Thanks so much for writing out all of this!

I am really surprised by the 60% number. Will update my internal model ;)

And fully agree that highly intensive farming with no regulation is the worst of both worlds and very worthwhile to work on. Thank you for that work!!

Thanks! I wasn’t aware of the great work that https://welfarefootprint.org/ is doing, and your attempt to bring it to a total value is exactly what I was looking for. From what I understand the “best” scenarios (cage free hens and reformed broilers) are still below the example standard I discussed here. Would you agree?

Thanks for taking the time to write this! I think it aligns well with what somebody else had shared with me as well privately.

Let me start with where I disagree: I don't share your view that it is unethical under all circumstances to create "humans to be slaughtered". If my life ended painlessly without me knowing and affecting nobody around me in a few years because, plot twist, our universe is just one big farm of some aliens, then that would be a pity because I would've preferred to live another fourty years but I'm also grateful for the fourty years of life until that point that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise. From conversations with friends I do understand that this is not a common view and I understand if yours is different. One reason "it would be a pity" is that of course I had plans for my life and those vanish but here I share the thinking you mentioned that animals probably live a lot less in the future than we do so this might "count less".

On your false dichotomy argument: "Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time." I agree but realistically the options are "no life" or "limited life" (becuase animals are expensive), and if those are the options then I think "limited life" is better. And if the animals truely have no concept of the future, isn't "two animals for half the time" somewhat similar to "one animal for the full time"?

I love how you went from these philosophical points to more practical points at the end, so let me also come back to those. I think no matter the disagreement on the points above, we can both agree that a world without net-negative factory farmed lives is a better world. I personally don't think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat, it is too deeply culturally engrained in so many cultures. At the same time nobody who sees the suffering of animals is supporting these practices. So going from a messaging of "ideally everybody should be vegan and let's trust tech to solve it" to "ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated" is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.

In practice that would probably mean supporting organizations that try communicating along those lines and see if that has a better effect than advocating for a vegan diet. I could also imagine that it has the opposite effect: Normalising animal protein and a slippery slope in the direction of also eating net-negative animal protein.

Thanks! Indeed thinking along the same lines although I have a much stronger intuition that most human and wild animal lives are lives worth living.
From the comment section I liked

• The link to the talk on wild animal welfare - while it makes the point that evolution is complicated and not guranteed to increase welfare welfare for all animals, I think I share their assumption that pain is an evolutionary tool for animals to stop doing things that will harm them (which would stop working if it would be overly abundant). In a similar way pleasure can be argued to encourage taking actions to achieve fitness-improving goals, so you'd expect them to always somewhat balance out unless in niche cases where pain/pleasure don't have an effect on reproductive success (like an especially painful death, or a factory farm where activities from the animals don't have an effect on their fitness).
• The link to the neutral point discussion although most considerations seem more relevant for human lives (e.g., the ethical issues around legalising assisted suicide) I found it interesting that the estimated neutral point moves "down" as people have lower average life satisfaction (e.g., 2 for UK and 0.5 for Ghana and Kenya).

Somewhat unrelated to this but I read your work for Animal Advocacy Africa. How do you look at the welfare of animals farmed in more traditional settings there? E.g., chickens in a village or small cattle herds by roaming tribes like the Kenyan Maasai? Just from looking at them I always guessed that they have a "good life" but curious what you think! From some conversations I understood that factory farming also becomes more prominent in Kenya but the majority still seems to be farmed in more traditional settings.

Yes I heard the same. I had a brief look at their regulation and saw that "No more than 3,000 laying hens may be kept in any one shed" which seems pretty high even if they have more space per hen than with other regulations.

I'll see if I can talk to some experts and get their thoughts on these questions.

Thanks for your thoughts!

On your question: I chose organic because I had initially planned to take the EU Organic one because it’s so wide spread here and has some animal welfare standards. In the end I chose Naturland though because it seems to be stronger on animal welfare, and I wanted to make a strong case.

I am not aware of any reported malpractices as the one you cited for that label but of course there is always a chance to have these outliers.

Thanks for tagging me! Fully agree with you Joseph that an easier way to socialise with strangers at conferences would be great and that's exactly what I'm trying to do with this app. Let me know if you know anybody organising conferences or communities for whom this could be helpful.

Thanks so much for steelmanning my argument and looking for some research yourself! And I share your intuition that some consumption seems zero-sum around status. I do think though that my smartphone is giving me tons of value but that's a different discussion probably haha

Thanks for that! And for making the ideological ickyness visible. I think a lot of people, me included, feel like this. And thanks also for acknowledging the accounting part of the framework. It does rely on a similar relationship though that money spent represents value delivered. So we would have to assume that companies are more rational in their spending choices.

If I understand you correctly, you are questioning three things
1) That there is a marginal relationship between income and life satisfaction at high incomes
2) If there were a relationship, that consumption is a good predictor of contribution to life satisfaction
3) That Elon Musk could be the most impactful person alive

Let me try to address each one

1) For this I will just defer to the studies referenced in Our World In Data:  "Higher personal incomes go together with higher self-reported life satisfaction" suggests to me that also at high incomes there is a marginal relationship between income and life satisfaction.

2) If we accept 1), then it's very likely that your spending will be predictive of your life satisfaction. I share your intuition that spending becomes more volatile and impulsive, but if we consider similar amounts on a percentage level, and thereby a similar level of contribution to the WELLBY measure, I think it's fair to assume that somebody who earns $100k will be as diligent about spending $1k as a person earning $1k will be about spending $10.

3) You make the point that Elon relies on government spending. I think this is a valid one because that is far far away from actual consumer life satisfaction and the influence of each citizen and the effect on them is only very very indirect. So maybe the government just spent the money badly (I'd argue though that it's much better spent than on NASA). If, however, he would not rely on these and make most of his money directly from consumers, I think accepting 2) would have to lead us to accept 3) unless he were in some industry that tricks our consumer choices, like the addictions you mentioned, I think he doesn't.

Hm, not sure. If there is an opportunity for innovation, I'd expect either the incumbent to pursue this to expand the addressable market (and thereby make more revenue / have more impact) or/and a competitor to innvoate, thereby reducing the price and capturing market share / prevent the incumbent from increasing profits (and increasing revenue / imapct for the competitor).

On second reading I assume you are referring to the issue that when a product gets cheaper through innvoation it might look like the product would be less impactful because it now gets less share of the total WELLBYs of the customer. I guess, though, what would happen at the same time is that overall life satisfaction of the customer will go slightly up as they now have more disposable income (just saved some money from spending less on that product), and that increased life satisfaction would be distributed across all purchases, including the one that just got cheaper. On a micro level those won't perfectly balance of course but on the coarsness level of this analysis I think we'd be fine - see the section on first dollar vs last dollar spent in Appendix 1.

But I'm not an economist or anything like that by training so very curious about your further thoughts! I very likely missed things.

I addressed the counterfactual impact a bit in Appendix 1 in the section on absolute vs relative impact.