Hey Devon, thanks for your comment!
As you can see above, Larks raised a similar concern in their comment. After a quick Google search, I have found some data on this from the UK—“Each 1 mph reduction in average traffic speed costs the UK economy in excess of £1Bn in lost productivity through extended journey times” (https://www.abd.org.uk/press-release-hes-proposed-motorway-speed-limit-reduction-to-60mph-borders-on-economic-vandalism/). This suggests the impact could be quite significant and could give us reason to reduce the economic impacts that are currently being modeled to account for this lost productivity. However, as the World Health Organization found that the economic impact of road traffic injuries is approximately 3% of GDP, I think the economic impacts would still be net-positive.
Apologies for the belated response, I missed this!
The pitch for shrimp welfare would be similar to the pitch of invertebrate welfare in general where even if the case for shrimp sentience is weaker than the case for mammal, bird, and fish sentience, the expected value of helping shrimp might be higher than the expected value of helping mammals, birds, and fish due to the large scale of their suffering. For example, fishcount estimate that 51-167 billion fish were slaughtered in 2017, and 210-530 billion shrimps and prawns were slaughtered.
I think the case for working to end the practice of eyestalk ablation is particularly strong as it is such a horrific practice that it could be seen as low hanging fruit. This could then be a good ‘foot-in-the-door’ for other shrimp welfare issues.
Yeah, welfare points are a per-animal metric, but they are discounted by our best guess at the likelihood of sentience of each animal so we have estimated that shrimp have a 10% likelihood of sentience and cows, to use your example, have a 75% likelihood of sentience. So an intervention that affects shrimp would have to affect sufficiently more welfare points than an intervention that affects cow to be considered cost-effective. I hope this makes sense!