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Eugine_Nier comments on Vegetarianism - Less Wrong Discussion
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If that was the limiting factor I'd expect it to show up in the price of meat.
Vegetarians tell me that this is because of agricultural subsidies.
I grew up on a beef farm. There were no agricultural subsidies of that kind in place in the jurisdiction. It was still profitable to sell beef and the prices were not particularly exorbitant.
What did you feed them? I strongly suspect that's where the subsidies would show up.
What I hear is that it's water prices- if they were allowed to float, that would dramatically raise the price of meat. But I haven't researched that issue, so treat that as hearsay.
Ridiculous subsidies to the agricultural industry is not a worldwide phenomenon.
Pun intended? (Incidentally the prices are allowed to float here.)
Lucky! Are you outside the OECD? I haven't looked into it heavily, but I was under the impression that all of those countries had rather massive agricultural supports.
Given that I mentioned my background I assume you mean lucky for everyone else. Subsidies may not be efficient but the actual recipients tend to benefit. More government based income would have been handy.
New Zealand then Australia (here) are the most efficient agricultural producers in the OECD in terms of Producer Subsidy Estimate (PSE). About one fifth of the average. We tend to be the ones bitching about subsidies (and tariffs). Their impact on us is primarily to damage our export market.
Does this make sense?
I've heard the figure that cattle require 40 units of grain to produce beef with as many calories as one unit of grain. If this is true, and beef costs only ten times as much as flour, we should be subsidizing about 75% of the cost of raising cattle beyond whatever subsidies we have for the grain we feed them (much of the latter should be reflected in ground corn and wheat flour prices).
I don't actually know the numbers. My uneducated hunch is that we subsidize, but not to that level. I could also be missing something important in my model, like if the way we subsidize corn makes it basically free to feed to cattle, but still costly to feed to humans.
I wouldn't be surprised if transportation + milling + packaging make for a lot of this difference. I would expect bulk meat prices per unit to drop more slowly than bulk grain prices per unit, which is in the right direction to turn a 1:40 ratio into a 1:10 ratio.
I believe this does actually show up in the price of grain in poor countries. So even if you don't care about bovine suffering, if you care about human suffering there are mechanisms that reward eating less meat.
I believe this does show up. Quick Googling indicates that the wholesale price of ground beef is about ten times that of flour, and that squares with how much I think I've seen in supermarkets. Is there a reason you don't think that counts?
The point was that it showed up in damage to soil that doesn't cost more NOW but will later.
At any rate this is an argument in favour of pricing externalities better, not an argument against meat in general.
What exactly are the externalities supposed to be here? If the farming land is privately owned and the property rights secure in the long run, the cost of soil depletion is fully internalized. Or is there some wider-scale process going on that presents a collective action problem for farmers?
Internalizing future negative externalities without accounting for them now doesn't solve the problem, especially if people aren't aware of it. In a larger sense, the negative externalities of climate change are fully internalized to the human race, but as long as they don't affect us yet, we have little individual incentive to care.
Which is to say that a farmer that may go bankrupt in 20 years because the farm will no longer be able to sustain production is not going to increase prices unless the farmer is quite cognizant of the fact and is planning for it. Most won't.
So, new American tractors are now satellite-driven to ensure they don't take the same path, in order to decrease the amount of soil they kick up and erosion that happens. I find it unlikely many American farmers are oblivious to these issues.
That's pretty cool.
Part of my reply to Vladimir addresses your question; I think [North] American farmers aren't all that oblivious, but I suspect that they are still more optimistic than they ought to be. 20 years also might be too short a time window; 50 years might be more appropriate, and the problem still remains.
If nothing else, psychology tells us that once we start talking about a 50 year time window, we should have a very high prior for people being overly optimistic and insufficiently discounting future costs.
But why? In countries with stable governments and secure property titles, plenty of economic activity takes place with time horizons of this magnitude, and even much longer ones. What is it that makes landowners so irrationally shortsighted?
Poverty. If you have no income, and $X in savings that produce 5% interest, if 0.05X isn't enough to live on, you're still going to live on the money you have, even if you're aware that it will run out.
I think farmers in developed nations are much better off, but that farmers in the developing world are depleting topsoil faster than we can afford to have it depleted, to say nothing of the future cost to themselves. I further am under the impression that topsoil depletion is still a problem in the US, and its current resolution is forcing faster topsoil depletion in the rest of the world. If you have specific information that this is not the case, I'm basing this impression off a large number of things that I've read that all might be out of date, or collectively too pessimistic about current conditions.
Edit: also note the last paragraph of my reply to Vaniver.
Well a large number of problems facing humanity can be dismissed as "just price in externalities/reduce transaction costs and everything will be fine" but until that's achieved tactics for reducing the social costs must be considered. I do wonder how many of the people responding to a given complaint with "Externalities!" actually go on to at the very least think about and discuss those external effects, and how many respond with the mentalese equivalent of "that's that problem sorted". This example is particularly instructive, since it's unlikely anyone on this board is in a position to make major reforms with respect to land tenure and property rights.