300,000 lives, 100 million hens, and a world still to save

EA is back.

I went on the Sam Harris podcast again recently. If you want the full non-paywalled episode, I’m able to share it here:

https://samharris.org/episode/SE6877E700B

30 mins of it is also on youtube, spotify, etc.

The occasion for the podcast was the 10-year anniversary edition of Doing Good Better. So, preparing for the podcast, I collected some relevant facts about what EA has achieved over the last decade, and where the movement stands today. I found the numbers both surprising and inspiring, so I thought I should share them here.

EAs don’t often toot their own horn, and with all that’s going on in the world, or on the internet at least, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. So I think a bit of horn-tooting is at least occasionally warranted, otherwise we’ll only ever focus on the bad and not on the good. And, despite a few subdued years, the EA¹ movement is thriving.

I’ll break things down by cause area, before looking at EA’s recent return to serious growth.

First, global heath. Since 2015, over $2 billion has been raised for the most effective global health charities, with contributions from over 100,000 donors. The result is over 300,000 lives saved, mainly children. It’s hard to grasp the sheer scale of numbers like this, but each and every contributor to that statistic is an individual — a boy or girl with hopes and dreams and joys and sorrows.

I live in Oxford, UK. It has a population of about 150,000 people. Imagine if there was a nuclear bomb that was going to go off and completely obliterate the entirety of Oxford, and the EA community managed to stop it. Think about how much of a loss there would from a city being destroyed, and how huge an event it would be if we’d managed to prevent that. And then imagine it happening twice over. Oxford one year, Cambridge the next.

And it’s not just within global health and development. On the basis of EA ideas, Lewis Bollard and others championed and funded corporate cage-free campaigns, which got almost all major US fast food restaurants and retailers to commit to phasing out eggs from hens kept in battery cages.

In 2012, 10% of US hens were cage-free; by 2025, 46% were, thanks in significant part to these campaigns. That’s around 100 million hens spared from cage confinement per year. In decades of animal welfare activism, nothing comes close to the impact of this. There’s obviously an enormous amount more to do, but the sheer scale of the impact here is mind-boggling.

For pandemic preparedness and AI, it’s harder to give crisp numerical impact. But, reflecting on the last 10 years: when Doing Good Better came out, these were regarded as very fringe concerns — extremely speculative, or even paranoid. I think it’s clear from the last 6 years that the early concern here was very farsighted. There are now thriving fields of biosecurity, AI safety and AI governance that would be far smaller and more impoverished if it weren’t for that foresight.

None of this is to say that we’ve gotten everything right — I certainly haven’t. And all this should come with caveats about counterfactual contribution. And the wins still pale in comparison to the size of the problems in the world. And… But, still, there have in fact been some huge wins.

Now, people sometimes have the impression that, okay, that’s true of the past, but EA nowadays is dying or on the way out. But really, that’s very far from accurate.

In the last year alone, total effective giving — total money going to highly effective organisations across a range of cause areas — is up by something like 40%,² closing in on $2 billion per year. For context, if that effective giving ecoystem were a foundation, it would be one of the top five largest foundations in the world by annual money moved.

We can look at other metrics too. There were over a thousand new Giving What We Can pledges in the last year — year-on-year growth of 24%. Similarly, there are still thousands of people every year changing their careers, informed by the advice of 80,000 Hours, Probably Good, and others. And CEA’s main metrics are all growing in the 10% to 30% per year range. EA seems to be back to the rate of growth that’s been typical for most of its history.

And the sheer pace of all this still blows my mind, to be honest. It doesn’t feel at all long ago that it was 2009 and Toby Ord was speculating that we might one day need a part-time secretary to mail out the Giving What We Can pledges, and my response was scepticism.

On the Sunday of EA Global in SF, 50 people took the 10% giving pledge. In comparison, the first year of Giving What We Can resulted in 41 new pledgers. More people took the pledge in one day, this year, than in our whole first year.

All of this matters because, sadly, one of the things that’s happened over the last 10 years is that various aspects of the world have gotten worse — or at least progress has slowed.

From 1990 onwards, we saw decades of sustained reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty; now that’s down to about 800 million. But the rate of decrease is basically plateauing, and from 2030 onwards — at least putting transformative AI to the side — that number might actually start increasing again.

When it comes to animal welfare, there’s been sustained exponential growth in the number of animals used for food, such that last year there were 90 billion animals raised and killed in factory farms.

The last few years have seen the largest war break out in Europe since WWII. As of last month, it is now the first time in 50 years that there’s no treaty between the United States and Russia governing the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. And human-level machine intelligence has moved from being a distant possibility to a near-term prospect.

What this means is that now, more than ever, we need people to step up, appreciate the sheer range of challenges we face, take responsibility, and act with both the heart and the head to make the world better. I hope those motivated by EA can be such people. The track record suggests they can.

This post was adapted from my EA Global: San Francisco talk, here. The 10-year anniversary edition of Doing Good Better is available here.

1. What is EA? Here I’m meaning the collection of people who are acting on the basis of a distinctive mindset (cosmopolitan, scope-sensitive, truth-seeking, optimising) to try to make the world better with their time and money. Such people need not describe themselves as “effective altruists”; what matters is what outcomes come about, not how people label themselves.

2. The data isn’t fully in yet; this number is an estimate from Sjir Hoeijmakers, based on an in-progress update to this assessment of the effective giving ecosystem.