welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: How are resources in EA allocated across issues?, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum. This is a cross-post from 80,000 Hours. How are the resources in effective altruism allocated across cause areas? Knowing these figures, for both funding and labour, can help us spot gaps in the current allocation. In particular, I’ll suggest that broad longtermism seems like the most pressing gap right now. This is a follow on from my first post, where I estimated the total amount of committed funding and people, and briefly discussed how many resources are being deployed now vs. invested for later. These estimates are for how the situation stood in 2019. I made them in early 2020, and made a few more adjustments when I wrote this post. As with the previous post, I recommend that readers take these figures as extremely rough estimates, and I haven’t checked them with the people involved. I’d be keen to see additional and more thorough estimates. Update Oct 2021: I mistakenly said the number of people reporting 5 for engagement was ~2300, but actually this was the figure for people reporting 4 or 5. Allocation of funding Here are my estimates: Cause Area $ millions per year in 2019 % Global health 185 44% Farm animal welfare 55 13% Biosecurity 41 10% Potential risks from AI 40 10% Near-term U.S. policy 32 8% Effective altruism/rationality/cause prioritisation 26 6% Scientific research 22 5% Other global catastrophic risk (incl. climate tail risks) 11 3% Other long term 1.8 0% Other near-term work (near-term climate change, mental health) 2 0% Total 416 100% What it’s based on: Using Open Philanthropy’s grants database, I averaged the allocation to each area 2017–2019 and made some minor adjustments. (Open Phil often makes 3yr+ grants, and the grants are lumpy, so it’s important to average.) At a total of ~$260 million, this accounts for the majority of the funding. (Note that I didn’t include the money spent on Open Phil’s own expenses, which might increase the meta line by around $5 million.) I added $80 million to global health for GiveWell using the figure in their metrics report for donations to GiveWell-recommended charities excluding Open Philanthropy. (Note that this figure seems like it’ll be significantly higher in 2020, perhaps $120 million, but I’m using the 2019 figure.) GiveWell says their best guess is that the figures underestimate the money they influence by around $20 million, so I added $20 million. These figures also ignore what’s spent on GiveWell’s own expenses, which could be another $5 million to meta. For longtermist and meta donations that aren’t Open Philanthropy, I guessed $30 million per year. This was based on roughly tallying up the medium-sized donors I know about and rounding up a bit. I then roughly allocated them across cause areas based on my impressions. This figure is especially uncertain, but seems small compared to Open Philanthropy, so I didn’t spend too long on it. Neartermist donations outside of Open Phil and GiveWell are the most uncertain. I decided to exclude donors who don’t explicitly donate under the banner of effective altruism, or else we might have to include billions of dollars spent on cost-effective global health interventions, pandemic prevention, climate change etc. I excluded the Gates Foundation too, though they have said some nice things about EA. This is a very vague boundary. For animal welfare, about $9 million has been donated to the EA Animal Welfare Fund, compared to $11.6 million to the Long Term Future Fund and the Meta Fund (now called the Infrastructure Fund). If the total amount to longtermist and meta causes is $30 million per year, and this ratio holds more broadly, it would imply $23 million per year to EA animal welfare (excluding OP) in total. This seems plausible considering that Ani...