Review
Note another angle on the healthcare costs. The ground truth reality is likely the same argument tobacco companies made. Heart diseases often kills people when they are younger, and have consumed less in retirement or medicare funds. So like smoking, it's possibly a net savings to governments for healthcare costs.
I do not think this is entirely accurate. Lung cancer in smokers hits unusually young people because, well, they are smokers. Heart disease is a disease of old age and accelerating it somewhat through an unhealthy diet would have complex effects. However, making matters even more complicated, ultraprocessed foods also promote cancers and obesity -- the latter is definitely a huge healthcare burden which does not kill people immediately.
This is hard to model since there can be a shift from a disease that kills slowly to one that kills quickly and early (dementia to lung cancer), but you can have also the opposite shift (e.g. from a non-disease state to chronic COPD and frailty preceding death).
All we can say for sure is that the harmful effects of smoking and junk food diets may be offset to some extent. More so for smoking than junk food.
Either way, it would appear the consensus is that "in high-income countries, lifetime health care costs are greater for smokers than for non-smokers, even after accounting for the shorter lives of smokers"
https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/17-2-the-costs-of-smoking
I understand the issue wasn't healthcare costs but total cost to the government.
It means if you were playing 'simGovernment" from a bird's eye view, and you do not care about the fate of individuals, you are trying to maximize the government's power and revenue, this might be a profitable tradeoff.
You can abstract it as a "card" from an options menu you can select:
[beef subsidy]
+ farmer votes
- average lifespan
+ healthcare costs
- total cost per citizen
NPV of choice: + <some number> per citizen
You can think of this case where as a government official or a gamer playing the "government" as a side your interests aren't aligned with the population's happiness or lifespan as a case of misalignment.
Lung cancer affects old people.
Also, while your link claims that lifetime healthcare costs are greater for smokers, it does not claim it is a consensus, but specifically mentions that many people claim the opposite. And that's before getting to Gerald Monroe's point.
Unclear. The overwhelming majority of healthcare costs for the median American come in the last 6 months of life. The "least costly" method of dying is usually passing away in your sleep out of the blue.
The types of diseases correlated with Big Mac consumption or smoking are not usually "pass away in your sleep without much medical intervention." They are more likely to be the types of diseases that carry with them long-term, relatively high cost interventions (dialysis, heart surgery, gastric bypass, and other obesity-related interventions.) Same with smoking-- significant levels of medical care are allocated to treating people with lung cancer.
While its possible some of those savings are recouped by moneys otherwise sent as social security payments or whatever, it seems unlikely they are a net savings.
This is to say nothing about people who might retire early because of preventable disease (shortened health spans where they provide society with useful work) and other reasons obese people might not produce as much net output that they otherwise would in the alternative where they did not consume so many Big Macs.
So, perhaps a better statistic might be:
For a total negative-social-externalities-per-big-mac of $1.21?
Of course, some of these estimates might swing wildly depending on key assumptions...
Personally, I love the idea of trying to tax/subsidize things to account for social externalities. But of course the trouble is finding some way to assess those externalities which is fair and not subject to endless distortion from political pressure, ideological fads, etc. (For more on the practical difficulties of theoretically-perfect Pigouvian taxation , see this post by economist Bryan Caplan.) So I'd be happy to see more discussion of this Big Mac question; I'd encourage you to make a cross-post to the EA Forum!
I do think that's better, but my guess is if one of us got the book and looked at how they calculated their totals we'd be pretty unimpressed and not see them as worth building on.
Big Macs are 0.4% of beef consumption specifically, rather than:
...respectively.
The health impact of red meat is certainly dominated by beef, and the environmental impact of all animal food might be as well, but my impression is that beef accounts for a small fraction of the cruelty of animal farming (of course, this is subjective) and probably not a majority of meat and dairy government subsidies.
Doesn't make sense to use the particular consumer's preferencces to estimate the cruelty cost. If that's how we define the cruelty cost it then the buyer should already be taking it into account when making their purchasing decision, so it's not an exernality.
The externality comes from the animals themselves having interests which the consumers aren't considering
The issue is that there might be no objective way to compare an animal's interests to a human's interests.
We should definitely not expect the "true fraction of beef consumption" to be proportional to impact. Steaks are consumed basically the same way as they were before subsidies (though in much larger quantity); they don't respond much to the subsidy to take advantage of it. Fast food isn't restricted to being prepared or sourced in a particular traditional way and therefore will change itself to best exploit subsidy. Estimating that effect as a 2.5x multiplier seems like a perfectly good conservative approximation, so you should just stick with 1%.
1% isn't high. If they're 0.4% of beef consumption, and Big Macs (like most fast food) are heavily optimized for cost, then we should expect them to be far more efficient at benefiting from subsidies than traditional means of beef consumption. A factor of 2.5 seems like a perfectly good conservative estimate for that efficiency.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
I was reading a Faunalytics report on people who stopped being vegan or vegetarian, via the EA Forum, and was surprised to see:
This seemed much too high to me: I know we subsidize meat heavily, but that's a much bigger ratio than I remembered seeing. Clicking through to the source, and 2022 AEIR (angle: anti-subsidy) blog post I see:
Clicking through to their source, a 2015 Berkeley Entrepreneurship & Technology Technical Report (angle: anti-climate change) I see:
This is uncited, and not at all plausible. In 2013 a Big Mac cost $4.56, so they're claiming $8.44/burger. There are about 550M Big Macs sold annually, so the total Big Mac subsidy would be $4.6B. That's 12% of the entire $38B. And Big Macs are only 0.4% of US beef consumption (25.5B lb of beef, 1/5lb each, 550M/y) let alone all the other subsidized foods.
I did a bit more looking and found David Simon claiming in his 2013 book Meatonomics that the retail price of a big mac would be $12. This is close enough that it might be the source of the claim. He breaks it down as:
Now, health care costs are not what I'd normally consider a subsidy, and Simon doesn't claim it is one. But it also looks like each of these national numbers was converted into a per-Big Mac number by assuming Big Macs are responsible for 1% of the total:
While 1% is not as implausible as 12%, that's still oddly high. If we look just at the health claim, I don't know where they're getting $314B but I see Springmann 2018 claiming $71B for red meat. This would make Big Macs responsible for 6.5% of the total health impact of red meat despite being only 0.4% of beef consumption (see above).
In short, this statistic is junk.
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