On alternative proteins, I’d adjust the claims. I agree we don’t currently have strong, clean evidence that today’s plant-based products robustly displace animal products at the scale we’d want. But I’d describe the evidence as “limited, mixed, and hard to interpret” rather than “evidence that the substitution effect is weak, at best.”
Evidence in this domain is very hard to come by, and there are substantial doubts about the extent to which we can even reliably measure these things. See Unjournal’s evaluation of Bray et al.; tldr, a large-scale grocery pricing experiments found that own-price elasticity estimates much smaller than standard/cutting-edge demand-estimation methods generated on parallel data. (But other critiques also suggest doubts about the relevance of the experimental estimate.s)
Also see this AI curated evidence/discussion on the lack of validation evidence in this domain as well as our earlier post showing plant-vs-animal estimates all over the map,and not clearly linked to methodology.
Challenges include:
The (limited) evidence is mostly about current plant-based products and current meat-reduction interventions, not about genuinely price/taste/convenience-competitive products, cultivated meat, precision fermentation, etc.
Measurement issues … Scanner data misses food-away-from-home, substitution across animal products, longer-run habit formation, product introductions, and general equilibrium effects. And of course, price endogeneity.
And (as others mentioned) I’d separate the consideration of current plant-based products from future alternative proteins.
My prior is that if something becomes a close enough substitute and is cheaper / tastier / more convenient, it should substantially displace some animal consumption, though the magnitude and species mix are very uncertain.
But there’s a chicken/egg problem in gathering evidence and funding: we probably won’t get decisive (“revealed-preference”) evidence until (e.g.) cultured meat products are actually on shelves and menus at scale, but getting them there requires investment under uncertainty. There’s a potentially high upside here which we’d sacrifice if we’re not willing to invest under uncertainty.
On alternative proteins, I’d adjust the claims. I agree we don’t currently have strong, clean evidence that today’s plant-based products robustly displace animal products at the scale we’d want. But I’d describe the evidence as “limited, mixed, and hard to interpret” rather than “evidence that the substitution effect is weak, at best.”
Evidence in this domain is very hard to come by, and there are substantial doubts about the extent to which we can even reliably measure these things. See Unjournal’s evaluation of Bray et al.; tldr, a large-scale grocery pricing experiments found that own-price elasticity estimates much smaller than standard/cutting-edge demand-estimation methods generated on parallel data. (But other critiques also suggest doubts about the relevance of the experimental estimate.s)
Also see this AI curated evidence/discussion on the lack of validation evidence in this domain as well as our earlier post showing plant-vs-animal estimates all over the map,and not clearly linked to methodology.
Challenges include:
The (limited) evidence is mostly about current plant-based products and current meat-reduction interventions, not about genuinely price/taste/convenience-competitive products, cultivated meat, precision fermentation, etc.
Measurement issues … Scanner data misses food-away-from-home, substitution across animal products, longer-run habit formation, product introductions, and general equilibrium effects. And of course, price endogeneity.
And (as others mentioned) I’d separate the consideration of current plant-based products from future alternative proteins.
My prior is that if something becomes a close enough substitute and is cheaper / tastier / more convenient, it should substantially displace some animal consumption, though the magnitude and species mix are very uncertain.
But there’s a chicken/egg problem in gathering evidence and funding: we probably won’t get decisive (“revealed-preference”) evidence until (e.g.) cultured meat products are actually on shelves and menus at scale, but getting them there requires investment under uncertainty. There’s a potentially high upside here which we’d sacrifice if we’re not willing to invest under uncertainty.