Thank you for your detailed, well-informed, and clearly written post.
America has about five times more vegetarians than farmers — and many more omnivores who care about farm animals. Yet the farmers wield much more political power.
This probably doesn’t address your core points, but the most plausible explanation for me is that vegetarians on average just care a lot less about animal welfare than farmers care about their livelihoods. Most people have many moral goals in their minds that compete with other moral goals as well as more mundane concerns (which by revealed preferences they usually care about more), while plausibly someone’s job is in top 1-3 of their priorities.
Sure there are some animal advocates (including on this forum!) who care about animals being tortured more than even farmers care about their jobs. But they’re the exception rather than the rule; I’d be very very surprised if they are anywhere close to 20% of vegetarians.
There are also plenty of people whose economic or other interests are indirectly affected by agricultural interests. If you live in an agriculture-heavy district, anything that has a material negative effect on your community’s economics will indirectly affect you. That may be through a reduction in the amount consumers have to spend in your local area, local tax revenue, farm job loss increasing competition for non-farm jobs, etc.
Yeah good point. I think welfare reforms should mostly be good for these indirect players, since the reforms mostly require agribusinesses to invest more in new infrastructure (e.g. building more barns to give animals more space) and increase staffing (e.g. cage-free farms require more workers than caged farms). But I agree that the indirect players probably don’t see it this way.
Thank you for your detailed, well-informed, and clearly written post.
This probably doesn’t address your core points, but the most plausible explanation for me is that vegetarians on average just care a lot less about animal welfare than farmers care about their livelihoods. Most people have many moral goals in their minds that compete with other moral goals as well as more mundane concerns (which by revealed preferences they usually care about more), while plausibly someone’s job is in top 1-3 of their priorities.
Sure there are some animal advocates (including on this forum!) who care about animals being tortured more than even farmers care about their jobs. But they’re the exception rather than the rule; I’d be very very surprised if they are anywhere close to 20% of vegetarians.
There are also plenty of people whose economic or other interests are indirectly affected by agricultural interests. If you live in an agriculture-heavy district, anything that has a material negative effect on your community’s economics will indirectly affect you. That may be through a reduction in the amount consumers have to spend in your local area, local tax revenue, farm job loss increasing competition for non-farm jobs, etc.
Yeah good point. I think welfare reforms should mostly be good for these indirect players, since the reforms mostly require agribusinesses to invest more in new infrastructure (e.g. building more barns to give animals more space) and increase staffing (e.g. cage-free farms require more workers than caged farms). But I agree that the indirect players probably don’t see it this way.
Thanks Linch. Yeah I think you’re spot on about the salience / enthusiasm gap. I should have emphasized this more in the piece.