This is a really interesting idea. But does a system like this risk increasing the number of animals being farmed?
I’m struggling to wrap my head around the economics of it properly, but if you take it to extremes then it seems like it might?
Suppose I’m a wealthy individual who is willing to pay a very high price to keep a hen out of a cage (more than the market price of all of her eggs over her life). Now imagine that the demand for eggs drops to zero. In the current system, farmers would stop raising hens, and animal activists would be happy. But in this new system, if it is still legal to cage hens, then a farmer could keep raising hens, threaten to put them in cages unless I pay them not to, and just throw all their eggs in the bin? Or am I misunderstanding the system?
That’s an extreme and unrealistic example, but just meant to illustrate that in principle paying for welfare (which is really paying someone not to do something bad) feels like it might carry a risk of increasing total amount of suffering, even if it decreases the average?
This is correct and equally but less visibly so at current margins. This would increase the profitability of animal farming and also legitimize the idea that as a farmer, my Coase-ian property rights over my animals include the right to effectively torture. I am not saying this on balance makes it bad. I don’t know, but it’s extremely important to carefully think through this trade off.
This is a really interesting idea. But does a system like this risk increasing the number of animals being farmed?
I’m struggling to wrap my head around the economics of it properly, but if you take it to extremes then it seems like it might?
Suppose I’m a wealthy individual who is willing to pay a very high price to keep a hen out of a cage (more than the market price of all of her eggs over her life). Now imagine that the demand for eggs drops to zero. In the current system, farmers would stop raising hens, and animal activists would be happy. But in this new system, if it is still legal to cage hens, then a farmer could keep raising hens, threaten to put them in cages unless I pay them not to, and just throw all their eggs in the bin? Or am I misunderstanding the system?
That’s an extreme and unrealistic example, but just meant to illustrate that in principle paying for welfare (which is really paying someone not to do something bad) feels like it might carry a risk of increasing total amount of suffering, even if it decreases the average?
This is correct and equally but less visibly so at current margins. This would increase the profitability of animal farming and also legitimize the idea that as a farmer, my Coase-ian property rights over my animals include the right to effectively torture. I am not saying this on balance makes it bad. I don’t know, but it’s extremely important to carefully think through this trade off.