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Larks comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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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.
ISTM that meat is usually produced relatively near where it's sold, probably because of what Gwern says.
That's not what I meant to ask. You said something about grains costing more energy for shipment per unit food energy value which as far as I could tell had nothing to do with how much people valued stuff. What I meant to ask was whether you think that, counting both production and shipment, meat costs less energy per unit food energy value than grains, because that's what your comment seemed to imply. (And while I'm not sure what you were using “some people value X” as an argument for, keep in mind that some people are willing to spend tens or sometimes even hundreds of dollars for a ticket to a football match -- not to mention stuff like heroin.)
I think those are vastly overrated -- for almost any ‘reasonable’ diet composition, they are second-order effects at best. They certainly don't outweigh two orders of magnitude between food energy values. (Of course, people like to advertise their cheese as only containing 10% of fat without telling you the total food energy value of 100 grams of the stuff, so this point is rarely emphasized.) I'm going to add links to earlier comments of mine where I talk about this, when I find them.
It is possible to get quite decent amino acid ratios from a vegetarian diet, or even from a vegan diet (though it's harder). (This is probably one of the reason why I picked soy rather than oats as an example, even though the latter has an even higher food energy value per energy cost.)
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"
Yes (provided that's a generic “you”). If you wouldn't call that a tragedy of commons, then the two of us are just using the term with two slightly different meanings.