I would guess that support and opposition to capital punishment and abortion are not very sensitive to cost
I’m inclined to agree with this, and discussed it a bit in the anti-abortion case study. (See the bullet point beginning “One paper finds that “the fundamental law” and the corresponding footnotes, 371-3)
A price elasticity of demand of −0.81 may be “inelastic” according to the comparison to −1, but it’s actually surprisingly elastic to me. It’s more elastic than demand for almost all animal products according to the estimates Faunalytics compiled.
It would be good to briefly define the “cumulative elasticity factor”, e.g. as the ratio of the percentage change in quantity over the percentage change in a demand shock/shift.
There are at least two kinds of support to consider: the number of people getting abortions, and the percentage of people (or politicians) in favour of more liberal or restrictive abortion laws/policies, and the latter probably has little or even the opposite dependence on price, i.e. as abortion policy becomes more restrictive and prices increase, support for more liberal policies increases, so the these restrictions may not be stable, especially where the left wing is close to having or has majority power.
Maybe this could be the case with animal products, too, but we have alternatives to animal products that are looking increasingly attractive (and people can switch to other animal products), whereas the alternatives to abortion for someone who wants an abortion are not very good, so it seems less likely to be the case for animal products.
Thanks for the clarifications and comments!
I’m inclined to agree with this, and discussed it a bit in the anti-abortion case study. (See the bullet point beginning “One paper finds that “the fundamental law” and the corresponding footnotes, 371-3)
Interesting. A few comments on this:
I think ACE updated their page since you cited it, so the cumulative elasticity estimates are gone. Faunalytics has estimates: https://faunalytics.org/animal-product-impact-scales/ (EA Forum post). See the Elasticities tab here.
A price elasticity of demand of −0.81 may be “inelastic” according to the comparison to −1, but it’s actually surprisingly elastic to me. It’s more elastic than demand for almost all animal products according to the estimates Faunalytics compiled.
It would be good to briefly define the “cumulative elasticity factor”, e.g. as the ratio of the percentage change in quantity over the percentage change in a demand shock/shift.
There are at least two kinds of support to consider: the number of people getting abortions, and the percentage of people (or politicians) in favour of more liberal or restrictive abortion laws/policies, and the latter probably has little or even the opposite dependence on price, i.e. as abortion policy becomes more restrictive and prices increase, support for more liberal policies increases, so the these restrictions may not be stable, especially where the left wing is close to having or has majority power.
Maybe this could be the case with animal products, too, but we have alternatives to animal products that are looking increasingly attractive (and people can switch to other animal products), whereas the alternatives to abortion for someone who wants an abortion are not very good, so it seems less likely to be the case for animal products.