Why do people give to charity?

It seems strange to even ask. Most people would point to the fact that they’re altruistic and want to make a difference. Others are concerned with inequality and justice. Another group points to the concept of “paying it forward” or repaying a debt to society. Other explanations cite various religious or social reasons.

Not too many people cite the fact that giving makes them happier. Even if people agree this is true, I don’t often hear it as people’s main reason. Instead, it’s more like a beneficial side effect. In fact, it seems pretty odd to me to hear someone boldly proclaim that they give only because it makes them happier, even if it might be true.

 

But if it’s true that giving does make people happier, should we be promoting that publicly and loudly?  Luke's article "Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings" suggests that we should tell people to enjoy the happiness that giving brings.  Perhaps it might make a great opportunity to tap into groups who wouldn’t consider giving otherwise or have misconceptions that giving would make them miserable?

However, I’m a bit worried about how it might affect people’s incentives.  In this essay, I follow the evidence provided in the Harvard Business School working paper "Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior" by Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. Overall, in light of potential incentive effects, I think caution and further investigation is warranted when promoting the happiness side of giving.

 

Giving and Happiness

Giving What We Can has published its own review of research on happiness and giving and find a pretty strong connection. And it’s true -- lots of evidence confirms the connection and even indicates that it’s a causal relationship rather than a misleading correlation. In fact, it goes in both directions -- giving makes people happier and happier people are more likely to give[1].

Neurological studies of people found that people experienced pleasure when they saw money go to charity, even when it wasn’t their own, but experienced even more pleasure when they gave to charity directly[2], a conclusion that has been backed up with revealed preference tests in the lab[3, 4].

This connection has also been backed up in numerous experimental studies. Asking people to commit random acts of kindness can significantly increase self-reported levels of happiness compared to a control group[5]. Further research found that the amount people spent on gifts for others and donations to charity correlates with their self-reported happiness, while the amount they spent on bills, expenses, and gifts for themselves did not[6]. Additionally, people given money and randomly assigned to spend money on others were happier than those randomly assigned to spend the same amount of money on themselves[7].

 

Altering Incentives

People generally believe that spending on themselves will make them much happier than spending on others[6], which, given that this isn’t the case, means there is plenty of room for changing people’s minds. However, any social scientist or avid reader of Freakonomics knows that altering incentives can create unintended effects. So is there a potential harm in getting people to do more giving via advertising self-interested motive?

The classic example is that of the childcare center that had problems with parents who were late to pick up their children. They reasoned that if they charged fines, parents would stop being late, because they would have an economic incentive not to. They found instead, however, that introducing a fine actually created even more tardiness[8], presumably because what once was seen as rude and bad faith now could be made up for with a small economic cost. More surprisingly, the amount of lateness did not return to pre-fine levels even after the owners stopped the policy[9].

Other studies have found similar effects. A study of 3-5 year old nursery students who all initially seemed intrinsically interested in various activities were randomly put into three groups. One group made a pre-arranged deal to do a one of the activities in which they seemed interested in exchange for a reward, another group was surprised with a reward after doing the activity in question, and the third group was not rewarded at all. Those who were given an award upfront ended up significantly less intrinsically interested in the task than the other groups after the study was finished[10]. A similar study found that students who were interested in solving puzzles stopped solving those puzzles after a period ended where they were paid to solve puzzles[11].

 

In general, money and reminders of money tend to make people less pro-social[12]. This has also been found to some degree specifically in the world of charity. In a randomized field experiment, donors were encouraged to donate to disaster relief in the US and were randomly either enticed with an offer of donation matching or not. The study found that while people donated more often with the promise of donation matching, their contributions after the donation matching dropped below the control group, ending with a negative net effect overall[13].

Another study found that when gifts were sent out to donors, larger gifts resulted in a larger response rate of returned donations, but yielded a smaller average donation[14], though I suppose this could just be because more people who usually would give nothing were giving a small amount, bringing the average down. More importantly, this study found no net decrease in future donations after gifts were no longer sent out; instead, donations returned to their normal levels[14].

And certainly it’s worth noting some times when appeals to self-interest are successful. I couldn’t find any studies where this was the case. However, there is one anecdotal example: as Nick Cooney points out in "Self-Interest Can Make the World a Better Place -- For Animals, At Least", reduction in people eating factory farmed meat is coming almost entirely from people motivated not by concern for animal cruelty, but concern for their own health. Could advocating self-interested donations be the same as advocating health-motivated vegetarianism?

 

Opportunities for Further Investigation

It’s not very good to just let things be unclear if they don’t have to be, and I think we can resolve this issue with more scientific study. For example, one could randomly select one group to receive information about giving and happiness, another group to receive other standard arguments for giving, and a control group to receive no arguments or information about giving at all, and track their donation habits in a longitudinal study. This study would have it’s complications for sure, but could help see if information about giving and happiness backfires or not.

Or perhaps one could perform a field experiment. You could set up a booth asking people to donate to your cause and randomly include information about giving and happiness or not in your pitch and see how this affects immediate and long-term contributions. Doing this would have added advantages of being much quicker to run and not leading to people donating only because they think they’re being observed.

 

References

[1]: Anik, Lalin, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, Elizabeth W. Dunn. 2009. “Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior”. Harvard Business School Working Paper 10-012.

[2]: Harbaugh, William T. 2007. "Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations." Science 316: 1622-1625.

[3]: Andreoni, James, William T. Harbaugh, and Lise Vesterlund. 2007. "Altruism in Experiments". New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.

[4]: Mayr, Ulrich, William T. Harbaugh , and Dharol Tankersley. 2008. "Neuroeconomics of Charitable Giving and Philanthropy". In Glimcher, Paul W., Ernest Fehr, Colin Camerer, and Russel Alan Poldrack (eds.) 2009. Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. Academic Press: London.

[5]: Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. 2005. "Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change." Review of General Psychology 9 (2): 111–131.

[6]: Akin, Lara B., et. al. 2010. "Pro-social Spending And Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #16415.

[7]: Dunn, Elizabeth W., Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton. 2008. “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.” Science 319: 1687-1688.

[8]: Gneezy, Uri and Aldo Rustichini. 2000a. “A fine is a price.” Journal of Legal Studies 29: 1-18.

[9]: Gneezy, Uri and Aldo Rustichini. 2000b. “Pay enough or don't pay at all.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115: 791-810.

[10]: Lepper, Mark R., David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett. 1973. “Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28(1): 129-137.

[11]: Deci, Edward L. 1971. “Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18(1): 105-115.

[12]: Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode. 2006. “The Psychological Consequences of Money”. Science 17 (314): 1154-1156.

[13]: Meier, Stephan. 2007. “Do Subsidies Increase Charitable Giving in the Long Run? Matching Donations in a Field Experiment”. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper #06-18.

[14]: Falk, Armin. 2005. “Gift Exchange in the Field”. University of Bonn.

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(This essay is also cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog and my blog.)

Abstract: If you value the welfare of nonhuman animals from a consequentialist perspective, there is a lot of potential for reducing suffering by funding the persuasion of people to go vegetarian through either online ads or pamphlets.  In this essay, I develop a calculator for people to come up with their own estimates, and I personally come up with a cost-effectiveness estimate of $0.02 to $65.92 needed to avert a year of suffering in a factory farm.  I then discuss the methodological criticism that merits skepticism of this estimate and conclude by suggesting (1) a guarded approach of putting in just enough money to help the organizations learn and (2) the need for more studies should be developed that explore advertising vegetarianism in a wide variety of media in a wide variety of ways, that include decent control groups.

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Introduction

I start with the claim that it's good for people to eat less meat, whether they become vegetarian -- or, better yet, vegan -- because this means less nonhuman animals are being painfully factory farmed.  I've defended this claim previously in my essay "Why Eat Less Meat?".  I recognize that some people, even those who consider themselves effective altruists, do not value the well-being of nonhuman animals.  For them, I hope this essay is interesting, but I admit it will be a lot less relevant.

The second idea is that it shouldn't matter who is eating less meat.  As long as less meat is being eaten, less animals will be farmed, and this is a good thing.  Therefore, we should try to get other people to also try and eat less meat.

The third idea is that it also doesn't matter who is doing the convincing.  Therefore, instead of convincing our own friends and family, we can pay other people to convince people to eat less meat.  And this is exactly what organizations like Vegan Outreach and The Humane League are doing.  With a certain amount of money, one can hire someone to distribute pamphlets to other people or put advertisements on the internet, and some percentage of people who receive the pamphlets or see the ads will go on to eat less meat.  This idea and the previous one should be uncontroversial for consequentialists.

But the fourth idea is the complication.  I want my philanthropic dollars to go as far as possible, so as to help as much as possible.  Therefore, it becomes very important to try and figure out how much money it takes to get people to eat less meat, so I can compare this to other estimations and see what gets me the best "bang for my buck".

Other Estimations

I have seen other estimates floating around the internet that try to estimate the cost of distributing pamphlets, how many conversions each pamphlet produces, and how much less meat is ate via each conversion.  Brian Tomasik calculates $0.02 to $3.65 [PDF] per year of nonhuman animal suffering prevented, later $2.97 per year, and then later $0.55 to $3.65 per year.

Jess Whittlestone provides statistics that reveal an estimate of less than a penny per year[1]. 

Effective Animal Activism, a non-profit evaluator for animal welfare charities, came up with an estimate [Excel Document] of $0.04 to $16.60 per year of suffering averted, that also takes into account a variety of additional variables, like product elasticity.

Jeff Kaufman uses a different line of reasoning, by estimating how many vegetarians there are and guessing how many of them came via pamphlets, estimates it would take $4.29 to $536 to make someone vegetarian for one year.  Extrapolating from that using at a rate of 255 animals saved per year and a weighted average of 329.6 days lived per animal (see below for justification of both assumptions), would give $0.02 to $1.90 per year of suffering averted[2].

A third line of reasoning, also by Jeff Kaufman, was to measure the amount of comments on the pro-vegetarian websites advertised in these campaigns and found that 2-22% of them were about an intended behavior change (eating less meat, going vegetarian, or going vegan), depending on the website.  I don't think we can draw any conclusions from this, but it's interesting.

To make my calculations, I decided to make a calculator.  Unfortunately, I can't embed it here, so you'd have to open it in a new tab as a companion piece.

I'm going to start by using the following formula: Years of Suffering Averted per Dollar = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Days lived / animal)

Now, to get estimations for these variables.

Pamphlets Per Dollar

How much does it cost to place the advertisement, whether it be the paper pamphlet or a Facebook advertisement?  Nick Cooney, head of the Humane League, says the cost-per-click of Facebook ads is 20 cents.

But what about the cost per pamphlet?  This is more of a guess, but I'm going to go with <a href="">Vegan Outreach's suggested donation of $0.13 per "Compassionate choices" booklet.

However, it's important to note that this cost must also include opportunity cost -- leafleters must forego the ability to use that time to work a job.  This means I must include an opportunity cost of say $8/hr on top of that, making the actual cost $0.27 assuming a pamphlet is given out each minute of volunteer time, meaning 3.7 people are reached per dollar from pamphlets.  For Facebook advertisements, the opportunity cost is trivial.

Conversions Per Pamphlet

This is the estimate with the biggest target on it's head, so to speak.  How many people do we get to actually change their behavior with a simple pamphlet or Facebook advertisement?  Right now, we have three lines of evidence:

Facebook Study

Humane League did A $5000 Facebook advertisement campaign.  They bought ads that look like this...

 

...and sent people to websites (like this one or this one) with auto-playing videos that start playing and show the horrors of factory farming.

Afterward, there was another advertisement run to people who "liked" the video page, offering a 1 in 10 chance of winning a free movie ticket in order to take a survey.  Everyone who emailed in asking for a free vegetarian starter kit were also emailed a survey.  104 people took the survey and there were 32 reported vegetarians[3] and 45 people reported, for example, that their chicken consumption decreased "slightly" or "significantly".

7% of visitors liked the page and 1.5% of visitors ordered a starter kit.  Assuming all the other people went away from the video not changing their consumption, this survey would lead us to (very tenuously) think about 2.6% of people seeing the video will become a vegetarian[4].

(Here's the results of the survey in PDF.)

Pamphlet Study

A second study discussed in "The Powerful Impact of College Leafleting (Part 1)" and "The Powerful Impact of College Leafleting: Additional Findings and Details (Part 2)" looked specifically at pamphlets.

Here, Humane League staff visited two large East Coast state schools and distributed leaflets.  They then returned two months later and surveyed people walking by.  Those who remember receiving a leaflet earlier were counted.  They found about 2% of those receiving a pamphlet went vegetarian.

Vegetarian Years Per Conversion

But once a pamphlet or Facebook advertisement captures someone, how long will they stay vegetarian?  One survey showed vegetarians refrain from eating meat for an average of 6 years or more.  Another study I found says 93% of vegetarians stay vegetarian for at least three years.

 

Animals Saved Per Vegetarian Year

And once you have a vegetarian, how many animals do they save per year?  CountingAnimals says 406 animals saved per year.

The Humane League suggests 28 chickens, 2 egg industry hens, 1/8 beef cow, 1/2 pig, 1 turkey, and 1/30 dairy cow per year (total = 31.66 animals), and does not provide statistics on fish.  This agrees with CountingAnimals on non-fish totals.

Days Lived Per Animal

One problem, however, is that saving a cow that could suffer for years is different from saving a chicken that suffers for only about a month.  Using data from Farm Sanctuary plus World Society for the Protection of Animals data on fish [PDF], I get this table:

Animal	Number	Days Alive
Chicken (Meat)	28	42
Chicken (Egg)	2	365
Cow (Beef)	0.125	365
Cow (Milk)	0.033	1460
Fish	225	365

This makes the weighted average 329.6 days[5].

 

Accounting For Biases

As I said before, our formula was Years of Suffering Averted = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Days lived / animal).

Let's plug these values in... Years of Suffering Averted per Dollar = 5 * 0.02 * 3 * 255.16 * 329.6/365 = 69.12.

Or, assuming all this is right (and that's a big assumption), it would cost less than 2 cents to prevent a year of suffering on a factory farm by buying vegetarians.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm beholden to this cost estimate or that this estimate is the "end all, be all" of vegan outreach.  Indeed, I share many of the skepticisms that have been expressed by others.  The simple calculation is... well... simple, and it needs some "beefing up", no pun intended.  Therefore, I also built a "complex calculator" that works on a much more complex formula[6] that is hopefully correct[7] and will provide a more accurate estimation.

 

The big, big deal for the surveys is concern for bias.  The most frequently mentioned bias is social desirability bias, or people who say they reduced meat just because they want to please the surveyor or look like a good person, which actually happens a lot more on surveys than we'd like.

To account for this, we'll have to figure out how inflated answers are because of this bias and then scale the answers down by that amount.  Nick Cooney who says that he's been reading studies that about 25% to 50% of people who say they are vegetarian actually are, though I don't yet have the citations.  Thus, if we find out that an advertisement creates two meat reducers, we'd scale that down to one reducer if we're expecting a 50% desirability bias.

 

The second bias that will be a problem for us is non-response bias, as those who don't reduce their diet are less likely to take the survey and therefore less likely to be counted.  This is especially true in the Facebook study, which only measures people who "liked" or requested a starter kit, showing some pro-vegetarian affiliation.

We can balance this out by assuming everyone who didn't take the survey went on to have no behavior change whatsoever.  Nick Cooney's Facebook Ad Survey is for the 7% of people who liked the page (and then responded to the survey), and obviously those who liked the page are more likely to reduce their consumption.  I chose an optimistic value of 90% to consider the survey completely representative of the 7% who liked the page, and then a bit more for those who reduced their consumption but did not like the page.  My pessimistic value was 95%, assuming everyone who did not like the survey went unchanged and assuming a small response bias among those who liked the page but chose not to take the survey.

For the pamphlets, however, there should be no response bias since the entire population of college students was surveyed from randomly, and no one was said to reject taking the survey.

 

Additional People Are Being Reached

In the Facebook survey, those who said they reduced their meat consumption were also asked if they influenced any of their friends and family to also reduce eating meat, and found that they usually produced 0.86 additional reducers.

This figure seems very high, but I do strongly expect the figure to be positive -- people who reduce eating meat will talk about it sometimes, essentially becoming free advertisements.  I'd be very surprised if they ended up being a net negative.

 

Accounting for Product Elasticity

Another way to boost the effectiveness of the estimate is to be more accurate about what happens when someone stops eating meat.  The change isn't from the actual refusal to eat, but rather from the reduced demand for meat, which leads to a reduced supply.  Following the laws of economics, however, this reduction won't necessarially be one-for-one, but rather depend on the elasticity of product demand and supply.  By getting this number, we can find out how much meat is reduced for every meat not demanded.

My guesses in the calculator come from the following sources, some of which are PDFs: Beef #1, Beef #2, Dairy #1, Dairy #2, Pork #1, Pork #2, Egg #1, Egg #2, Poultry, Salmon, and for all fish.

 

Putting It All Together

Implementing the formula on the calculator, we end up with an estimate of $0.03 to $36.52 to reduce one year of suffering on a factory farm based on the Facebook ad data and an estimate of $0.02 to $65.92 based on the pamphlet data.

Of course, many people are skeptical of these figures.  Perhaps surprisingly, so am I.  I'm trying to strike a balance between being an advocate of vegan outreach as a very promising path for making the world a better place, while not losing sight of the methodological hurdles that have not yet been met, and open to the possibility that I'm wrong about this.

The big methodological elephant in the room is that my entire cost estimate depends on having a plausible guess for how likely someone is to change their behavior based on seeing an advertisement.

I feel slightly reassured because:

1. There are two surveys for two different media, and they both provide estimates of impact that agree with each other.
2. These estimates also match anecdotes from leafleters about approximately how many people come back and say they went vegetarian because of a pamphlet.
3. Even if we were to take the simple calculator and drop the "2% chance of getting four years of vegetarianism" assumption down to, say, a pessimistic "0.1% chance of getting one year" conversion rate, the estimate is still not too bad -- $0.91 to avert a year of suffering.
4. More studies are on the way.  Nick Cooney is going to do a bunch more to study leaflets, and Xio Kikauka and Joey Savoie have publicly published some survey methodology [Google Docs].

That said, the possibility for desirability bias in the survey is a large concern as long as the surveys continue to be from overt animal welfare groups and continue to clearly state that they're looking for reductions in meat consumption.

Also, so long as surveys are only given to people that remember the leaflet or advertisement, there will be a strong possibility of response bias, as those who remember the ad are more likely to be the ones who changed their behavior.  We can attempt to compensate for these things, but we can only do so much.

Furthermore, and more worrying, there's a concern that the surveys are just measuring normal drift in vegetarianism, without any changes being attributable to the ads themselves.  For example, imagine that every year, 2% of people become vegetarians and 2% quit.  Surveying these people at random and not capturing those who quit will end up finding a 2% conversion rate.

How can we address these?  I think all three problems can be solved with a decent control group, whether it be a group of people that receive a leaflet not about vegetarianism, or no leaflet at all.  Luckily, Kikauka and Savoie's survey intend to do just that.

Jeff Kaufman has a good proposal for a survey design I'd like to see implemented in this area.

 

Market Saturation and Diminishing Marginal Returns?

Another concern is that there are diminishing marginal returns to these ads.  As the critique goes, there are only so many people that will be easily swayed by the advertisement, and once all of them are quickly reached by Facebook ads and pamphlets, things will dry up.

Unlike the others, I don't think this criticism works well.  After all, even if it were true, it still would be worthwhile to take the market as far as it will go, and we can keep monitoring for saturation and find the point where it's no longer cost-effective.

However, I don't think the market has been tapped up yet at all.  According to Nick Cooney [PDF], there are still many opportunities in foreign markets and outside the young, college kid demographic.

 

The Conjunction Fallacy?

The conjunction fallacy is a classic fallacy that reminds us that no matter what, the chance of event A happening can never be smaller than the chance of event A happening, followed by event B.  For example, the probability that Linda is a bank teller will always be larger than (or equal to) the probability that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist.

What does this mean for vegetarian outreach?  Well, for the simple calculator, we're estimating five factors.  In the complex calculator, we're estimating 90 factors.  Even if each factor is 99% likely to be correct, the chance that all five are right is 95%, and the chance that all 50 are right is only 60%.  If each factor is only 90% likely to be correct, the complex calculator will be right with a probability of 0.5%!

This is a cause for concern, but I don't think there's any way around this.  It's just an inherent problem with estimation.  Hopefully we'll be balanced by (1) using the different bounds and (2) hoping underestimates and overestimates will cancel each other out.

 

Conversion and The 100 Yard Line

Something we should take into account that helps the case for this outreach rather than hurts it is the idea that conversions aren't binary -- someone can be pushed by the ad to be more likely to reduce their meat intake as opposed to fully converted.  As Brian Tomasik puts it:

Yes, some of the people we convince were already on the border, but there might be lots of other people who get pushed further along and don’t get all the way to vegism by our influence. If we picture the path to vegism as a 100-yard line, then maybe we push everyone along by 20 yards. 1/5 of people cross the line, and this is what we see, but the other 4/5 get pushed closer too. (Obviously an overly simplistic model, but it illustrates the idea.)

This would be either very difficult or outright impossible to capture in a survey, but is something to take into account.

 

Three Places I Might Donate Before Donating to Vegan Outreach

When all is said and done, I like the case for funding this outreach.  However, I think there are three other possibilities along these lines that I find more promising:

Funding the research of vegan outreach: There needs to be more and higher-quality studies of this before one can feel confident enough in the cost-effectiveness of this outreach.  However, initial results are very promising, and the value of information of more studies is therefore very high.  Studies can also find ways to advertise more effectively, increasing the impact of each dollar spent.  Right now, however, it looks like all ongoing studies are fully funded, but if there were opportunities to fund more, I would jump on it.

Funding Effective Animal Activism: EAA is an organization pushing for more cost-effectiveness in the domain of nonhuman animal welfare and is working to further evaluate what opportunities are the best, Givewell-style.  Giving them more money can potentially attract a lot more attention to this outreach, and get it more scrutiny, research, and money down the line.

Funding Centre for Effective Altruism: Overall, it might just be better to get more people involved in the idea of giving effectively, and then getting them interested in vegan outreach, among other things.

 

Conclusion

Vegan outreach is a promising, though not fully studied, method of outreach that deserves both excitement and skepticism.  Should one put money into it?  Overall, I'd take a guarded approach of putting in just enough money to help the organizations learn, develop better cost-effective measurements and transparency, and become more effective.  It shouldn't be too long before this area will become studied well enough to have good confidence in how things are doing.

More studies should be developed that explore advertising vegetarianism in a wide variety of media in a wide variety of ways, with decent control groups.

I look forward to seeing how this develops.  Don't forget to play around with my calculator.

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Footnotes

[1]: Cost effectiveness in years of suffering prevented per dollar = (Pamphlets / dollar) * (Conversions / pamphlet) * (Veg years / conversion) * (Animals saved / veg year) * (Years lived / animal).

Plugging in 80K's values... Cost effectiveness = (Pamphlets / dollar) * 0.01 to 0.03 * 25 * 100 * (Years lived / animal)

Filling in the gaps with my best guesses... Cost effectiveness = 5 * 0.01 to 0.03 * 25 * 100 * 0.90 = 112.5 to 337.5 years of suffering averted per dollar
I personally think 25 veg-years per conversion on average is possible but too high; I personally err from 4 to 7.

[2]: I feel like there's an error in this calculation or that Kaufman might disagree with my assumptions of number of animals or days per animal, because I've been told before that these estimates with this method are supposed to be about an order of magnitude higher than other estimates.  However, I emailed Kaufman and he seemed to not find any fault with the calculation, though he does think the methodology is bad and the calculation should not be taken at face value.

[3]: I calculated the number of vegetarians by eyeballing about how many people said they no longer eat fish, which I'd guess only a vegetarian would be willing to give up.

[4]: 32 vegetarians / 104 people = 30.7%.  That population is 8.5% (7% for likes + 1.5% for the starter kit) of the overall population, leading to 2.61% (30.7% * 8.5%).

[5]: Formula is [(Number Meat Chickens)(Days Alive) + (Number Egg Chickens)(Days Alive) + (Number Beef Cows)(Days Alive) + (Number Milk Cows)(Days Alive) + (Number Fish)(Days Alive)] / (Total Number Animals).  ...Plugging things in: [(28)(42) + (2)(365) + (0.125)(365) + (0.033)(1460) + (225)(365)] / 255.16] = 329.6 days

[6]: Cost effectiveness in amount of days prevented per dollar = (People Reached / Dollar + (People Reached / Dollar * Additional People Reached / Direct Reach * Response Bias * Desirability Bias)) * Years Spent Reducing * (((Percent Increasing Beef * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Beef * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Beef Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Beef Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Beef * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Beef * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Beef Consumption * Beef Elasticity * (Average Beef Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Beef Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Dairy * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Dairy * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Dairy Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Dairy Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Dairy * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Dairy * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Dairy Consumption * Dairy Elasticity * (Average Dairy Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Dairy Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Pig * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Pig * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Pig Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Pig Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Pig * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Pig * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Pig Consumption * Pig Elasticity * (Average Pig Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Pig Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Broiler Chicken * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Broiler Chicken * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Broiler Chicken Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Broiler Chicken Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Broiler Chicken * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Broiler Chicken * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Broiler Chicken Consumption * Broiler Chicken Elasticity * (Average Broiler Chicken Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Broiler Chicken Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Egg * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Egg * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Egg Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Egg Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Egg * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Egg * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Egg Consumption * Egg Elasticity * (Average Egg Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Egg Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Turkey * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Turkey * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Turkey Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Turkey Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Turkey * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Turkey * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Turkey Consumption * Turkey Elasticity * (Average Turkey Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Turkey Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Farmed Fish * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Farmed Fish * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Farmed Fish Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Farmed Fish Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Farmed Fish * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Farmed Fish * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Farmed Fish Consumption * Farmed Fish Elasticity * (Average Farmed Fish Lifespan + Days of Suffering from Farmed Fish Slaughter)) + (((Percent Increasing Sea Fish * Increase Value) + (Percent Staying Same with Sea Fish * Staying Same Value) + (Percent Decreasing Sea Fish Slightly * Decrease Slightly Value) + (Percent Decreasing Sea Fish Significantly * Decrease Significantly Value) + (Percent Eliminating Sea Fish * Elimination Value) + (Percent Never Ate Sea Fish * Never Ate Value)) * Normal Sea Fish Consumption * Sea Fish Elasticity * Days of Suffering from Sea Fish Slaughter) * Response Bias * Desirability Bias

[7]: Feel free to check the formula for accuracy and also check to make sure the calculator implements the formula correctly.  I worry that the added accuracy from the complex calculator is outweighed by the risk that the formula is wrong.

-

Edited 18 June to correct two typos and update footnote #2.

Also cross-posted on my blog.

I think I’ve always had certain stereotypes in my mind about research. I imagine a cutting-edge workplace, maybe not using the newest gadgets because these things cost money, but at least using the newest ideas. I imagine staff of research institutions applying the scientific method to boost their own productivity, instead of taking for granted the way that things have always been done. Maybe those were the naive ideas of someone who had never actually worked in a research field. 

At the medical research institute where I work one day a week, I recently spent an entire seven-hour day going down a list of patient names, searching them on the hospital database, deciding whether they met the criteria for a study, and typing them into a colour-coded spreadsheet. The process had maybe six discrete steps, and all of them were purely mechanical. In seven hours, I screened about two hundred and fifty patients. I was paid $12.50 an hour to do this. It cost my employer 35 cents for each patient that I screened, and these patients haven't been visited, consented or included in any study. They're still only names on a spreadsheet. I’ve been told that I learn and work quickly, but I know I do this task inefficiently, because I’m not a simple computer program. I get bored. I make mistakes. Heaven forbid, I get distracted and start reading the nurses’ notes for fun because I find them interesting.

In 7 hours, I imagine that someone slightly above my skill level could write a simple program to do the same task. They wouldn’t screen any patients in those 7 hours, but once the program was finished, they could use it forever, or at least until the task changed and the program had to be modified. I don’t know how much it would cost the organization to employ a programmer; maybe it would cost more than just having me do it. I don’t know whether allowing that program to access the confidential database would be an issue. But it seems inefficient to pay human brains to do work that they’re bad at, that computers would be better at, even if those human brains belong to undergrad students who need the money badly enough not to complain.

One of the criteria I looked at when screening patients was whether they did their dialysis at a clinic in my hometown. They have to be driving distance, because my supervisor has to drive around the city and pick up blood samples to bring to our lab. I crossed out 30 names without even looking them up because I could see at a glance that they were a nearby city an hour’s drive away. How hard would it be to coordinate with the hospital in that city? Have the bloodwork analyzed there and the results emailed over? Maybe it would be non-trivially hard; I don’t know. I didn’t ask my supervisor because it isn’t my job to make management decisions. But medical research benefits everyone. A study with more patients produces data that’s statistically more valid, even if those patients live an hour’s drive away.

The office where I work is filled with paper. Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold endless binders full of source documents. Every email has to be printed and filed in a binder. Even the nurses’ notes and patient charts are printed off the database. It’s a legal requirement. The result is that we have two copies of everything, one online and one on paper, consuming trees. Running a computer consumes fossil fuels, of course. I don’t know for sure which is more efficient, paper or digital, but I do know that both is inefficient. I did ask my supervisor about this, and apparently it’s because digital records could be lost or deleted. How much would it take to make them durable enough?

I guess that more than my supervisor, I see a future where software will do my job, where technology allows a study to be coordinated across the whole world, where digital storage will be reliable enough. But how long will it take for the laws and regulations to change? For people to change? I don’t know how many of my complaints are valid. Maybe this is the optimal way to do research, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a papier-mâché of laws and habits and trial-and-error. It doesn't feel planned. 

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