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Upvote for noticing an error in your model and announcing the update—that’s a good habit, and I like the idea of posts on the Forum which encourage said habit.
I’m sure you had a strategy in mind for the current title, but I’ll still suggest choosing something more descriptive; this seems like it might be confusing to link to in a few months (especially for people who don’t recognize the name “kbog”).
Thanks for posting this update. I’m fairly new to the forum, so I missed the original posting of the two links you’ve provided.
These posts seem closely related to meat consumption Kuznets curves. I am not an expert in this literature and I intend to do more reading on the topic, but a quick search found this 2013 paper, which might be of interest to you. I’ve only briefly looked over the paper, but their results seem to update and support the findings of York and Gossard (2004). It seems that the expected turning point of the meat consumption Kuznets curve occurs at a per capita income of US$45,263 in the full sample of 150 countries (in their sample, only 3 countries reach this threshold).
Not that Kuznets curves should be interpreted as causal relationships, but I was naively hopeful that it might occur here.
Anyway, I’m interested to see your animal suffering extension of this idea. I think there is a small literature on animal welfare Kuznets as well, which may be interesting. Thanks for sharing your work and your updates!
Interesting. Y&G said that they checked for a curvillinear relationship and the results “do not suggest substantively different conclusions,” which I understand to mean that there isn’t good evidence for a Kuznets curve.
I did not know that India’s average consumption was so low, perhaps their marginal increase in consumption is not much either.
Looking at Table 3. Am I reading this right: the relationship for low income countries is +0.0188kg (annually) per $1 annual income? That’s 18.8kg from $1000 which is about an order of magnitude greater than the Y&G results.
I just had a very quick look-through of Y&G, but it looks like they tested for curvilinear (i.e., a log transformation of GDP) only. I could be missing a footnote, but I don’t believe they included a second-order GDP term to test a polynomial relationship.
However, the findings of the 2013 paper largely support that, from my quick reading. The estimation of the second-order coefficient is significant but basically zero for most of the different data slices. Further, when they back out the inflection points, the income levels for the turning point of meat consumption are much higher than the turning points for other Kuznets curves ($45K relative to $3K-$12K in the general environmental KC literature).
But actually now that I’m digging in to the results, I think the tables report different numbers from the text. Neither Y&G nor RC&M are forthcoming about their units, which is frustrating, but at least Y&G discuss their results clearly. I’m a bit frustrated about the write up of this paper. I believe that you’re reading the results correctly, unless the authors are actually using per capita GDP in thousands like Y&G and failing to report that (although that result wouldn’t make any more sense). It does seem a lot higher than Y&G.
I’m losing faith in this paper now (at least in the result discussion), but I would like to check out the literature further and see if there are any other newer papers that can provide insight into the differences.
Thanks for following up on this and posting a correction. I’d suggest updating your original post to include your updated fish consumption estimates. Or if that’s too much work, a correction on that post with a link to this new one would be helpful. As it stands now, it still says: “I also excluded fish because there is no significant correlation between income and fish consumption in African countries.” I think people are likely to find your original post when researching the meat eater problem, especially since the corresponding EA Concepts page cites it.
kk will add a link. But major edits would be a pain because the old post is in HTML.
do 3rd world countries eat factory farmed meat?
I’m not sure exactly, my perception is that (1) often they don’t currently but the new growth is more likely to be factory farming, (2) traditional farming isn’t clearly better. Farming in the West is probably covered by more welfare regulations than farming in poor countries.