Edit: this is out of date, see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YuFD4v7DFBcM57eSA/consequences-of-animal-product-consumption-combined-model
The "meat eater problem" is the problem that, the more we enrich people, the more meat they will eat - which increases animal suffering.
Well I took my old analysis here, that was estimating the magnitude of the meat eater problem. Then I decided to combine it with the animal suffering numbers from my more recent estimate of the net farm animal suffering caused by farming.
In the process I found that my meat eater calculation included a critical misreading of York & Gossard. Fish consumption does increase as African countries get wealthier, by an estimated 0.79kg annually per $1000 GDP.
I'll suppose that 0.6kg out of this marginal increase is from farming. I'll suppose that 0.4kg of this is like catfish (because the similarly small tilapia is commonly farmed in Africa and other poor regions) and 0.2kg is like salmon.
Plugging these numbers into the animal welfare spreadsheet as a "diet" (too simple an action to merit uploading - it's just the kg quantities from the meat eater sheet, plus 0.4k for catfish and 0.2kg for salmon) I get -720 welfare day-points for the year's marginal meat consumption. This means that a $1,000 increase in GDP per capita for a person in Africa has an animal cost that is equivalent to -2 points on a -100 to +100 scale, which is 4% of the average welfare difference between living in India and living in Canada, using my sentience weights. Things may be worse in India/Bangladesh: presumably they fall somewhere between the average relationship for Asia (2.31kg) and the relationship for the West, Africa and the Middle East (0.79kg). The authors suggest that cultural factors drive the difference.
I'm ignoring the climate change costs of meat consumption because that can and should be left as part of the more general question of the link between economic development and long run GHG emissions. In any case, GHG emissions only make a relatively small difference on any short or medium run outlook, as I argued when I posted the farming analysis.
Given these assumptions about animal farming (which point heavily towards animal charity in the first place, anyway - see Shulman's comment in the original meat eater problem thread) I think these numbers suggest general agnosticism about the direct impacts of economic growth aside from the question of wild animal suffering. I would make an exception for pulling people out of serious poverty because the wealth-welfare relationship is solidly logarithmic. Per Footnote 7, York & Gossard seem to think that neither a linear model (which they present, because it's simpler) nor a logarithmic model (which they claim to have done) is decisively a better fit for the relationship between wealth and animal consumption.
Thanks for posting this update. I'm fairly new to the forum, so I missed the original posting of the two links you've provided.
These posts seem closely related to meat consumption Kuznets curves. I am not an expert in this literature and I intend to do more reading on the topic, but a quick search found this 2013 paper, which might be of interest to you. I've only briefly looked over the paper, but their results seem to update and support the findings of York and Gossard (2004). It seems that the expected turning point of the meat consumption Kuznets curve occurs at a per capita income of US$45,263 in the full sample of 150 countries (in their sample, only 3 countries reach this threshold).
Not that Kuznets curves should be interpreted as causal relationships, but I was naively hopeful that it might occur here.
Anyway, I'm interested to see your animal suffering extension of this idea. I think there is a small literature on animal welfare Kuznets as well, which may be interesting. Thanks for sharing your work and your updates!
I just had a very quick look-through of Y&G, but it looks like they tested for curvilinear (i.e., a log transformation of GDP) only. I could be missing a footnote, but I don't believe they included a second-order GDP term to test a polynomial relationship.
However, the findings of the 2013 paper largely support that, from my quick reading. The estimation of the second-order coefficient is significant but basically zero for most of the different data slices. Further, when they back out the inflection points, the income levels for the turning point ... (read more)