KT

Karthik Tadepalli

Economics PhD @ UC Berkeley
2913 karmaJoined Apr 2021Pursuing a doctoral degree (e.g. PhD)karthiktadepalli.com

Bio

I research a wide variety of issues relevant to global health and development. I'm always happy to chat - if you think we have similar interests and would like to talk, send me a calendar invite at karthikt@berkeley.edu!

Sequences
1

What we know about economic growth in LMICs

Comments
361

I upvoted because I liked the story, but this feels like a pretty glaring strawman of "mathematical solutions to multifaceted human problems". I can't imagine any reasonable solution/intervention to which this critique would apply.

Came here to comment this. It's the kind of paradigmatic criticism that Scott Alexander talks about, which everyone can nod and agree with when it's an abstraction.

There were a bunch, most prominently IRRI in the Philippines - Table 1 in this paper lists all of them.

Interesting, then I figure it probably substituted for meat consumption at restaurants rather than meat consumption at home. Regardless, I think it's mostly valid to use increase in plant based consumption as a proxy for a reduction in meat consumption since total food consumption is relatively stable.

Where are you getting that it didn't decrease meat sales? I see nothing in the article pointing to that and they also point out that aggregate meat sales have been calling.

I would be extremely skeptical that vegan consumption could go up a lot without meat consumption going down, since that would imply people are just consuming a lot more food in aggregate compared to previous years, which seems unlikely.

I don't have any disagreement with getting people information early, I just think characterizing the current system as one where only the criticizee benefits is wrong.

Yes, Ramsey discounting focuses on higher incomes of people in the future, which is the part I focused on. I probably shouldn't have said "main", but I meant that uncertainty over the future seems like the first order concern to me(and Ramsey ignores it).

Habryka's comment:

applying even mild economic discount rates very quickly implies pursuing policies that act with extreme disregard for any future civilizations and future humans (and as such overdetermine the results of any analysis about the long-run future).

seems to be arguing for a zero discount rate.

Good point that growth-adjusted discounting doesn’t apply here, my main claim was incorrect.

If you think that the risk of extinction in any year is a constant , then the risk of extinction by year is , so that makes it the only principled discount rate. If you think the risk of extinction is time-varying, then you should do something else. I imagine that a hyperbolic discount rate or something else would be fine, but I don't think it would change the results very much (you would just have another small number as the break-even discount rate).

Matthew is right that uncertainty over the future is the main justification for discount rates, but another principled reason to discount the future is that future humans will be significantly richer and better off than we are, so if marginal utility is diminishing, then resources are better allocated to us than to them. This classically gives you a discount rate of where is the applied discount rate, is a rate of pure time preference that you argue should be zero, is the growth rate of income, and determines how steeply marginal utility declines with income. So even if you have no ethical discount rate (), you would still end up with . Most discount rates are loaded on the growth adjustment () and not the ethical discount rate () so I don't think longtermism really bites against having a discount rate. [EDIT: this is wrong, see Jack’s comment]

Also, am I missing something, or would a zero discount rate make this analysis impossible? The future utility with and without science is "infinite" (the sum of utilities diverges unless you have a discount rate) so how can you work without a discount rate?

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