1,157 corporate pledges are now fully implemented, 89% of the pledges that came due by last year.
!!
So if:
Saulius’ 2019 estimates were otherwise correct i.e. cage-free campaigns do in fact affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (updating 64%-->89% follow-through gives 54-->75 chicken-years)
A free-range egg costs 11 cents more than a caged egg
“You shouldn’t be buying eggs at all!” I hear you cry. Why not? Because personally boycotting commercial egg production robustly makes you >2,500 times more persuasive as an animal welfare advocate? Because being free to consume egg-based products would make such a negligible difference to your productivity over the rest of your life, that it would never lead to you earning an additional $1.50?[3] Indeed you never spend more than $1.50 to give yourself the kind of benefits (yes, benefits) you’d get from being free to consume eggs for the rest of your life?
Epistemic status: Sitting in a cafe in a country with ~no cage-free eggs staring hungrily at a breakfast menu consisting entirely of egg-based options considering breaking my no-meat-or-caged-eggs diet while KC and the Sunshine Band sing Give It Up over the cafe speakers and wondering if the universe is telling me to give up rationalising eating tasty food or to give up rationalising looking more altruistic.
Here, I’m assuming that cage-free campaigns affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (as above), that you’d otherwise eat 200 caged eggs a year, that commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year (as above), that you live another 75 years, that—very speculatively—going cage-free removes 50% of the suffering, and welfarism.
I had estimated donating “0.147 $/year” to corporate campaigns for broiler welfare is enough to cancel all suffering caused to farmed animals per person per year (not just that linked to eggs). However, I still think eating predominantly whole-food plan-based makes sense from an altruistic perspective:
It is cheaper in upper-middle-income and high-income countries, so one can make more donations. From Springmann 2021 (see Fig. 1 below), “compared with the cost of current diets, the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns were, depending on the pattern, up to 22–34% lower in cost in upper-middle-income to high-income countries on average (when considering statistical means), but at least 18–29% more expensive in lower-middle-income to low-income countries”.
It is healthier, so one can work more time.
According to the EAT-Lancet Commision, the global adoption of a predominantly plant-based healthy diet, with just 13.6 %[1] (= (153 + 15 + 15 + 62 + 19 + 40 + 36)/2500) of calories coming from animals, would decrease premature deaths of adults by 21.7 %[2] (= (0.19 + 0.224 + 0.236)/3).
BMK=benchmark diets. FLX=flexitarian diets. PSC=pescatarian diets. VEG=vegetarian diets. VGN=vegan diets. Veg=diet variant high in fruits and vegetables. Grn=high-grain diet variant.
Epistemic status: Sitting in a cafe in a country with ~no cage-free eggs staring hungrily at a breakfast menu consisting entirely of egg-based options considering breaking my no-meat-or-caged-eggs diet while KC and the Sunshine Band sing Give It Up over the cafe speakers and wondering if the universe is telling me to give up rationalising eating tasty food or to give up rationalising looking more altruistic.
Thank you so much for crossposting this!
!!
So if:
Saulius’ 2019 estimates were otherwise correct i.e. cage-free campaigns do in fact affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (updating 64%-->89% follow-through gives 54-->75 chicken-years)
A free-range egg costs 11 cents more than a caged egg
Modern commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year
Then: It’s ~2,500 times more cost-effective to donate to a cage-free campaign than to buy cage-free eggs instead of caged eggs.[1]
While I agree that we shouldn’t take expected value estimates too literally, that’s one hell of a multiplier. And even if ethical offsetting is generally antithetical to EA values, if your goal is to get chickens out of cages, an estimated 2500x multiplier on the margin[2] is a powerful challenge to buying cage-free eggs yourself.
“You shouldn’t be buying eggs at all!” I hear you cry. Why not? Because personally boycotting commercial egg production robustly makes you >2,500 times more persuasive as an animal welfare advocate? Because being free to consume egg-based products would make such a negligible difference to your productivity over the rest of your life, that it would never lead to you earning an additional $1.50?[3] Indeed you never spend more than $1.50 to give yourself the kind of benefits (yes, benefits) you’d get from being free to consume eggs for the rest of your life?
Epistemic status: Sitting in a cafe in a country with ~no cage-free eggs staring hungrily at a breakfast menu consisting entirely of egg-based options considering breaking my no-meat-or-caged-eggs diet while KC and the Sunshine Band sing Give It Up over the cafe speakers and wondering if the universe is telling me to give up rationalising eating tasty food or to give up rationalising looking more altruistic.
75*300/(1/0.11)
Obviously if no one bought cage-free eggs, no one would produce them.
Here, I’m assuming that cage-free campaigns affect 75 chicken-years per dollar (as above), that you’d otherwise eat 200 caged eggs a year, that commercial hens produce 300 eggs a year (as above), that you live another 75 years, that—very speculatively—going cage-free removes 50% of the suffering, and welfarism.
Note that rather than exhibiting regression to the mean over time, this is remarkably ~15x larger than ACE’s 2015 estimate for online ads.
Nice points, Holly!
I had estimated donating “0.147 $/year” to corporate campaigns for broiler welfare is enough to cancel all suffering caused to farmed animals per person per year (not just that linked to eggs). However, I still think eating predominantly whole-food plan-based makes sense from an altruistic perspective:
It is cheaper in upper-middle-income and high-income countries, so one can make more donations. From Springmann 2021 (see Fig. 1 below), “compared with the cost of current diets, the healthy and sustainable dietary patterns were, depending on the pattern, up to 22–34% lower in cost in upper-middle-income to high-income countries on average (when considering statistical means), but at least 18–29% more expensive in lower-middle-income to low-income countries”.
It is healthier, so one can work more time.
According to the EAT-Lancet Commision, the global adoption of a predominantly plant-based healthy diet, with just 13.6 %[1] (= (153 + 15 + 15 + 62 + 19 + 40 + 36)/2500) of calories coming from animals, would decrease premature deaths of adults by 21.7 %[2] (= (0.19 + 0.224 + 0.236)/3).
BMK=benchmark diets. FLX=flexitarian diets. PSC=pescatarian diets. VEG=vegetarian diets. VGN=vegan diets. Veg=diet variant high in fruits and vegetables. Grn=high-grain diet variant.
Thanks for sharing! I found it funny.
Calculated based on values in Table 1.
Mean of the 3 estimates in Table 3.