Martin Gould’s Five insights from farm animal economics over at Open Phil’s FAW newsletter points out that (quote) “blocking local factory farms can mean animals are farmed in worse conditions elsewhere”:
Consider the UK: Local groups celebrateblocking new chicken farms. But because UK chicken demand keeps growing — it rose 24% from 2012-2022 — the result of fewer new UK chicken farms is just that the UK imports more chicken: it almost doubled its chicken imports over the same time period. While most chicken imported into the UK comes from the EU, where conditions for chickens are similar, a growing share comes from Brazil and Thailand, where regulations are nonexistent. Blocking local farms may slightly reduce demand via higher prices, but it also risks sentencing animals to worse conditions abroad.
The same problem haunts government welfare reforms — stronger standards in one country can just shift production to places with worse standards.
This reminded me of what Will MacAskill wrote in Doing Good Better on anti-sweatshop protests being potentially misguided because the alternative for sweatshop workers is worse (long quote):
… those who protest sweatshops by refusing to buy goods produced in them are making the mistake of failing to consider what would happen otherwise. In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-paid farm labor, scavenging, or unemployment.
A clear indicator that sweatshops provide comparatively good jobs is the great demand for them among people in developing countries. Almost all workers in sweatshops chose to work there, and some go to great lengths to do so. In the early 2000s, nearly four million people from Laos, Cambodia, & Burma immigrated to Thailand to take sweatshop jobs, and many Bolivians risk deportation by illegally entering Brazil in order to work in the sweatshops there. The average earnings of a sweatshop worker in Brazil are $2,000/year — not very much, but $600/year more than the average earnings in Bolivia, where people generally work in agriculture or mining. Similarly, the average earnings among sweatshop workers are: $2/day in Bangladesh, $5.50/day in Cambodia, $7/day in Haiti, and $8/day in India. These wages are tiny, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of these countries live in, the demand for these jobs seem more understandable.
It’s difficult for us to imagine that people would risk deportation just to work in sweatshops. But that’s because the extremity of global poverty is almost unimaginable.
Among economists, there’s no question that sweatshops benefit those in poor countries and that they are ‘tremendous good news for the world’s poor.’ One said, ‘My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.’ Low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing is a stepping-stone that helps an economy based around cash crops develop into an industrialized, rich country. During the Industrial Revolution, for example, Europe and America spent more than 100 years using sweatshop labor, emerging with much higher living standards as a result. It took many decades to pass through this stage because the tech to industralize was new, and the 20th century has seen countries pass through this stage of development much more rapidly because the tech is already in place. The four East Asian ‘Tiger economies’ — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan — exemplify speedy development, having evolved from very poor, agrarian societies in the early 20th century to manufacturing-oriented sweatshop countries mid-century, and finally emerging as industrialized economic powerhouses in recent decades. Because sweatshops are good for poor countries, if we boycott them, we make people in poor countries worse off.
We should certainly feel outrage and horror at the conditions sweatshop laborers toll under. The correct response, however, is not to give sweatshop-produced goods in favor of domestically produced goods. The correct response is to try to end the extreme poverty that makes sweatshops desirable places to work in the first place. What about buying products from companies that employ people in poor countries but claim to have higher labor standards, like People Tree, Indigenous, and Kuyichi? By doing this, we would avoid the use of sweatshops, while at the same time providing even better job opportunities for the extreme poor.
This made me wonder about 2 things:
Zooming out: if you buy that the two examples above form a natural category (of “noble intentions misguided by poor reasoning about counterfactuals / second-order effects”, say), what other examples are there of such altruistic mistakes that we might be making?
Zooming in: what kind of intervention is analogous to “buy from People Tree” in the FAW context? Is this a promising avenue at all?
I know very little about FAW, but I’d guess the answer to #2 is “not promising” mainly because it isn’t what advocates do. Instead, and again quoting from Gould’s writeup, they do this:
… advocates are getting smarter about this. They’re pushing for laws that tackle both production and imports at once. US states like California have done this — when it banned battery cages, it also banned selling eggs from hens caged anywhere. The EU is considering the same approach. It’s a crucial shift: without these import restrictions, both farm bans and welfare reforms risk exporting animal suffering to places with even worse conditions. And advocates have prioritized corporate policies, which avoid this problem, as companies pledge to stop selling products associated with the worst animal suffering (like caged eggs), regardless of where they are produced.
Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.
More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).
Martin Gould’s Five insights from farm animal economics over at Open Phil’s FAW newsletter points out that (quote) “blocking local factory farms can mean animals are farmed in worse conditions elsewhere”:
This reminded me of what Will MacAskill wrote in Doing Good Better on anti-sweatshop protests being potentially misguided because the alternative for sweatshop workers is worse (long quote):
This made me wonder about 2 things:
Zooming out: if you buy that the two examples above form a natural category (of “noble intentions misguided by poor reasoning about counterfactuals / second-order effects”, say), what other examples are there of such altruistic mistakes that we might be making?
Zooming in: what kind of intervention is analogous to “buy from People Tree” in the FAW context? Is this a promising avenue at all?
I know very little about FAW, but I’d guess the answer to #2 is “not promising” mainly because it isn’t what advocates do. Instead, and again quoting from Gould’s writeup, they do this:
Zooming out, regarding other examples of altruistic mistakes that we might be making, I think there are a lot of scenarios in which banning something or making something less appealing in one locations is intended to reduce the bad thing, but actually just ends up shifting the thing elsewhere, where there are even fewer regulations.
One critique of the United States’s drug policy is that it doesn’t halt the production or trade of dangerous drugs, but simply pushes it elsewhere (the balloon effect).
When a jurisdiction bans chicken farmers from using small cages, (such as California’s Proposition 2 from 2008) then it might just shift production elsewhere.
Regarding immigration from Mexico to the USA, Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper to discourage illegal immigration into the USA near Tijuana. But it actually just caused immigrants to shift from from crossing the border in one place to crossing in a different place. It also may have increased the number of illegal immigrants in the USA, because previously people came and left cyclically, but with stricter border control people instead came and stayed. While we could certainly argue that this isn’t altruistic, the general idea of taking action to reduce/halt a behavior actually resulting in that behavior continuing elsewhere applies.
More mundane: a parent doesn’t want their child to engage in a particular behavior (smoking cigarettes, having sex, drinking alcohol, etc.), the child will then do it away from the home in a more dangerous context. My vague impression is that teenagers with parents who ban sexual activity tend to have less access to contraception and worse health outcomes (although I haven’t read the research on this).
A little bit different, but a classic example of this kind of “poor reasoning about second order effects” is the cobra effect (or any similar incentive for extermination)
Welfare traps
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of list of examples I was looking for.