criteria: importance, neglectedness and tractability.
Importance considers factors like the number of people an issue affects and the good a substantial breakthrough in the area can accomplish in terms of things like increased economic value or health gains. Neglectedness prioritizes causes that are overlooked by other philanthropists, especially big players. Tractability is meant in the research sense, the adoption of models with a high likelihood of yielding solutions.
Potential causes are then run through a four-part process that prioritizes research and finding the right specialized staff. They are carefully evaluated and reevaluated, leading OP to adopt new ideas, exit causes responsibly, or spin off areas like its criminal justice work. For example, in November of 2021, after making more than $130 million in grants, OP helped launch an independent justice organization, Just Impact, with $50 million in seed funding over three and a half years.
Today, Open Philanthropy funds focus areas within two broad categories, global health and wellbeing and longtermism. Within that, a breakdown of 2021 grants shows current priorities in terms of dollars and cents. Global Health and Development totaled $137 million. Funding in the categories of potential risks from AI and farm animal welfare each totaled roughly $82 million. Sixty-nine million went to responsibly exiting criminal justice reform. Forty-one million went to scientific research. Effective altruism community growth totaled more than $33 million. Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness drew roughly $25 million. And land use reform and macroeconomic stabilization policy both came in at $6.3 million.
Open Philanthropy’s approach to farm animal welfare
OP funds in six priority areas within the broad category of Global Health and Wellbeing. Global Aid Policy works to increase both the levels and effectiveness of official development assistance. Global Health and Development grants are largely recommended by GiveWell, and focus on high-impact, cost-effective interventions that can save lives in lower- and middle-income countries, like an investment in chlorination dispensers for clean drinking water that will help boost program capacity to 9 million Africans over the next four years.
Scientific Research broadly supports biomedical research, driven by outcome potential and funding scarcity, rather than any one field or condition. Two of the categories are new: South Asian Air Quality and the growth of the effective altruism community in global health and wellbeing. The sixth is Farm Animal Welfare, which has been part of the portfolio since OP’s inception.
Open Philanthropy’s work to alleviate suffering across the planet has always extended to animals, a cause that certainly fits the bill for neglectedness. Less than 0.2% of U.S. philanthropic dollars are currently directed that way.
Lewis Bollard, senior program manager for farm animal welfare, said the cause is popular within the EA movement due to sheer scale. Billions of animals are being farmed in cruel conditions that prioritize yield.
Open Philanthropy believes that reforms to the severity of their treatment can help phase out the worst practices and significantly reduce suffering. It advocates in ways that are intended to reach the greatest number of animals, and specifically, the two most numerous farmed vertebrates: chicken and fish.
Bollard joined OP toward the end of 2015 and began following the usual funding steps. He and his team began by looking at importance, meaning the “number of animals we can affect and how we can affect them. How much and how long.” Then they identified and evaluated grantees “starting with data areas that are the most promising.”
The team started making its first grants in 2016. It scaled up recently, doubling in size from four team members to eight. Some staff conduct impact and strategy work, gather and analyze data, and make recommendations. Others work on the ground in specific subtopics, like alternative proteins.
Prioritizing numbers and promising outcomes
All told, the cause area has made 345 grants in six portfolio areas. They include the best-known area of farm animal cruelty mitigation, cage-free reforms. Bollard said OP sees significant upsides to “pushing away from the practice of battery cages,” a housing system of identical cages that are stacked on top of each other in rows. The wire cages restrict natural movement — chickens cannot walk or expand their wings.
Another portfolio area, broiler chicken welfare, addresses the 70 billion chickens that are slaughtered annually after suffering depraved conditions. Bollard explained that the birds are genetically altered to grow as “fast and fat” as possible. As a result, they develop huge breasts that prevent them from walking, so spend their days lying on barn floors, often in manure that can cause acid burns.
Grants for fish welfare are aimed at impacting the estimated 73 to 180 billion fish being farmed at any one time globally, in what OP considers to be the harshest conditions of all. Giving includes a four-year, total $2.6 million grant made in 2021 to Fair Fish International to establish the first certification standards for wild-caught fish.
The work translates across borders. Two portfolio areas have a clear global reach. OP seeks to improve farm animal welfare in Asia, home to a large share of the world’s confined animals. The grants made in 13 Asian countries follow a particular interest in reducing meat consumption. OP’s work in Europe, a recognized leader in farm animal welfare, builds on protections through movement-building and increased welfare pledges with 50 grants to date.
Open Philanthropy has also made 22 grants to develop alternatives to animal-based foods and accelerate the commercialization of plant-based substitutes.
It’s also worth considering farm animal welfare’s impact on human lives and a healthy food system. One, there’s the case for sustainability. Factory farming is currently responsible for 15% of global climate. Two, it’s economically important, improving quality and reducing loss. The impact on costs recently became clear with the rise in egg prices following the avian flu and the potential human costs if the threat of transmission becomes a reality.
Bollard explained the consequences of zoonotic pandemic risks. “When you put millions of animals together, immune systems are compromised,” he said. “One pathogen spreads like wildfire.” The farming industry often combats the spread with mass killing. Bollard explained that “ventilation shut down” is common practice, proactively killing up to tens of thousands of animals by cutting off their air supply. The recent outbreak of avian flu that’s grabbing headlines in the U.S. alone is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of chickens.
Corporate campaigns
A significant part of realizing the goals of cage-free reforms is persuading all major food companies to stop using battery-caged eggs (that is, going free-range). Bollard estimates that its corporate campaigns have already benefited several hundred million animals. The campaigns leverage the power of consumer groups and popular opinion from people who are appalled when they discover accepted practices.
Vicky Bond, president of the Humane League, an Open Philanthropy grantee that works to end the abuse of animals raised for food, concurs. The group has been instrumental in using public sentiment to pressure companies to adopt cage-free commitments. Nearly 72% of people who learn about animal welfare and related industrial factory farming report seek out alternatives for their own buying. That knowledge is power. Bond feels OP’s early and sustained investments have resulted in significant progress on this front.
“Between 2016, when OP made its first major grant to the league, only around 5% of egg-laying hens were cage-free,” said Bond. Now, “over one-third of the U.S. egg-laying hen flock is cage-free. Practically all U.S. major hotels, food service companies, restaurant chains, manufacturers and retailers have made commitments to be cage-free by 2026 or earlier.”
Bond said that Open Philanthropy has had a “truly unparalleled” impact on both its work and the farmed animal protection movement at large. She credits Bollard and his team with influencing other philanthropists to make farm animals a priority, noting the outsize “bang for the charitable buck” in terms of reducing sheer suffering.
Bollard appreciates the progress, particularly in corporate and legislative arenas, but cautioned that there’s still much work ahead. “Domestically, there’s no national law, and the meat industry has tremendous power. Some retailers are farther along than others. Globally, protections are still “either missing or growing.”
As work continues, “The jury is still out,” he said.
Open Philanthropy’s approach to biosecurity and pandemic preparedness
By nature, longtermism grants generally focus on outcomes that may not occur for decades. With few exceptions, evidence and track records are scant and immediate results won’t tell the full story. Instead, grants are evaluated based on long-term probabilities, a limitation that’s countered with a longer evaluation runway than in global health, and the recognition that a high degree of course correction may be necessary.
It must be noted that longtermism has become a particularly controversial component of effective altruism, drawing criticism from some philosophers and pundits, and even creating something of a schism within the movement. Vox has a pretty good rundown of the debate over the merits of chasing a slippery concept like the distant future.
For Open Philanthropy, funding in the broad category of longtermism focuses on three areas: the potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence, effective altruism community growth, and biosecurity and pandemic preparedness. In 2021, AI drew $82 million in funding, community growth drew $33.5 million, and biosecurity drew $25 million.
Andrew Snyder-Beattie, senior program officer for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, said that to him, longtermism is about taking seriously “our responsibilities to future generations.” In addition to the effects on present day life, “more people could be born in the future than are alive today, and our actions could have significant effects on their lives.”
He used the eradication of smallpox as an example. Work that was carried out in the mid-20th century “saved millions of lives at the time, but it also continues to affect every subsequent generation.”
Asked what actions taken today can help people far into the future, Snyder-Beattie said, “One thing Open Philanthropy thinks about is how to avoid catastrophic events that could jeopardize humanity’s future. We believe pandemics are among the most important threats in this category and that some key pandemic prevention work is neglected relative to how impactful it could be.”
Snyder-Beattie joined Open Philanthropy in 2019 after five years in leadership positions at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He now leads a biosecurity team that’s grown to five people in the past year and a half and is expected “to continue to grow in the coming years.”
Snyder-Beattie said he and his team try to “react quickly when new opportunities arise,” while taking steps to “seed future opportunities.” Grantees are identified through a process of research and networking. The team executes “more speculative grants — projects and ideas we aren’t sure will work out, but could have huge positive benefits for the world if they do.”
While some funders are catching on for obvious reasons, the fact remains that few philanthropies have prioritized pandemic preparedness. “Unfortunately, there aren’t many funders who prioritize catastrophic risks from pandemics,” said Snyder-Beattie, “so we rarely find that an area we’re examining seems overcrowded.”
Though not many of its grantees have attracted funding from non-OP sources and few major funders “enter the space in a similar way,” OP is “happy to partner with other funders when our priorities are aligned” on efforts like the Pandemic Antiviral Discovery initiative, for example.
Three examples
Examples of its work include a travel grants program that allowed a group of early-career biosecurity professionals to attend the Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference in Geneva. Snyder-Beattie said OP hopes the experience engaging with diplomats, researchers, NGO staff and other more experienced members of the community will be formative to their career development.
Open Philanthropy also provided funding for the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense to produce a landmark white paper on priority technologies to prevent future pandemics, “The Apollo Program for Biodefense — Winning the Race against Biological Threats.” A case where philanthropy helped guide national policy, the Biden administration subsequently adopted several of the key recommendations. They just need funding. “While Congress has not yet appropriated substantial funds for these plans,” Snyder-Beattie said it still represents “the kind of ambitious work we hope to enable through our grantmaking.”
A third example helped create analytics to guide future decision-making. OP’s support for the Center for Health Security played an instrumental role in launching the CDC’s new Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, an epidemic “weather map” for relevant decision-makers.
The pressure is on. “It’s impossible to know when the next outbreak or biological threat might occur,” said Snyder-Beattie, “so this work is certainly time-sensitive. The earlier we prepare, the more likely we are to stop threats from escalating to a pandemic.”
They also measure process in indirect ways. “Because pandemics are rare, we rely on indirect measures to track our progress. For example, we could look for the advancement and deployment of technologies to reduce pathogen transmission in indoor spaces, or the successful enactment of policies we think could make it harder to misuse biology.”
Asked what lessons philanthropy should take away from COVID, Snyder-Beattie said that preparing for high-consequence risks, even if they seem unlikely, could be among the best ways to use philanthropic funding. For example, funding for mRNA research that began years before the pandemic enabled the rapid development of multiple COVID vaccines.”
While the research was supported by government funding, “there’s no reason a philanthropist focused on reducing biological risks couldn’t support these kinds of projects and help to protect the world from future pandemics.”
Neglected no longer
Open Philanthropy’s investments show that Cari Tuna is right about one thing: The causes it’s selected so far have been the most important part of its work. By catching what others are missing and basing decisions on research and reason, OP has identified areas that now seem prescient.
OP made its first biosecurity and pandemic preparedness grant in 2015, well before COVID circled the globe. Grants to limit the dangers of advanced AI started the same year, when it was on few people’s radar. Recently, a Pew poll tracked growing concerns, saying 85% of people worry about AI’s pervasive role in everyday life. Avian flu was largely unknown, let alone a conversation in America’s shopping aisles.
Just a decade after making its first grant, Open Philanthropy’s work seems more ripped from the headlines than neglected.
