I attended an interesting (not just researchers!) Wellbeing Forum in London on Monday. Focus topics highlighted two unusual (for this topic) themes that might both be of interest to people here: 'Human wellbeing in the age of AI' and 'religion and spirituality' (using recent large global polling data from Gallup). Feel free to DM me if you want more info or have any questions.
Hi - thanks again for taking more time with this, but I don't think you do understand my model. It has nothing to do with capital assets, hiring/firing workers, or switching suppliers. All that it requires is that some decisions are made in bulk, i.e. at a level of granularity larger than the impact of any one individual consumer. I agree this is less likely for retail stores (possibly some of them order in units of 1? wouldn't it be nice if someone actually cared enough to look into this rather than us all arguing hypothetically...), but it will clearly h...
I still haven't read Budolfson, so I'm not claiming that M&H misinterpret him. As I said, I did read their entire paper, and in the section specifically about him they describe two interpretations of "buffer", neither of which matches my model. So if his model is similar to mine, they got it wrong. If his model is different than mine, then they don't seem to have ever considered a model like mine. Either way a bad sign.
Everything you write about how you think they might respond to me (i.e. your three bullet points and the subsequent paragraph) is 100% ...
Yes all fair, and I'd say it goes beyond counterfactuals. I'm not sure people fully realize how sensitive many conclusions are to all sorts of assumptions, which are often implicit in standard models. I am on record disagreeing strongly with John Halstead about the likely cost-effectiveness of advocating for economic growth, and I feel similarly about much of the longtermist agenda, so this isn't specific to animals. My personal sense is that if you can save an existing human life for a few thousand dollars (for which the evidence is very clear, although p...
Interesting - thanks for the extra info re Budolfson. I did in fact read all of M&H, and they give two interpretations of the buffer model, neither of which is related to my model, so that's what I was referring to. [That's also what I was referring to in my final paragraph: none of the sources you cited on that side of the causal efficacy argument seems to have considered anything like my model, which remains true given my current knowledge.] In fact if Budolfson was saying something more like my model, which does seem to be the case, then that'...
I wasn't gesturing toward the relative competitiveness because it's important per se (you're right that it isn't) but rather as a way to gauge absolute competitiveness for those who don't already know that a net profit margin of 5.7% isn't bad at all. My intuition is that people realize that both defense and healthcare firms make decent profits (as they do) and hence that this fact would help convey that farmers (whether large or small; and if your point is that they can differentiate themselves and do some monopolistic competition then you're already on m...
I had seen some of this, but not the specific paper (ungated) by McMullen & Halteman - thanks!
First of all note that the two sources you cite directly contradict one another: the first-hand anecdotal account says there is essentially no meat waste even in very small groceries, while M&H (p.12) say there is a modest constant unavoidable waste that is in fact higher in smaller / local stores than for big outfits. Indeed M&H are internally inconsistent: they say that the market is highly competitive (although they only give a very incomplete refer...
I'm a professor of economics, but thanks for the link explaining elasticity :)
The answer is no, we can't just do that, since those approaches assume nontrivial changes (and/or they assume everything is continuous, which the real world isn't). One plausible simple model of supermarket (or restaurant) purchasing behavior is that when observed demand goes above/below a certain threshold relative to predicted demand, they buy more/less of the input next cycle. From an individual point of view, the expected aggregate demand of other agents in any time per...
Thanks for the input Michael - your estimates seem reasonable / defensible to me. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable / defensible to argue that time spent just sitting around is fairly highly pleasurable for chickens (relative to their maximum): many humans prefer doing nothing to active foraging (NB I'm being serious), and chickens (like all prey) are evolved to be wary of predators and at risk of dying at any moment. My sense is that the default welfare state for all living beings is nontrivially positive (we see this in human survey data, and i...
Thanks again - all very constructive / helpful. I've updated some of my beliefs (partly toward the scale of this issue, as you intended, but also toward current factory farming not being as bad as I would have guessed... although I admit most people probably know less about conditions than I did), and I hope you have as well.
The only place I wanted to specifically respond is to your comment that you "sympathise with animal-welfare advocates pushing for veganism because the most common objections to it are pretty weak" - this doesn't make sense to me. We sh...
Thanks for the quick and constructive reply!
(and yes apologies for the typo: I meant "disabling" not "debilitating")
I admit I'm still unconvinced by several of the assumptions and still believe that they require a bit more discussion / support / defense; e.g. in addition to the ones above, the claim that welfare is symmetric around the neutral point or (as discussed elsewhere in the comments) that their welfare range is 0.33 that of humans. I'm also sympathetic to the comment that was somewhat skeptical regarding the expected marginal impact of best-...
Hi Vasco -
It's great that you're so passionate about this, but I find it extremely surprising that you're willing to draw such strong conclusions based on such weak evidence and ad hoc assumptions. For instance if I change your assumption that debilitating pain is 100x as bad as hurtful pain, and instead assume that it is only 10x as bad (and don't change anything else), your calculations imply that even under the conventional scenario broiler chickens have net positive lives (and hence presumably that we should be eating as many of them as possible ...
I don't think this assumption Vasco made is reasonable, and it substantially overestimates the pleasure conventional broilers are likely to experience:
Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.
There are a few issues with this:
Hi - thanks for writing this - agree this is a somewhat neglected topic in general. You might want to look at a couple of my papers: a conceptual one (with my father and some perinatologists), and a follow-up empirical one that does actually ask people to try to put numbers on some of these important tradeoffs.
Hi Richard - this all makes a lot of sense. Gustav Alexandrie and I have a model of 'perspective-weighted utilitarianism' which also puts intermediate weight on potential people and has some of the same motivations / implications. I presented it at the June GPI workshop and would be happy to discuss.
-Julian
Thanks for this! A small point: as one of the coauthors of the Blattman et al Liberia CBT study, we didn't use trained counselors either (they basically don't exist in Liberia) so I think this helps somewhat with your legitimate concern about scaling. I wasn't sure what you meant by job training in that context?
We are just finishing a ten-year follow-up of the same population, with encouraging results, which should be public soon.
Great question and great answers so far. I always liked Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin, which has certainly saved millions of lives) but I suspect someone else would have found it relatively quickly if he hadn't - although I've never looked into the details.
What about George Washington? He obviously wasn't the intellectual leader of the early USA and its form of government (and should only get a fraction of the credit / blame for everything that followed), but my sense (?) is that he played a key political (leadership) and military role in the...
Another point of agreement: the economics profession currently focuses too much on empirical work. Meanwhile my own personal view is that people like Esther and Chris B are slightly 'too far' in the pro-RCT camp, and that people like Lant (and you) are 'too far' in the anti-RCT camp. But I don't see anyone in this discussion as being extreme (except possibly Lant...); healthy disagreement is to be expected and encouraged. Note that Esther and Abhijit's most recent book tackles macro issues like migration, trade, climate change, and yes growth - using RCTs ...
I'm going to try to step back first and speculate where we actually disagree, in hopes of getting at what you actually think should be happening differently, if anything. You seem to be arguing to some extent against things that do not exist, and in particular that neither I nor others are saying. I think we agree that (i) 1-5% of work in economics should be RCTs; (ii) RCTs are not the right approach for many, indeed most, questions in social science; (iii) there exists lots of policy-relevant and actionable information from non-RCT sources; (iv) intuition...
And thanks for your reply! I hope that you are now satisfied, since the issue is being discussed :) More seriously I really am glad you brought it to the fore again, because it deserves it, and I'm being [sincerely] critical only because I take it seriously and respect it.
Re the FP report: so did it find anything promising or not? My reading (could be wrong, obviously, so let me know) was that they/you didn't in fact find anything to point to; that they/you believe such a thing does exist; but that it would take a lot of time and effort to find...
Hello,
I've been meaning to respond to the original post but never got around to it, so thank you for bringing it back up and encouraging more discussion. I'm not a 'randomista' per se, but I have published RCTs as well as non-RCTs, and I have worked in the US as well as many developing countries. FWIW, like Lant I have a PhD in econ from MIT (where I was one year ahead of Esther and TA'd for Abhijit), have taught at Harvard (and elsewhere), and used to work at the World Bank. We're also fairly evenly matched at tennis, judging from an interesting doubles game ma...
I liked the post (I have worked a lot on RCTs, and a little on NPIs, but not together alas!). Here's another paper that I didn't see mentioned (although maybe I missed it) which I think roughly falls into the category you're considering?https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27496/revisions/w27496.rev0.pdf
I feel like there are also some behavioral econ papers looking at e.g. social distancing in queues, but off the top of my head I'm not certain if there are actual randomized field experiments in that space...
-julian
Thanks for this great post. I'm closer to left-libertarian or classical liberal myself, but I have many friends and family (mostly in the US) who are more traditional progressives and much more sympathetic to typical social justice concerns than to EA. I agree with many of the issues identified here (including in the comments); my own experience has been that it is largely that they want to be able to "walk and chew gum at the same time". As an economist, I'm imbued with notions like opportunity cost and only being able to optimize one goal at a time (pote...
I agree with several of the previous responses, but just to add something I haven't seen mentioned: it is a new / different experience 'outside the convex hull' of anything else. I selfishly enjoy that, because I like to experience new things (travel, changing research focus, ultra-running, etc), but I also believe that all of this gives me a more flexible and broader view of the world and how it can work and what it can contain, in a way that improves my perspective and my thinking. Imagination only goes so far, even for the most creative amongst us.
I consider myself 'EA-adjacent' for the past few years - very sympathetic and somewhat knowledgeable, although not fully invested for various reasons. However I think I was already broadly aware of all the IBCs you listed. So perhaps I am more invested than I thought! But my preferred interpretation is that most people who are sufficiently interested in EA and also sufficiently open to considering various causes will have already found most of these or will do so relatively quickly on their own. Obviously I could be wrong, and if you do a survey we will find out at least the first half.
[Note that I fully agree with you that it is very beneficial for people to be aware of these!]
Hi - I'm an American (although dual citizen with Canada) who worked in US government for six years (at the Fed and the CFPB) and am now an academic in the UK so happy to give my thoughts briefly; feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss further.
I agree with the general premise, both because the US is so large and because (for better or worse, and despite everything) the US is still seen as a leader in many ways: whether or not they copy it (often not, often with good reason), almost everyone will at least consider doing anything the US does. T...
This is great - thanks. My belief certainly wouldn't be that simply because of the age structure IFR is going to be lower in developing countries. I do think that will be protective, but I also think that poor health systems will (obviously) go the other way. Some risk factors (generally more stressed immune systems) may work against them; other risk factors (lower rates of hypertension & diabetes) may work in favor. Hopefully treatment regimens will improve over time in useful ways even for resource-poor settings, but it's hard to predict. S...
Sorry for the slow reply! I had been working on some rough estimates for total (i.e. including medium- and long-run downstream impacts) costs and benefits of e.g. lockdown vs targeted social distancing, but even in high-income countries this is hard! This paper from Layard et al (using well-being adjusted life years) is perhaps the closest I've seen:
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/occasional/op049.pdf
See also this effort for LMICs from CGD:
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/scoping-indirect-health-effects-covid-19-open-call-resources
Happy to consid...
Thanks! and good question. I wasn't being very precise, and partly that's because I suppose I see it on a continuum. The extent to which lockdowns make sense will depend on the context and will be correlated (I believe) with GDP/capita, % formal economy, etc. I actually think a decent case could be made against lockdowns even in high-income countries, although I'm not sure the numbers would come out that way (and I realize that's far more controversial). It's true that they are "practical" in middle- and high-income count...
If farmed chickens plausibly have overall net positive lives (per the discussion above), and if you're something like a total utilitarian, then you should want more of them to exist; hence eat more in order to at least weakly increase demand / production.
Alternately, if you think it's very difficult to know for sure whether chickens have net positive lives or not, and you enjoy the taste of chicken, then that's another case for eating more of them.