Yes, rich people eat more meat. A lot more. From OWID
Is this relationship causal? Probably. Obviously this is hard to establish but I'd bet that if we did have well-identified studies they'd validate that.
Is the increase in meat consumption per capita as incomes rise offset by declining birth rates? Probably not. The differences in meat consumption between rich and poor countries is large (can easily be a factor of 10 or more).
Does a $5000 donation to ACE offset the potential harms? This is a deep question. I suppose you could build a model to address it. I think that model would be extremely brittle and probably rest on weak evidentiary foundations. So I have no idea.
My thought: I would take the job that most increases your human capital. I am increasingly of the opinion that the future is going to be weird and we really, really need to be building skills. The big picture is too murky to think about in a productive way and things are going to be chaotic. We should focus on navigating the incoming chaos.
See also this[20] more recent meta-analysis that came to a similar conclusion about alternative proteins and other meat reduction interventions.
👋 I am lead author of that paper!
Two studies we looked at addressed alt proteins directly
Bianchi
2022
Replacing meat with alternative plant-based products (RE-MAP): a randomized controlled trial of a multicomponent behavioral intervention to reduce meat consumption
10.1093/ajcn/nqab414
Acharya
2004
Nutritional changes among premenopausal women undertaking a soya based dietary intervention study in Hawaii
10.1111/j.1365-277X.2004.00537.x
The second paper is a small sample and doesn't really address what we consider the modern generation of alt proteins. The first does. From that paper's abstract:
Methods
Adult volunteers who regularly consumed meat were recruited from the general public and randomized 1:1 to an intervention or control condition. The intervention comprised free meat substitutes* for 4 weeks, information about the benefits of eating less meat, success stories, and recipes. The control group received no intervention or advice on dietary change. The primary outcome was daily meat consumption after 4 weeks, assessed by a 7-day food diary, and repeated after 8 weeks as a secondary outcome...
Results
Between June 2018 and October 2019, 115 participants were randomized. The baseline meat consumption values were 134 g/d in the control group and 130 g/d in the intervention group. Relative to the control condition, the intervention reduced meat consumption at 4 weeks by 63 g/d (95% CI: 44–82; P < 0.0001; n = 114) and at 8 weeks by 39 g/d (95% CI: 16–62; P = 0.0009; n = 113), adjusting for sex and baseline consumption. The intervention significantly increased the consumption of meat substitutes without changing the intakes of other principal food groups.
* Participants selected the meat-free substitute foods from a catalogue containing the full range of products available in a major UK grocery store at the time of the trial. This included mycoprotein meat alternatives and vegetable- and pulse-based meat substitutes.
How much should one update on this study? IDK. But by its own lights, giving people alt proteins for free -- embedded in a larger intervention -- had meaningful effects.
However, when we test intro-ing alt proteins in a hypothetical, online ordering, chipotle-like environment, alas we don't find much.
It's true that we aren't powered to detect very small changes on any test. We did a fair bit of background work to target 5 pp. as our SESOI based on our understanding of what we could plausibly take to restaurants as an argument that they should add a chicken-based PMA to their menus.
if One were to have introduced a more more popular set of plant-based products it remains possible that these indeed would have substituted for the animal products.
Yes, that is possible. Our paper does not address what some other, more appealing thing would have done. However, taste parity is an open problem. My personal belief -- out of scope of the data -- is that we can think of consumers as extrapolating, when they see an item like "chickn'itas," that it'll basically be the category average, or on par with the other PMAs currently available at Chipotle, and making a choice based on that belief. Unfortunately, PMAs account for a small fraction of all sales (3% per this out-of-date article but I couldn't find anything more up to date and official. However, based on 1-on-1 conversations, I think this number is still approximately right). Chipotle has tried many times to introduce more plant-based options. If a more popular and appealing option existed at the kind of margins that Chipotle looks for, we can assume they would have already made it available.
Regarding the chicken-vs-everything else split: the difference-in-difference CI ([−12.58, 0.73]) is wide, and we say in the paper that we can't resolve which meat the displacement came from, alas.
Hi David, my colleagues and I have a forthcoming project that will address the substitution question using a large, novel dataset.
Regarding the extent to which PBAs displace demand for meat products or provide more options for vegetarians, some work led by my colleague Jessica Hope is relevant (summarized here).
I suspect other teams have forthcoming work on this as well. Very interesting subject!
There are some scenarios where AGI liberates us from constraints and others where it enables humans to extend their dominance over animals. Who can say?
Something about this topic creates a semantic stop sign for people whose opinions I otherwise find interesting. So even if the subject interesting in the abstract, I'm afraid here and now it sometimes leads to worse discussions.
I have not read this paper -- I will put it on my reading list -- but for folks interested in the subject, I recommend Norwood and Lusks's book Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, specifically chapter 5, which covers different rearing systems. They argue, and I agree, that cage-free systems are better overall for chicken welfare but note that many farmers and specialists feel that caged systems are actually better for overall flock health. For instance, mortality is higher in cage-free systems due to diseases, pecking etc. (Here is some contrary evidence.)
The first person I lightly flambéed also said “sorry I was used to less nice parts of the internet” so I guess that went down well
When someone says “be nice” and it gets more upvotes than the post itself that provides a more meaningful signal of how a post went astray than just downvoting the original post
So I am not persuaded and will keep doing my chastise-y hall monitor thing 😤😤😤
The big difference, however, is that Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military. Think of the difference between “this fighter jet is not certified for flight above such-and-such an altitude, and if you fly above that altitude, you’ve breached your warranty,” and “you may not fly this jet above such-and-such an altitude”). It is probably the case that the military should not agree to terms like this, and private firms should not try to set them.
The contract was not illegal, just perhaps unwise, and even that probably only in retrospect. Note that this is true even if you agree with the underlying substance of the limitations. You can support restrictions on mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons, but disagree that a defense contract is the optimal vehicle to achieve that policy outcome. The way you achieve new policy outcomes, under the usual rules of our republic, is to pass a law...
I agree that there's something iffy/non-democratic in theory about putting that kind of constraint around the Pentagon, and that it would have been prudent for them to decline it in the first place. An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital "you're welcome to use our drug so long as you don't use it in any abortions," it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
Anyway this reframing put one sentence in particular by Dario into a new light: "To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI." In other words, because we know what the law should be and what it's probably going to be, we should implement that policy today. I think many of us can think of examples where we'd be uncomfortable with a billionaire tech CEO saying that.
Yes, rich people eat more meat. A lot more. From OWID
Is this relationship causal? Probably. Obviously this is hard to establish but I'd bet that if we did have well-identified studies they'd validate that.
Is the increase in meat consumption per capita as incomes rise offset by declining birth rates? Probably not. The differences in meat consumption between rich and poor countries is large (can easily be a factor of 10 or more).
Does a $5000 donation to ACE offset the potential harms? This is a deep question. I suppose you could build a model to address it. I think that model would be extremely brittle and probably rest on weak evidentiary foundations. So I have no idea.
My thought: I would take the job that most increases your human capital. I am increasingly of the opinion that the future is going to be weird and we really, really need to be building skills. The big picture is too murky to think about in a productive way and things are going to be chaotic. We should focus on navigating the incoming chaos.
Hi there
👋 I am lead author of that paper!
Two studies we looked at addressed alt proteins directly
The second paper is a small sample and doesn't really address what we consider the modern generation of alt proteins. The first does. From that paper's abstract:
Methods
Adult volunteers who regularly consumed meat were recruited from the general public and randomized 1:1 to an intervention or control condition. The intervention comprised free meat substitutes* for 4 weeks, information about the benefits of eating less meat, success stories, and recipes. The control group received no intervention or advice on dietary change. The primary outcome was daily meat consumption after 4 weeks, assessed by a 7-day food diary, and repeated after 8 weeks as a secondary outcome...
Results
Between June 2018 and October 2019, 115 participants were randomized. The baseline meat consumption values were 134 g/d in the control group and 130 g/d in the intervention group. Relative to the control condition, the intervention reduced meat consumption at 4 weeks by 63 g/d (95% CI: 44–82; P < 0.0001; n = 114) and at 8 weeks by 39 g/d (95% CI: 16–62; P = 0.0009; n = 113), adjusting for sex and baseline consumption. The intervention significantly increased the consumption of meat substitutes without changing the intakes of other principal food groups.
* Participants selected the meat-free substitute foods from a catalogue containing the full range of products available in a major UK grocery store at the time of the trial. This included mycoprotein meat alternatives and vegetable- and pulse-based meat substitutes.
How much should one update on this study? IDK. But by its own lights, giving people alt proteins for free -- embedded in a larger intervention -- had meaningful effects.
However, when we test intro-ing alt proteins in a hypothetical, online ordering, chipotle-like environment, alas we don't find much.
Hi David,
It's true that we aren't powered to detect very small changes on any test. We did a fair bit of background work to target 5 pp. as our SESOI based on our understanding of what we could plausibly take to restaurants as an argument that they should add a chicken-based PMA to their menus.
Yes, that is possible. Our paper does not address what some other, more appealing thing would have done. However, taste parity is an open problem. My personal belief -- out of scope of the data -- is that we can think of consumers as extrapolating, when they see an item like "chickn'itas," that it'll basically be the category average, or on par with the other PMAs currently available at Chipotle, and making a choice based on that belief. Unfortunately, PMAs account for a small fraction of all sales (3% per this out-of-date article but I couldn't find anything more up to date and official. However, based on 1-on-1 conversations, I think this number is still approximately right). Chipotle has tried many times to introduce more plant-based options. If a more popular and appealing option existed at the kind of margins that Chipotle looks for, we can assume they would have already made it available.
Regarding the chicken-vs-everything else split: the difference-in-difference CI ([−12.58, 0.73]) is wide, and we say in the paper that we can't resolve which meat the displacement came from, alas.
Hi David, my colleagues and I have a forthcoming project that will address the substitution question using a large, novel dataset.
Regarding the extent to which PBAs displace demand for meat products or provide more options for vegetarians, some work led by my colleague Jessica Hope is relevant (summarized here).
I suspect other teams have forthcoming work on this as well. Very interesting subject!
👋 we've updated this post to link to the now-published paper:
Hope, J. E., Green, S. A., Peacock, J. R., & Mathur, M. B. (2026). Effects of adding plant-based menu options on meat selection frequency: A randomized controlled experiment. Food Quality and Preference, 105931.
I don't have a singular directional intuition about this.
Hi James,
I'm of course excited to see more funding and attention here and I broadly agree with your theory of change.
Obvious counterfactual is to funnel that same donation into, say, one of four existing groups:
What appeals about going your own way?
I have not read this paper -- I will put it on my reading list -- but for folks interested in the subject, I recommend Norwood and Lusks's book Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, specifically chapter 5, which covers different rearing systems. They argue, and I agree, that cage-free systems are better overall for chicken welfare but note that many farmers and specialists feel that caged systems are actually better for overall flock health. For instance, mortality is higher in cage-free systems due to diseases, pecking etc. (Here is some contrary evidence.)
So I am not persuaded and will keep doing my chastise-y hall monitor thing 😤😤😤
Dean Ball's commentary on this refamed the issue for me https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/clawed
I agree that there's something iffy/non-democratic in theory about putting that kind of constraint around the Pentagon, and that it would have been prudent for them to decline it in the first place. An analogy I read on Substack: if an epidural manufacturer told a government hospital "you're welcome to use our drug so long as you don't use it in any abortions," it would probably be prudent to decline that contract (too much overhead).
Anyway this reframing put one sentence in particular by Dario into a new light: "To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI." In other words, because we know what the law should be and what it's probably going to be, we should implement that policy today. I think many of us can think of examples where we'd be uncomfortable with a billionaire tech CEO saying that.