This is a portfolio problem, not an intervention problem, and many major producing countries are trending towards further fragmentation.
I would say it is an intervention problem in the sense greater fragmentation limits the scale of the benefits for a given spending (or, equivalently, increases the spending for a given scale of benefits), thus decreasing the cost-effectiveness of interventions.
A direct welfare intervention targeting Scottish farmed salmon could be more cost-effective in 2025 than 2000 as the population has increased even as global aquaculture has diversified.
I agree there’s some important sense in which species diversification constrains how many species we can help with fixed resources (if species diversified and total population remained still, then intervention cost-effectiveness would decrease). I think “portfolio problem” gestures at how this phenomenon is hard to notice if we analyse the cost-effectiveness only at the level of direct welfare interventions, and don’t take a step back to look at how we distribute resources across welfare interventions or consider approaches that target the diversification problem itself (like the post’s recommendations).
Thanks for the relevant post, Chiawen.
I would say it is an intervention problem in the sense greater fragmentation limits the scale of the benefits for a given spending (or, equivalently, increases the spending for a given scale of benefits), thus decreasing the cost-effectiveness of interventions.
A direct welfare intervention targeting Scottish farmed salmon could be more cost-effective in 2025 than 2000 as the population has increased even as global aquaculture has diversified.
I agree there’s some important sense in which species diversification constrains how many species we can help with fixed resources (if species diversified and total population remained still, then intervention cost-effectiveness would decrease). I think “portfolio problem” gestures at how this phenomenon is hard to notice if we analyse the cost-effectiveness only at the level of direct welfare interventions, and don’t take a step back to look at how we distribute resources across welfare interventions or consider approaches that target the diversification problem itself (like the post’s recommendations).
Thanks for clarifying, Ben. That makes sense.