There is definitely a miscommunication occurring here. I am not arguing that improving taste has intrinsic social value, nor does my argument hinge on it. Quite the opposite, argument 1 requires an externality beyond taste. To state clearly, my arguments show that there is a market failure that causes the profit-maximizing investment in taste to be lower than the socially optimal investment in taste, where the socially optimal level is higher since higher tastiness would cause increased consumption, which would lower consumption of animal products, which would alleviate animal suffering.

To clarify the example in argument 1, I meant to say every iPhone sold, not every iPhone produced. Note that the causal chain is the same. This is precisely why I chose this example.

More storage -> more people buy iPhones -> better insect welfare = win

Tastier meat alternatives —> more people eat meat alternatives —> less animal suffering = win

The example is not perfect, because tastier meat alternatives only affect animal suffering through the number of meat alternatives sold (and more precisely, the number of animal products displaced), whereas, in the iPhone example, there is the extrinsic margin of increasing the number of iPhones sold, and also the intrinsic margin of increasing the number of GB, conditional on sale. I can see why this would be confusing and make it sound like the taste of the meat alternatives is presumed to be intrinsically good. That was not my intention. I intended to highlight a product with a positive externality, where increasing its value to the customer would also create additional social value. 

To that end, let's fix the example. Let's assume that we found out that every iPhone sold was somehow a massive boon for insect welfare. The social value of increasing the number of GB of storage in iPhones would increase upon the news, as increasing the storage capacity would make the iPhone more attractive to consumers, which would increase the number of iPhones sold, which would lead to better insect welfare. Likewise, any increase in the quality of iPhones would have the same effect. Storage was arbitrarily chosen as a metric that people care about, like the taste of food. However, I highly doubt that Apple would do much at all, if anything, to increase the number of iPhones sold upon learning this news regarding insect welfare. 

Thus, we can see that the introduction of an externality to the number of iPhones sold led to underprovisioning of iPhone quality-improvement research relative to what is socially optimal (profit-maximizing quality-improvement research remained the same, whereas the socially optimal value increased).

Regarding foundational research, the fact that food manufacturers invest in taste research does not imply a lack of underprovision of foundational research. Pretty much all industries do research. Foundational research is not the same as other kinds of research. Since this market failure is well-known, I don't think it is worth hashing out in detail, though I did explain it briefly above. You could argue that there isn't any foundational research to do in this field, or that it is very intractable, but arguing that a well-known market failure doesn't exist will be difficult.

Honestly, I fail to see how this responds to my comment. I will try to explain again.

There are two arguments here. My argument was that a profit-maximizing firm will invest less in improving taste than one that internalizes the externalities of replacing meat with plant-based foods, or whose customers internalize those externalities. Similarly, Apple has an incentive to increase the quality of the iPhone, but its incentive is tempered by cost. It chooses the quality that maximizes profit, not the maximum quality possible. Maybe for every GB of storage they cram into the iPhone, a baby alien is saved from a terrible death on a faraway planet. But if neither Apple nor Apple's customers internalize those externalities, Apple is going to put fewer GB of storage into the iPhone than is socially optimal. 

Here is maybe a better example: if we found out that adding extra GBs of storage to iPhones was somehow a massive boon for insect welfare, do we think that Apple would seriously put much effort into maximizing the number of GBs of storage in iPhones? No. Very few people care about insect welfare, and Apple would continue to market iPhones with the same amount of storage as they had previously planned. Even if Apple did care, if its customers didn't, then Apple might struggle to raise enough capital from profit-maximizing investors to reach the socially optimal level of GB of storage. (Ok, Apple would not struggle to raise capital, but Beyond Food might!)

The second argument, and this is the argument directly made in the RFP, is that they plan to fund foundational pre-competitive research questions. This is a well-known market failure in economics. Foundational research is often non-excludable and non-rival. That is, you can't patent it, and my use of it doesn't diminish your ability to use it. In short, a firm doing this research would absorb all of the cost but would not capture all of the benefit. This is why foundational research is often funded by governments and philanthropic organizations.

Maybe there are reasons why these arguments don't work in this case! But I would like to see counterarguments. Simply claiming that incentives are aligned doesn't address either of these arguments.

Let's assume for simplicity that these companies are profit-maximizing. Then they are, in fact, not incentivised to maximize tastiness. Taste can increase revenue, but it also increases cost. Therefore, the profit-maximizing investment in taste-improving research need not equal the socially optimal investment.

But actually, that is not the argument used in the post. They say:

These are foundational, pre-competitive research problems. They are unlikely to be solved by any single company and are systematically underfunded by both public agencies and private R&D budgets, making them strong candidates for philanthropic support.  

So this is a classic underprovision of fundamental research issue.

Saving animals from suffering in factory farms is an externality not priced in by the market. Therefore, the optimal investment in alternative meat is greater than the profit-maximizing investment.

Hi Garrison,

I notice that only the paperback is available for pre-order on Amazon. Will there be a kindle version?

Hi Jason, thanks for this. I was not aware of this review article. There is a new review article that came out this year, which concludes that there is insufficient evidentiary basis for harm from high protein intake. In particular, it seems like some of the results of previous studies may have been confounded with calorie intake.

I'm not a nutritionist or an exercise scientist, so I could be interpreting this incorrectly, but I think you are overly dismissive of the idea that people should be eating more protein.

The guideline's recommendation of 0.7 to 1 gram per kilogram daily represents the minimum intake needed to prevent malnutrition and maintain nitrogen balance; it is insufficient for optimal muscle growth when combined with strength training.^[1] For people who are trying to increase their muscle mass, Huberman's suggestion is accurate and helpful.^[2] Since muscle mass is associated with lower all-cause mortality, I think that Huberman's suggestion (when accompanied with adequate exercise) is more beneficial than the government guideline. This is especially true for older adults, but to ensure healthy aging and longer health spans, it is preferable to build muscle throughout adulthood.

That said, we should, of course, be encouraging people to get as much of their protein intake as possible from non-animal sources. Personally, I encourage vegans to exercise and try to eat in the range of 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound (1.5 to 2.2 grams per kg) of body weight per day, not only for your own health, but to be an example to others that they can reduce animal suffering without sacrificing their health or muscle growth.

1. ^{^}

   Note that the review you linked specifically excludes multi-component interventions, including protein and exercise combinations.

2. ^{^}

   https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/6/376
   https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8978023/
   Note that the first meta-analysis finds that the effect of supplementing protein plateaus at 1.6 g/kg. This is still within Huberman's range, and is still much higher than the guideline of 0.7 - 1. I've seen people in the exercise community quibble a lot about this supposed plateau. My position is that in expectation the benefit of going up from 1.6 g/kg to 2.2 g/kg is higher than the (pretty much non-existent) risk.

Now, this isn’t the best way to maximize expected value. If you were an expected value maximizing robot, you would not pursue this strategy. You would say “bleep bloop, this brings about 93.5 fewer expected utils than the other strategy.” But I assume you are not an EV maximizing robot.

Hmmm. This is interesting, as diversification is expected utility maximizing in the finance context. The fact that it is not EV maximizing in the utilitarian framework makes me wonder if there is something wrong with the framing.

The obvious difference is that EV is risk-neutral. I think this is usually justified by the fact that we are counting utils, whereas in finance, we are counting dollars. Arguably, it makes sense that utility is concave in dollars, but not that utility is (strictly) concave in itself.

Intuitively, this seems wrong to me. Imagine a choice set {A, B}. Choice A has a 50% chance of resulting in a world with 1 million sentient beings, all with 100 utils each, and a 50% chance of resulting in a world with zero sentient beings. Choice B results with certainty in a world with 500 thousand sentient beings, all with 100 utils each. I strictly prefer Choice B to Choice A, implying that I have a moral meta utility function that is concave in utils. This is sufficient to derive that diversification is optimal.

Thanks for this Phil,

A couple of questions regarding SWE:

“Second-wave endogenous” (I’ll write “SWE”) growth models posit instead that technology grows exponentially with a constant or with a growing population. The idea is that process efficiency—the quantity of a given good producible with given labor and/or capital inputs—grows exponentially with constant research effort, as in a first-wave endogenous model; but when population grows, we develop more goods, leaving research effort per good fixed.

Only one SWE model avoids a conclusion along these lines: the first one, Young (1998). It avoids the conclusion by positing that vertical innovation faces severely diminishing returns to research labor, so that in effect, a larger population can only be employed productively in research if the range of goods widens.

So does this mean that in the research production function, the exponent on the stock of 'ideas' is one, and the exponent on the number of researchers is significantly less than one? It might be nice to see the equation.

Relatedly, isn't endogenous growth a knife-edge case? Intuitively, it seems unlikely to be true, and SWE doesn't seem to address this issue.

I'm imagining something that is Cobb-Douglas between capital and land. Growth should be exponential (not super exponential) when A_auto is growing at a constant rate, same as a regular Cobb-Douglas production function between capital and labor. Specifically, I was thinking something like this:

X_old^beta(A_old K_old^alpha L^{1-alpha})^(1-beta) + X_auto^beta(A_auto K_auto)^(1-beta)

st X_old + X_auto = X_total (allocating land between the two production technologies)

As to your second point, yes, you are correct, as long as A_old is constant wages would not increase.