As much as I think family planning charities like MSI do good by preventing the pain of unwanted pregnancies on women, I do not think that we should factor in animal welfare concerns when it comes to family planning funding. The analysis assumes that an extra human will have the same impact on meat consumption as an average human, this isn’t true. One extra meat consumer will raise the price of meat, reducing the amount that others eat, and meat production is far from perfectly elastic. One could argue there is some chance they might go on to work in the meat industry and raise supply that way, but at the current moment meat prices seem more dependent on available land then labor supply to me so that seems unlikely. Additionally, due to agglomeration effects an extra human may reduce the time until a full replacement of farmed animal meat with plant based or culture based meats. I do not think we should assume that bringing an extra human into the world should have a net negative impact on farmed animal welfare in expectation.
My impression is elasticity concerns usually only cut the farmed animal impacts of demand shifts by about 30-70%. I think the post’s analysis above also didn’t include descendants of the births directly prevented, which could make up for that.
The agglomeration effect seems very small to me. The probability that this person contributes other than just through diffuse societal benefits to others (targeted contributions to alt proteins and diet change instead of diffuse benefits to society through goods and services, taxes, etc.) seems very very small, and diffuse societal benefits seem very unlikely to make any significant difference at all (e.g. to funding for alt proteins).
As much as I think family planning charities like MSI do good by preventing the pain of unwanted pregnancies on women, I do not think that we should factor in animal welfare concerns when it comes to family planning funding. The analysis assumes that an extra human will have the same impact on meat consumption as an average human, this isn’t true. One extra meat consumer will raise the price of meat, reducing the amount that others eat, and meat production is far from perfectly elastic. One could argue there is some chance they might go on to work in the meat industry and raise supply that way, but at the current moment meat prices seem more dependent on available land then labor supply to me so that seems unlikely. Additionally, due to agglomeration effects an extra human may reduce the time until a full replacement of farmed animal meat with plant based or culture based meats. I do not think we should assume that bringing an extra human into the world should have a net negative impact on farmed animal welfare in expectation.
My impression is elasticity concerns usually only cut the farmed animal impacts of demand shifts by about 30-70%. I think the post’s analysis above also didn’t include descendants of the births directly prevented, which could make up for that.
The agglomeration effect seems very small to me. The probability that this person contributes other than just through diffuse societal benefits to others (targeted contributions to alt proteins and diet change instead of diffuse benefits to society through goods and services, taxes, etc.) seems very very small, and diffuse societal benefits seem very unlikely to make any significant difference at all (e.g. to funding for alt proteins).