(no subject)
Tyler Cowen: Market Failure for the Treatment of Animals (DOC)
I examine the welfare economics of how humans treat animals, using ordinal welfare economics and the standard of willingness to pay. I therefore assume that animals count in the social welfare function only insofar as human animal lovers care about them. I do not defend these assumptions as the best available moral theory, but rather treat them as a minimalistic approach that counts animals as little as possible and looks for robust conclusions. Even under these assumptions we find systematic and significant market failure in the treatment and allocation of animals. Many of the common recommendations of animal rights advocates, however, fail to consider secondary consequences and therefore may decrease animal welfare. The effects of mandatory animal care standards, subsidies to animal care, and taxes on meat consumption all differ. Piecemeal and systematic reforms do not generally have the same effects on animal welfare. The results of this paper do not require any particular judgments as to exactly how much animal welfare counts, relative to human welfare.
A footnote about valuing animals because of the belief that "there was a chance you could have been an animal":
[We] might postulate an initial “entity” with varying chances of being born into each of the earth's creatures. This construct would place very high weight on the very numerous animals, such as insects, because the chance of “being born an insect” would be especially high. It is implausible to weight species according to how numerous they are.
These seems to mesh well with what I've heard practiced among Tibetans vegetarians, that they prefer to eat larger animals rather than smaller animals due to the amount of meat rendered and the principle of equality of souls.
One interesting result:
I argue that the intuition that animals matter does not suffice to support these claims. In fact we must think through animal policies very carefully to avoid the possibility of counterintuitive effects.
[...]
If tax policy is not available, individuals may try to replicate the effects of taxes through boycotts. A boycott of meat products alone, however, may simply induce animals to be shifted into the laboratory sector. Ideally the boycotters would like to boycott meat and the product of the sectors that are even worse, but such a broader boycott may not be possible. The boycotters may not be able to “reach” the animals used in the worst sectors. Not all such animals, for instance, are used to produce consumer goods sold in stores. Some laboratory animals are used to produce goods sold only to corporations, or are used for university research. The danger is that a boycott of meat will simply shift animals into very bad and harder-to-reach sectors. Instead, a subsidy to the better sector will have more predictable effects, by pulling animals out of the other, less favorable sectors, and thus should be preferred.