A question I have is how to evaluate the morality of the two options:

• A) Make it so that an animal is born, then later cause it considerable suffering
• B) Change the conditions so that the animal never exists

If everyone went vegetarian, the animal population would likely be greatly diminished and it isn't obvious to me that I'd choose option B over option A if I were on the menu. Are there some standard objections to the idea that option A is better than option B?

One quick objection might be that it proves too much. If John Beatmykids told me he wouldn't have kids unless he was permitted to beat them, I wouldn't give him a pass to beat any future children. Another objection might be that there's always a choice C, but here I don't see another option as realistic.

To be fair, people expected a chess playing computer to play chess in the same way a human does, thinking about the board abstractly and learning from experience and all that. We still haven't accomplished that. Chess programs work by inefficiently computing every possible move, so many moves ahead, which seemed impossible before computers got exponentially faster. And even then, deep blue was a specialized super-computer and had to use a bunch of little tricks and optimizations to get it just barely past human grand master level.

I just registered http://worstargumentintheworld.com - it redirects to this post, and should be available shortly. Much easier to mention in conversation when other people use this argument, and don't believe it's a "real thing."

Great piece of work, Yvain - it's now on my list of all-time favorite LW posts.

The "Correct" price for electricity is one price to be connected to the grid and several more relating to one's power used, power factor, peak demand, and the like.

The average price paid is lower than the "correct" price, because charging the "correct" price adds lots of measuring and billing costs. It's better to allow some subsidizing to be happening than to spend more just to make sure it isn't.

A couple of points.

1. This doesn't apply in all countries. In UK for instance, it is common to have a standing charge (flat fee per day) as well as a usage charge (fee per kWh). Or some utilities charge a high price for the first few kWh, and then a lower price for subsequent kWh, which has a similar effect. See here for some details.

2. Even where there is a single price (a price per kWh) it is not true that the "correct" market price is just the marginal cost. Suppliers do need to recover their costs of capital, and fixed costs, or they will go out of business. Imagine a market with a huge numbers of suppliers, where the price drops to marginal cost. They will all be losing money, but some will go broke quicker than others. As suppliers exit the market, the remaining suppliers find they can increase their price, and equilibrium is established when some marginal supplier is just hanging on in the market (barely making enough revenue to cover total costs). If the number of suppliers drops below this equilibrium, then they all start making large profits, but this situation should attract a new entrant into the market, so restoring equilibrium. That's how the market theory works of course: real life situations create both barriers to entry (overregulation, obstruction of access to wholesale supplies, or to the distribution network) and barriers to exit (loss-making firms are propped up for years by subsidies, bailouts etc).

The real life example here is electric utilities. The way they're regulated they charge a kWh price roughly equal to the average total cost (let’s say about 12 cents). The proper way to price would be at the marginal cost (at around 4 cents). The fact that marginal costs are below average total costs are what makes them a natural monopoly.

The somewhat obvious better solution would be to charge marginal cost for each kWh and then have some other method to collect the massive fixed costs. But for whatever historic reasons, we don't do that and most (all?) utilities price each kWh at about the average total cost. This means that as a society our quantity demanded kWh is way below where economic theory says it should be.

However, there is probably a fairly substantial pollution/CO2 externality to producing electricity. Without some analysis it isn't obvious whether we're producing too much electricity or too little.

I did try once to look at estimates of the size of the externality to see if it made up for the pricing way above marginal cost issue and the preliminary results were that the externality was smaller (meaning, global warming considered, we're still not using enough electricity). However, there were a couple of points I'd need to get into deeper.

• 1) The pricing above marginal cost issue is greatest for residential rates and smallest for industrial rates. I was looking at residential rates. Using the same cursory analysis on industrial rates would mean that we're over using electricity in industrial sectors.

• 2) The carbon externality number I used from the EPA seemed to be derived by figuring out how high the price of electricity would need to be to get usage down to the level they wanted. Under correctly priced utility rates (i.e., priced at the marginal costs), their analysis may have had a much higher $ / kWh externality number. But at the same time, I’m a little suspect of that method of calculating the externality as it would indicate if the cost of production halved it wouldn’t be optimal for society to produce more. So I’d need to do some more research to make sure I’m using good pollution/CO2 numbers.

I haven't seen this issue discussed by people like Mankiw when they talk about the Pigou Club and I think it probably should be. If there's interest I could probably write this up a bit more formally and make it a post.

Great article, I have a particular fondness for this line of reasoning as it helped me leave my religious roots behind. I ended up reasoning that despite assurances that revelation was 100% accurate and to rely on it over any and all scientific evidences because they're just "theories", there was a x% chance that the revelation model was wrong. And for any x% larger than something like 0.001%, the multiple independent pieces of scientific, historic, and archaeological evidences would crush it. I then found examples of where revelation was wrong and it became clear that x% was close to what you'd expect from "educated guess." And yes, I did actually work out all the probabilities with Bayes theorem.

Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:

How did you get so good?

I've lost more games than you've ever played.

-- Robert Tanner

This makes me wonder how much my writing skills would improve if I retyped excellently written essays for a while.

[Meta] Now I'm wondering why the OP is so heavily upvoted, for a meetup announcement. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the highest-voted meetup post of all time, even.