= 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)
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.
You'll also need to pay for either the live lamb to be shipped (very troublesome) or for refrigerated lamb cuts in smaller refrigerator cars which is both more expensive than a big metal bucket for grain and also much more time-sensitive and perishable (arranging continued power for refrigeration). I'm not sure how the transportation costs would net out.
Does that outweigh the two orders of magnitude (according to the numbers given in the blog post linked to in the ancestor) between the energy cost of growing them? There likely are foodstuffs more energy-dense than grains but nowhere near as energy-expensive as meat. (Well, there's seed oil, but I don't think one could have a reasonably balanced diet getting most of the calories from there so that doesn't count.)
Given that meat is being produced and shipped around on a commercial scale, I'd say some people value meat more than enough to outweigh the increased cost of production, yes. Consider that there are factors other than energy in food quality, such as amino acid ratios.
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.
Er... The first instance of "lamb" was supposed to be "soy" and both instances of "poor" were supposed to be "rich", right?
Eeek. slightly clearer"