Thank you for posting this, Joey. I think people too often talk about things like this in the abstract, not knowing the realities of the market. Two considerations I have when considering salary:

1. Counterfactuals: Money, at the end of the day, is a limited resource. When considering the counterfactuals, I personally would feel unethical accepting a super high salary from CE, as I think the counterfactual of this money would be, e.g., one less high-impact organization being founded. In the early days, some of our charities started with just $25K-$50K grants; I can't imagine myself using this money for my salary. Some people say, "Give founders more money for their salaries," but what if this money means one less highly-impactful organization (like LEEP, FEM, FWI) not being started? As the donor would choose to make sure a person has an EA-standard salary and not put the money into starting another organization? There is significant flexibility in terms of what the salary will be in different countries and circumstances (e.g., one of the co-founders having dependents), but if this is secured (the needs of the founder are secured), then every additional dollar needs to be thought of in counterfactuals. And this is how most of the CE community thinks.
2. What It Takes to Live a Good Life Money-wise: People think CE staff are paid small salaries, while I, as CE Staff, am paid a London market-rate salary + I receive benefits like a small donation bonus, equipment allowance, and training allowance. I feel overall very happy. I mean, with an average market salary, you can live a super good life in London: rent a room, save for retirement, help your mom in Poland, and go to theatres and Billie Eilish concerts :). So this is a very lavish lifestyle compared to the people and animals we're helping.

This is super exciting and very much needed. Farmed animal welfare is still super neglected, funding is far too small, and there are not enough EAs working on this cause area. Hopefully, we all can help in getting this book a lot of hype, so maybe it will even inspire new people to join the movement. 
 

A very promising intervention and I am so excited that you decided to found it (I am also very biased as I work for CE :) ). Thanks for taking the challenge and I wish you a quick success! With your combined experience and high focus on impact, I am really hoping you will change the import situation not only in New Zeland. Best of luck!

I asked ChatGPT about this: 
"In general, a country within the European Union (EU) cannot unilaterally ban a specific type of food that has been approved for sale and consumption in the EU. EU food regulations are set at the EU level and are designed to create a single market for food products, with a high level of protection for human health and consumer interests.

However, there are some limited circumstances in which a country may be able to restrict or ban certain types of food within its borders. For example, if a specific food product poses a significant risk to human health, a member state may be able to take emergency measures to restrict or ban its sale. In such cases, the country must provide scientific evidence to demonstrate that the measure is necessary and proportionate to address the identified risk.

Furthermore, countries may impose additional labeling requirements or other restrictions on food products for reasons such as cultural or ethical considerations. For example, some EU countries have banned or restricted the sale of certain types of meat that are produced using particular methods, such as foie gras or halal or kosher meat, for animal welfare or religious reasons.

In any case, any measures taken by a member state must comply with EU law, and if they are found to be in breach of EU law, the European Commission may take action against the country in question."

I wonder if they can use "cultural/ethical" for this. But probably that would be a big stretch?

We discussed the episode with David yesterday at our meetup and we really loved it. A lot of people agree with some of his views, and we were trying to draw some conclusions on the next steps for the animal movement. Super useful! Therefore, can't wait for the next episode. Hopefully coming soon? :) Thanks for doing it <3 
Also: love the name, love the branding!!!
 

@Ren Springlea I asked my best friend who has 20+ tattoos and two children about her experience of pain (also inspired by @Molly 's comment).  This is what she wrote: 

"Having had many tattoos, some of them several hours long and having given birth twice as well as having experienced intense contractions following a termination of a pregnancy, I would not even attempt to compare these pains as they are on an entirely different scale.

I have tattoos over all parts of my body, including areas widely thought of as incredibly painful and I had many a session when I felt like my skin was being ripped apart, yet not a single one of them ever came close to what I felt during childbirth.

I had two unmedicated births when no analgesia was used whatsoever and whilst some hypnobirthing techniques along with mental preparation helped a lot the second time around, the pain I felt was still absolutely excruciating and way above anything a tattoo could ever cause even on a tired swollen and bleeding skin in the most painful place on the body."

Probably one of the coolest things I have ever read on the EA forum. Thank you so much, Ren! I was looking for something like this for years now. I always had this thought: how would it be if we treated animal suffering seriously? If we see them as humans for a bit. The conclusion was always: we will devote our lives, freedom, time, and strength to help them on a totally different level than we do now.

This post helped me see the suffering of animals much better than I have ever seen it before while reading hundreds of articles about their experiences. This was such a clever thing to do. This is such a smart post. I am extremely moved and extremely grateful you wrote it. I am not sure if people would appreciate it, but I do very much. It's so helpful to see this perspective. I don't feel like I need to do the experiments to benefit from your insights.  

I guess it solidifies my focus on decreasing animal suffering as my primary focus area, but it also makes me think more about tradeoffs between different interventions. 

Really great thing!

Already in our content calendar :) 

Thank you for your comment, Nick. I used the word "reach" because it is difficult to objectively measure the impact of some of our charities, given their age. We wanted to give people a sense of their current progress despite this. Reach can also give a sense of the potential scale of the intervention. We also tried to include some estimated cost effectiveness to show the sense of level of impact per dollar. However, overall we do agree with the general sentiment that, sadly, people tend to look at more vanity level metrics like reach, funding, etc. Of course, many of our organizations will need to run an RCT (which some are already planning) before we can get a real sense of their impact, and we believe our organizations are committed to do this. 

We indeed agree that Fortify Health has done a really great job, but we had to limit the number of charities we could talk to for this post, and some charities were more cautious about being associated with the EA movement. Feel free to check our website for updates.

Thank you for your comment, Yadav.
Regarding success rates, we expect the net impact per charity to generally improve because both our program and outreach have gotten stronger. This improvement could still happen even with the overall success rate of our charities decreasing, with more charities shutting down but more charities having large wins, especially in policy. Over time, we expect some of our charities to shut down, with our general estimate being that one in five will.

Regarding cost-effective ideas, we recognize this as a legitimate concern and something we think about quite a bit. There might be some diminishing returns on the impact of ideas we can find, but researching multiple cause areas has slowed this down a lot. We expect some level of a natural refresh rate as more studies and new evidence comes out on what are the most effective things to do. For example, we expect one new great idea per cause area to become newly available per year. Our current estimates suggest we could start about 10 charities across four cause areas a year for the foreseeable future.