Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent (Rethink Priorities)
In this article, I estimate how many chickens will be affected by corporate cage-free\u00a0[1] and broiler welfare\u00a0[2] commitments won by all charities, in all countries, during all the years between 2005 and the end of 2018. According to my estimate, for every dollar spent, 9 to 120 years of chicken life will be affected. However, the estimate doesn’t take into account indirect effects which could be more important.
The estimate is summarized in the table below.\u00a0[3] In the table, everything is expressed in my\u00a0subjective 90% confidence intervals. Numbers in parentheses are means. M stands for million, and B stands for billion. The full estimation can be seen in the\u00a0the Guesstimate model. Numbers in the table may not add up because of the way Guesstimate works.
In addition to direct costs on corporate campaigns, the cost estimate includes the costs of undercover investigations about the living conditions of chickens, relevant research, and all administrative expenses associated with these activities. It doesn’t include the costs of legislative campaigns and future costs of ensuring compliance to commitments that are already made. Consequently, predictions of follow-through rates assume that the spending on ensuring compliance will not be substantial.
There are many ways this cost-effectiveness could be misleading. For example:
- I only estimate direct short term effects. Indirect effects on chicken and egg consumption, wild animal welfare, public opinion on farm animal issues, and long-term future could be more important.
- This is cost-effectiveness of past campaigns. Cost-effectiveness in the future might be different because companies could learn how to deal with animal advocates, it might be done in different countries, or for different asks.
- This is not an estimate of what an additional donated dollar would achieve, as I do not discuss room for more funding and there is a high variance in cost-effectiveness within the spending associated with corporate campaigns.
In the\u00a0first appendix, I show that even under very pessimistic assumptions, fighting for welfare reforms has affected more than one chicken-year per dollar spent
In the\u00a0second appendix, I discuss how the involvement of volunteers slightly skews this cost-effectiveness estimate. In short, volunteer time is a cost that is not accounted for.
In the\u00a0third appendix, I review previous cost-effectiveness estimates of corporate campaigns by\u00a0Capriati (2018), Bollard (2016), Dickens (2016), and Animal Charity Evaluators.
In the\u00a0fourth appendix, I explain why I chose to estimate the cost-effectiveness of campaigns in all countries, during all the years between 2005 and the end of 2018, rather than focusing on a specific charity or year, despite the fact that very few commitments were won before 2013. In short, all efforts are interrelated. Efforts in one year can lead to victories in later years, and a single commitment can be influenced by multiple charities working in multiple countries.
This article is a project of\u00a0Rethink Priorities. It contains a lot of details but I tried to make it easy to skim. The section I recommend reading the most is\u00a0Ways this estimate could be misleading.