Thanks for putting this together! It’s really great to see attempts at quantitatively prioritizing animal suffering, and I wish people would do more of it.
I do think you are misusing the word elasticities. The table you cite in compassion by the pound used the price elasticities of supply and demand to come up with their estimates, but these numbers they report are not elasticities, since that term usually refers to the change in demand or supply in response to price or income.
This leaves me particularly confused as to your interpretation of what you call “cross-price elasticities”—a cross-price elasticity of demand refers to the percent increase in demand of commodity x in response to a percent increase in price of commodity y. You are using the term to refer to “the increase in other products which are purchased as substitutes by these other consumers.” The reason this distinction is important is that traditional elasticities of demand account for individual consumers substituting one good for another due to price changes—they do not show the net change in equilibrium quantity of one good in response to a demand change of another good. Since you are basing this on your own assumptions rather than data, all I’m suggesting here is a rephrasing.
If you are truly looking for a cross-price elasticity of demand, these are well studied for most commodities and can be found here.
My final comment is that I am puzzled by your conclusion regarding milk given that the welfare metrics you use are just scales from better to worse and do not have an interpretation for their absolute value. It could be that your metrics are exactly spot on, but milk products still impose enormous suffering on cows per pound. I’m puzzled by your conclusions regarding the relative importance of climate change for the same reason.
Anyways, thanks again for working on this. I hope my comments don’t come across as too critical, as I think that carefully reasoning through these issues is really important.
Ah, yeah, thanks for underlining that, I say “elasticity effect” as opposed to elasticity, maybe that’s not clear enough.
My final comment is that I am puzzled by your conclusion regarding milk given that t welfare metrics you use are just scales from better to worse and do not have an interpretation for their absolute value.
The quality of life evaluations both have 0 for a life with neutral value, if that’s what you mean.
Each point in the scoring corresponds to 1⁄100 of the difference between a neutral life and a life with all interests satisfied, for a human, for one day.
So the estimated net harm of a cup of milk is like feeling 1% worse for a day, on my assumptions.
Thanks for putting this together! It’s really great to see attempts at quantitatively prioritizing animal suffering, and I wish people would do more of it.
I do think you are misusing the word elasticities. The table you cite in compassion by the pound used the price elasticities of supply and demand to come up with their estimates, but these numbers they report are not elasticities, since that term usually refers to the change in demand or supply in response to price or income.
This leaves me particularly confused as to your interpretation of what you call “cross-price elasticities”—a cross-price elasticity of demand refers to the percent increase in demand of commodity x in response to a percent increase in price of commodity y. You are using the term to refer to “the increase in other products which are purchased as substitutes by these other consumers.” The reason this distinction is important is that traditional elasticities of demand account for individual consumers substituting one good for another due to price changes—they do not show the net change in equilibrium quantity of one good in response to a demand change of another good. Since you are basing this on your own assumptions rather than data, all I’m suggesting here is a rephrasing.
If you are truly looking for a cross-price elasticity of demand, these are well studied for most commodities and can be found here.
My final comment is that I am puzzled by your conclusion regarding milk given that the welfare metrics you use are just scales from better to worse and do not have an interpretation for their absolute value. It could be that your metrics are exactly spot on, but milk products still impose enormous suffering on cows per pound. I’m puzzled by your conclusions regarding the relative importance of climate change for the same reason.
Anyways, thanks again for working on this. I hope my comments don’t come across as too critical, as I think that carefully reasoning through these issues is really important.
Ah, yeah, thanks for underlining that, I say “elasticity effect” as opposed to elasticity, maybe that’s not clear enough.
The quality of life evaluations both have 0 for a life with neutral value, if that’s what you mean.
Each point in the scoring corresponds to 1⁄100 of the difference between a neutral life and a life with all interests satisfied, for a human, for one day.
So the estimated net harm of a cup of milk is like feeling 1% worse for a day, on my assumptions.