I’m not sure about the academic literature, but will add anecdotally that my impression is that the PTC hypothesis is extremely widespread within the advocacy space—people talk about it a ton.
I’ll also add that the “necessary but not sufficient” line feels hard to interpret without more clarification (and a bit meaningless on its own because of this). It would be helpful if people pushing this position could clarify how much of the effort PTC is doing to reach sufficiency. E.g. if one thinks that if we reach PTC parity, and its done like 90% of the work to cause widespread adoption, I think they’re basically agreeing with the positive-PTC hypothesis. But, if PTC parity is required, but is like, 5% of what’s needed, that’s a very different claim.
Finally, the podcast referenced is very much positive-PTC. It feels really misleading to me to claim that podcast is negative-PTC. To the extent it isn’t, it’s strongly in the “PTC is doing 90%+ of the work” direction. E.g., to quote it directly:
...I was on the panel at a Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco maybe six or eight months ago with Mary Kay James who runs Tyson New Ventures with Tyson Venture Capital Fund and she said, “We are absolutely looking at clean meat,” which she called it clean meat, “as one of the things that we want to invest in.” And she said, “For us, it’s all about choice. We will provide the meat that consumers want.” Well, price, taste, convenience. When clean meat is price and taste competitive, Tyson, Perdue, Hormel, everybody just moves in that direction.
...
when we’re thinking about what it is that we want to eat, every single one of us thinks about the price of the food, we think about how it’s going to taste. We may not be thinking about convenience but convenience is going to be a central factor. If it’s not there, we’re not going to consume it.
...
The main thing that The Good Food Institute works on, when we say alternatives to the products of conventional animal agriculture, basically what we’re looking for is products that will compete on the basis of price, taste, and convenience as I mentioned.
I agree, especially with your points on “necessary but not sufficient.” In my view, this represents mostly a pivot from the PTC hypothesis. I’m not sure whether to view this as post hoc hypothesizing (generally bad) or merely updating-on-evidence (generally good).
I do think the question of “what percent of the ‘work’ is PTC?” is probably not well-defined, but is likely a worthwhile starting point for disagreement.
Thanks for both of your responses (@Jacob_Peacock and @abrahamrowe). I was going to analyse the podcast in more detail to resolve our different understandings, but I think @BruceF ’s response to the piece clarifies his views on the “negative/positive” PTC hypothesis. The views that he would defend are: (negative) “First, if we don’t compete on price and taste, the products will stay niche, and meat consumption will continue to grow.” and (positive) “Second, if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot, even if other factors will need to be met to gain additional market share.”
I expect that these two claims are less controversial, albeit with “quite a lot” leaving some ambiguity.
My initial response was based on my assumption that everyone involved in alt protein realises that PTC-parity is only one step towards widespread adoption. But I agree that it’s worth getting more specific and checking how people feel about Abraham’s “how much of the work is PTC doing- 90% vs 5%?” question.
I assume if you surveyed/ interviewed people working in the space, there would be a fairly wide range of views. I doubt if people have super-clear models, because we’re expecting progress in the coming years to come on multiple fronts (consumer acceptance, product quality, product suitability, policy, norms), and to mutually reinforce each other, but it would be worth clarifying so that you can better identify what you’re arguing against.
From my own work on alt-protein adoption in Asia I sense that PTC-parity is only a small part of the puzzle, but it would also be far easier to solve the other pieces if we suddenly had some PTC-competitive killer products, so PTC interact with other variables in ways that make it difficult to calculate.
Overall, I stand by my criticism that I don’t think the positive PTC-hypothesis as you frame it is commonly held. But I’d like to understand better what the views are that you’re critiquing. It would be interesting to see your anecdotal evidence supported- what people actually think when they say they (previously) bought into PTC, and who these people are. It could be true, for example, that people who work in PBM startups tend to believe more strongly that a PTC-competitive product will transform the market, but people working on the market side tend to realise how many barriers there are to adoption beyond these factors.
Thanks! My subsequent reply to Bruce might be helpful here—while Bruce doesn’t defend the claim here, I do think he says things that strongly resemble it elsewhere.
I’m not sure about the academic literature, but will add anecdotally that my impression is that the PTC hypothesis is extremely widespread within the advocacy space—people talk about it a ton.
I’ll also add that the “necessary but not sufficient” line feels hard to interpret without more clarification (and a bit meaningless on its own because of this). It would be helpful if people pushing this position could clarify how much of the effort PTC is doing to reach sufficiency. E.g. if one thinks that if we reach PTC parity, and its done like 90% of the work to cause widespread adoption, I think they’re basically agreeing with the positive-PTC hypothesis. But, if PTC parity is required, but is like, 5% of what’s needed, that’s a very different claim.
Finally, the podcast referenced is very much positive-PTC. It feels really misleading to me to claim that podcast is negative-PTC. To the extent it isn’t, it’s strongly in the “PTC is doing 90%+ of the work” direction. E.g., to quote it directly:
(Abraham and I both work for Rethink Priorities.)
I agree, especially with your points on “necessary but not sufficient.” In my view, this represents mostly a pivot from the PTC hypothesis. I’m not sure whether to view this as post hoc hypothesizing (generally bad) or merely updating-on-evidence (generally good).
I do think the question of “what percent of the ‘work’ is PTC?” is probably not well-defined, but is likely a worthwhile starting point for disagreement.
Thanks for both of your responses (@Jacob_Peacock and @abrahamrowe). I was going to analyse the podcast in more detail to resolve our different understandings, but I think @BruceF ’s response to the piece clarifies his views on the “negative/positive” PTC hypothesis. The views that he would defend are: (negative) “First, if we don’t compete on price and taste, the products will stay niche, and meat consumption will continue to grow.” and (positive) “Second, if we can create products that compete on price and taste, sales will go up quite a lot, even if other factors will need to be met to gain additional market share.”
I expect that these two claims are less controversial, albeit with “quite a lot” leaving some ambiguity.
My initial response was based on my assumption that everyone involved in alt protein realises that PTC-parity is only one step towards widespread adoption. But I agree that it’s worth getting more specific and checking how people feel about Abraham’s “how much of the work is PTC doing- 90% vs 5%?” question.
I assume if you surveyed/ interviewed people working in the space, there would be a fairly wide range of views. I doubt if people have super-clear models, because we’re expecting progress in the coming years to come on multiple fronts (consumer acceptance, product quality, product suitability, policy, norms), and to mutually reinforce each other, but it would be worth clarifying so that you can better identify what you’re arguing against.
From my own work on alt-protein adoption in Asia I sense that PTC-parity is only a small part of the puzzle, but it would also be far easier to solve the other pieces if we suddenly had some PTC-competitive killer products, so PTC interact with other variables in ways that make it difficult to calculate.
Overall, I stand by my criticism that I don’t think the positive PTC-hypothesis as you frame it is commonly held. But I’d like to understand better what the views are that you’re critiquing. It would be interesting to see your anecdotal evidence supported- what people actually think when they say they (previously) bought into PTC, and who these people are. It could be true, for example, that people who work in PBM startups tend to believe more strongly that a PTC-competitive product will transform the market, but people working on the market side tend to realise how many barriers there are to adoption beyond these factors.
Thanks! My subsequent reply to Bruce might be helpful here—while Bruce doesn’t defend the claim here, I do think he says things that strongly resemble it elsewhere.