Alternative proteins don’t seem like an overwhelmingly good bet. How much will the marginal $ to R&D bring forward the development of cost-competitive cultivated chicken? What’s the trade off between the broiler lives prevented, and the broiler lives improved if we spent that marginal $ on broiler welfare advocacy instead? If cost-competitive cultivated chicken is developed, will that really displace all chicken meat (and how quickly)? (I mostly mean these questions rhetorically, and just mean that it’s hard to answer to answer them confidently)
But also: even the best intervention might not be the best to fund at the margin. Not every marginal resource is fungible. And going all-in on one theory of change might take us to odd places for movement dynamics.
Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.
I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.
And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.
I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now.
Alternative proteins don’t seem like an overwhelmingly good bet. How much will the marginal $ to R&D bring forward the development of cost-competitive cultivated chicken? What’s the trade off between the broiler lives prevented, and the broiler lives improved if we spent that marginal $ on broiler welfare advocacy instead? If cost-competitive cultivated chicken is developed, will that really displace all chicken meat (and how quickly)? (I mostly mean these questions rhetorically, and just mean that it’s hard to answer to answer them confidently)
But also: even the best intervention might not be the best to fund at the margin. Not every marginal resource is fungible. And going all-in on one theory of change might take us to odd places for movement dynamics.
Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.
I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.
And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.
I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now.