= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (182)
Even if one assigned exactly zero terminal value to non-sapient beings (as IIRC EY does), it takes a hella more resources to grow 2000 kcal's worth of lamb than to grow 2000 kcal's worth of soy, and if everyone wanted to live on the diet of an average present-day American I don't think the planet could handle that; so until we find a way to cheaply grow meat in a lab/terraform other planets, eating meat amounts to defecting in an N-player Prisoner's Dilemma. (But the conclusion “...and therefore we should let people born from the wrong vagina die from malaria so they won't eat meat” doesn't feel right to me.)
(EDIT: I'm not fully vegetarian myself, though like the author of the linked post I eat less meat than usual and try to throw away as little food as possible.)
(Edited to remove the mention of the Tragedy of Commons -- turns out I was using that term in a non-standard way.)
It's not the tragedy of the commons because farms are privately owned. There might be some aspects like that (e.g. climate change) but "resources used" is in general a problem whose costs are fully internalised and can thus be dealt with by the price system.
I don't know much economics so I might be talking through my ass, but doesn't consuming more meat cause the price of meat to increase if the cost of producing meat stays constant, incentivizing farmers to produce more meat? (The extreme example is that if nobody ate meat nobody would produce meat as they would have no-one to sell it to, and if everybody only ate meat nobody would grow grains for human consumption.) And what about government subsidies?
Yes, the price would go up until no-one else wanted to eat meat. No extra planets required, and no market failure.
Still trying to wrap my head around this... [Off to read Introduction to Economic Analysis by R. Preston McAfee. Be back later.]
Tragedies of the commons only occur when the costs of your decisions are bourne by you. But that's not the case here; buying more meat means you have to pay more, compensating the farmer for the increased use of his resources.
Yes, you slightly increase the cost of meat to everyone else. You also slightly reduce the price of the other things you would otherwise have spent your money on. But it is precisely this price-raising effect that prevents us from accidentally needing three earths: long before that, the price would have risen sufficiently high that no-one else would want to eat meat. This is the market system working exactly as it should.
If it were the case that meat farming caused unusually large amounts of pollution, there might be a tragedy of the commons scenario. But it would have nothing to do with the amount of resources required to make the meat.
The idea that eating stuff that requires 100 units of energy to be grown when I could easily live on stuff that requires 1 unit of energy instead is totally unproblematic so long as I pay for it still sounds very counter-intuitive to me. I think I have an idea of what's going on, but I'm going to finish that introductory economics textbook first because I might be badly out of whack.
It's problematic only to the extent that you could otherwise have spent the money on even more useful things.
30,000 kcal's worth of soy arguably is more useful than 100 kcal's worth of lamb. That's my point.
The grain has a higher mass and lower value-density, so you're going to have a harder time shipping it long distances at a worthwhile price.
If you'd rather have lots of soy why did you buy the lamb? Economics can't save you from making irrational decisions.
You might say that you prefer the lamb but poor people would prefer the lamb, and society is biased in favour of poor people. But then this is a distribution of initial wealth problem, as all efficient outcomes can be achieved by a competitive equilibrium - not a tragedy of the commons problem at all.