Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.
Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.
My blog (often EA related content)
Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here
Very cool work, thanks Saulius & Nuno for doing it and Anima for commissioning!
I’m particularly interested in the stopping new factory farms campaign and am keen to understand how you think about this. I drew some very rough graphs to help me get my head around this and curious if you are modelling this in a similar way. I’ll leave aside the impact on the price of meat, although, I anticipate there may be some small increase when supply is more constrained.
Specifically, you note that you estimate that this will delay farms by, on average, around approx. 7 months. I’ll just assume this is 1 year for the sake of simplicity so this may look like this:
To describe what I’m thinking: the production of meat is essentially shifted to the right by 1 year, but follows a pretty similar upward trajectory (although I don’t think the trajectory matters too much). Therefore the difference in animal suffering (assuming that’s the same as meat production) is the difference in areas under the curve, shown by the beautifully scribbled light blue area.
However, I think this only holds if you think that there will come a time in the future when meat production will start going down. If you think it will have the same total peak and trajectory in both cases, then all you are doing is having a very similar amount of meat production/animal suffering, just delayed by a year. As seen by the small light blue area below, it makes sense there would be some small impact on animals.
But, for example, if you think the world is going to end or there will be some factor (e.g. very tasty and cheap cultivated meat) that causes meat production to decrease in a given year, then this will have counterfactually reduced animal suffering by reducing the height of the meat production peak, as seen below.
Is this roughly how you’re also thinking about this? I would be curious for an economist to weigh in also / look into this further as I’m sure there are a bunch of other relevant factors besides the duration of the delay that would affect overall meat / animal suffering averted e.g.:
If most farms are operating below max capacity and can fairly easily ramp up supply without building new facilities (which would make all of this moot)
How easily manufacturers/processors can find new suppliers
If there are any price impacts and how significant they might be for demand