Quantifying the Impact of Economic Growth on Meat Consumption

If we are considering this as a reason to spend money on other causes than poverty alleviation, then yes I agree. But this is probably more relevant for other kinds of decisions where the tradeoff between supporting different causes is less clear. Secondly, apparently some people do change their causes based on this issue, so even if they're not being rational at least it can help them sort out their priorities better.

Finally, if people want an across the board positive moral portfolio, those people who donate primarily to poverty alleviation may want to know how much to support animal advocacy in order to offset the animal harm, so quantifying it will help them figure it out better.

Strongly agree with this Carl, great point.

I wonder if a way to steel man this type of analysis is to interpret it as an argument that you're focusing on the wrong metric?

Honestly, Carl, this is one of the best pieces of feedback I've read on the EA Forum, and I thought that from last time I read the original comment. May I suggest you turn some version of this argument into it's own top-level article on the Forum?

I wonder what the bundle is here that brings you out ahead on everything - $1,000 to AMF and $20 to Animal Equity?

Thanks, your post was actually the thing that reminded me about this topic and inspired me to try to go out and make some progress on the issue.

I don't think these numbers are likely to make aid bad because I think that aid improves welfare more-than-proportionally to its impact on the economy. In other words I suspect (uninformed opinion here) that the impact of aid on well being is significant while its impact on economic growth is smaller, in comparison to the normal correlation between wealth and happiness that we see when economies develop for normal reasons. So the human welfare/animal welfare tradeoff for charities could easily be good even if the human welfare/animal welfare tradeoff for economic development in general is bad.

I think at least I've given a low enough upper bound on the issue that we can have an easier time determining that certain other far-reaching concerns can outweigh it, and that's an important step.

The only thing that really worries me about the discussion taking place is that no one's pointed out any problems or adjustments to my calculations, and I wrote this between midnight and 4am, so I have a high prior for having messed something up or done something contentious, and I'd hope that people would do more to point out issues with the methodology rather than taking the results at face value.

True. Of course, some people are confident that helping the global poor is positive overall, so can be straightforwardly concerned about the PR problem.

Hi kbog, I appreciate you've done a lot of work here, but I've downvoted because I have a strong ethical and practical objection to this issue being discussed as 'the poor meat eater problem'. These objections have been hashed out every time this topic comes up. It makes me very sad that the meme persists, and I think it's terrible for it to be associated with EA discussion.

Ok, I didn't put any thought into the title, if that's a potential issue then I have no problem changing it.

Fallacy: the decision to focus on only one long term consequence of advancing development

I don't assume that this is the only thing to worry about, and I didn't want to leave this impression which is why I tried to be as clear as I could with my post about how many other consequences I left out of consideration, and didn't draw any conclusions nor even speculate about aid being net good or bad.

The failure to apply the same reasoning to developed countries

Yes I didn't write about that but I just consider it to be a separate discussion. I've thought about looking at developed countries in the same way, but right now I felt like this was a more relevant topic to EAs.

Clearly the vast bulk of meat is eaten by rich people. If you want to discuss the implications for animal suffering of economic development, then why limit the discussion to poor countries? Why limit the consideration to 'what might be the effects of increasing aid to developing countries'. If one was to take this line of reasoning as am important one (ie we should limiting animal suffering by limiting human economic development, since the latter is associated with more animal product consumption), then I would question why you don't also recommend the following:

I guess you take this as a reductio ad absurdum against the idea of reducing animal suffering in the developing world, but I don't see that as the case. It seems perfectly morally plausible to me, in theory, that we could be justified in limiting the growth of a society founded on animal exploitation, so while I haven't done any analysis of it, I can't say the idea is so ridiculous as to justify shutting down discussion. Again, I'm not saying that I support these things, I'm saying that the possibility that in a different universe I might be committed to supporting them doesn't seriously disturb me. Now I would expect economic harm to the developed world to have negligible effects on meat consumption - meat consumption levels off above a relatively high income, so preventing future economic development of wealthy countries doesn't accomplish anything in that regard. I also see social stability as having positive x-risks and economic growth as reducing wild animal suffering so that's why I'm against the things you mentioned.

Besides, what do you make of fossil fuel advocates who think it's morally wrong to restrict fossil fuels used by the developing world? Maybe they have a point, but they're not obviously right.

Hey Bernadette,

I think your general argument:

If making people richer is bad because it increases meat consumption, then this has many implications other than just for AMF - it is an argument for many otherwise abhorrent actions and policies.

is a good one.

But I think you could present it better. At the moment some of your examples are very partisan - in a US context you have two very anti-right-wing examples, and no anti-left-wing examples. Thinking about Politics is the Mindkiller, this is likely to make it hard for right-wing readers to appreciate your point. Their instinctive reaction to your post will be hostility and defensiveness:

"No, doesn't she realise that 'universal health care' costs far more than it is worth? Experiments like the RAND and Oregon healthcare experiments show that giving people more healthcare than they would buy themselves doesn't make them any healthier, it just increases taxes even further!"

"No, gun rights are an important human right - violating them to try to reduce murders makes as much sense as banning gay sex as a policy to fight HIV/AIDs."

Now, these responses would miss the point of your argument. Your argument doesn't depend on which policies would make people in the first world poorer. Ideally, your right-wing reader would instead substitute

• Support political parties that promote pointless regulation (reducing economic growth)
• Support minimum wages (unemployed people can't afford meat)
• Support mandatory contraception and abortion (people who are never born can't eat meat)

for your suggested examples and then come to agree with your substantive point. But I think in practice this is unlikely - it takes substantial effort to overcome the instinctive negative response

But you can avoid this reaction, and make it easier for people from diverse political backgrounds to agree with you, by either including political examples from a variety of perspectives - say, swap out one of the anti-right-wing examples for an anti-left-wing one - or better yet by simply not using any directly political examples at all. Your first and last examples do this well - sufficiently concrete that people can understand what they mean, but sufficiently abstract that readers can think of examples consistent with their other views.

edit: formatting

I also support renaming this the 'rich meat eater problem', or something like that. It's absurd to have to focus be on the very poor in this regard when the problem is on what happens when people are no longer poor.

It is also bizarre to focus on only this one long-term effect when there are so many others that seem as significant, or more so. To start with, a richer world means more researchers working on better meat-replacements, and a bigger market for any business that succeeds in developing such a novel product.