Hey all!  I have a simple question with a complicated answer- how cost effective is cultivated meat?  In other words, how good is it to put a dollar into cultivated meat?

This is an important question to answer if our goal is to compare cultivated meat to other animal welfare interventions.  For example, many animal welfare nonprofits like the Shrimp Welfare Project and The Humane League have had many successful initiatives that we can use to estimate their cost effectiveness with decent accuracy (probably to within less than 1 order of magnitude.)  If THL spends an average of X dollars per company they persuade to phase out battery cages, donating X dollars will probably get 1 more company to phase out battery cages.  And we can know that with decently high confidence.

But cultivated meat has never succeeded before and therefore our "sample size" is 0.  X dollars could be 1000x more effective going to GFI than to THL, it could be 1000x less, or it could be about equal.  There is necessarily no data that supports any of those positions because cultivated meat has never happened before.

A linear extrapolation strategy often is helpful for this kind of problem, but here it seems useless.  We can be confident that if no money was invested in cultivated meat, it would never succeed.  And with the amount of money that has been invested, and assuming investment patterns keep following a similar trajectory, there are a wide range of expert estimates that range from "probably in a decade" to "probably never." We can't exactly draw a line from "never" to "halfway between 2034 and never," so we're kind of back to square 1.  

Complicating things slightly, money can either fund public or private work.  If Upside Foods' bioprocess is 95% finished and they just need a little more research and then capital to scale, we should be pumping as much money into Upside Foods as possible.  But if Upside Foods and all their peers are nowhere close to optimizing their bioprocess and they need a much more extensive body of public knowledge to make progress faster, we should be pumping money into public research instead.  Where do those lines meet?  I have no idea.

This forum is full of people who are much better at estimation than I am.  I'd love to read y'all's solutions.