You stop, another hundred million in China will eat it.
Too many people and too much demand. The balance has been lost for now.
Too many people and too much demand. The balance has been lost for now.
Perhaps you're trying to articulate that it's futile - since "there are many people who do not care", but that's like stabbing a baby saying "well, in our culture many people do this already".
Individual choices matter: buying less meat reduces supply (it's what economists call elastic) - your supermarket will buy less meat when you stop consuming it, and that propagates up the chain. If not 1-to-1, it may be 1/1000 chance of reducing the next 1000 lb order - which is basically equivalent to 1-to-1 response (especially in the long run).
And finally, with all the alternatives of substitute meats (on the market now) and cultured meats (coming to market soon), you have numerous options to reduce your meat consumption. So don't hide behind panic to do something bad - that's like seeing looting in the store and saying "well, I want some of that free stuff I haven't earned - at someone else's expense, and others are doing it".
Uhhhh, buying less meat will reduce price, not supply.
> "If someone gives up 1 lb of chicken, total consumption falls by 0.76lb in expectation."
https://reducing-suffering.org/comments-on-compassion-by-the...
Of course consumption falls if I give something up. That's not Supply.
Your original statement was "buying less meat reduces supply", while the quote you just gave as evidence talked about "consumption", which is the demand side of the equation (technically "quantity demanded", but I'm simplifying).
If you don't like my knowledge, maybe this will help [0]. Please don't tell me I'm "just claiming things based on theory I remember" - or anyone else on HN - it's rude.
[0] - https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
If you have the patience, perhaps you can explain to me where the mechanism I describe fails.
If in a town 10% of people stop buying beef, grocery store will stop stocking their shelves as much as they did prior. Going up the supply chain, when more stores do this, the supplier will decrease production. Of course this takes time, but given a few-years time horizon, the effects of lower consumption do propagate to the supply.
Is your comment just a nitpick with my misunderstanding the technical language economists use? Perhaps you're commenting with an assumption of a shorter time horizon than what I have in mind?
I wasn't nitpicking. This is actually a confusing part of economics, and the language of economics (which I'm trying to avoid) makes it worse. :)
Let me give you a few real examples, but with contrived numbers for illustration.
1 - Suppose you can buy either chicken or beef. Both cost $1. Now, due to some reason, the price of beef rises. What will happen, is that some people will buy more chicken, even though the price of that didn't change. (Maybe they can't afford the beef now, maybe they're frugal, etc.)
2 - Next, suppose the same $1 for each, but the price of beef drops. Now, since it is the cheaper source of protein, some people will buy the beef instead of the chicken, simply because it's cheaper.
3 - Third example (a bit more involved): The prices of both are again $1. You and a bunch of friends decide to go without beef for a month. The price of beef will drop. Now (and this is the key part), because the price of beef is now cheaper, some number of people will buy it instead of chicken.
What has happened in example 3, is that the second half of that example is actually the same as example 2. In your example of the town buying 10% less beef, then supply will eventually self-correct, but only if nothing else (prices, prices of substitutes, supply of substitutes) changes. This push-pull action on prices and quantities tends to bounce around - that's why prices of beef, chicken, oil, timber, etc tend to change frequently.
I hope this helps.
The argument I lay out is that even if supermarkets aren't 100% sensitive to demand, on average, reduction of consumption does propagate through the market, and at least a part of the effect is lower "production" (fewer animals raised in the future).
I think you're 100% right that when there's more supply than consumers, it's likely that the price will drop, and with lower price, more people will be eager to buy. But I still see all this as short-term effects. When looking across a lifetime of action (consuming literally TONS less meat), an individual's choice to eat less meat makes a difference.
Perhaps I should stay away from "elasticity" in my wording, as it brings in needless attention to economic theories that can make thinking about this issue harder, not easier.
Although the taxes were/are astronomical in the US, some people continue to buy them. Many fewer people, but still $ billions in sales every year.
You can take this approach with pretty much anything - tobacco, beef, soft drinks, carbon-based energy, foreign imports, etc., and it keeps it simple.
Before I reduced my meat consumption to virtually zero, my last concern was "how could I, a tiny individual, make any difference?" And then I heard the expected value argument (where my purchase could result in an extra bulk order from the supplier - so even if low probability, it was still better to abstain).
I guess I'm trying to say individuals can help normalise things that previously wasn't normal.
I went through the whole cowspiracy, went vegetarian for 2-3 years thing and I commend it, but it's pretty hard to get enough protein without being starving and vegetarian cooking takes way longer.
Idealy, you'd like to think that we can all just quit meat, but IMO it's for poeple who can afford the time and money to do so.
We should start putting customs duties on all meat products. German chicken e.g. have destroyed eg. the African chicken market. Live stock is transported over high ways because it is too expensive to slaughter locally. Free trade of animal products just leads to the most absurd effects.
Not helped by how many people are blatantly propagandized into objectively false positions by Fox News & similar.
I dunno, I think that’s confusing cause and effect. The solutions being proposed (e.g. be vegetarian) aren’t what people want. The same goes for lots of problems it seems. In my mind, somebody turning to Fox News et al. is a kind of effect of that.
People aren’t going to suddenly want to become vegetarian if Fox News goes away. There will probably always be somewhere people can listen to talking heads rant about the solutions they feel are being shoved down their throats.
Eating less meat would be something very personal, and I think you're right on there being an aversion totally unrelated to news, or propaganda of any kind.
On the other hand, there are measures like increasing investment in climate research, green energy, carbon capture, etc. These have a much smaller personal effect on each individual.
These two categories both, on Fox News and contemporaries, exist under the same umbrella. If the demand was really going from ground-up, then we might see segments about how eating meat doesn't really contribute to global warming next to segments about how we could create jobs with green energy investment. But we don't.
Instead we see a widespread denial of climate change itself on the top level, falling back to denial of man-made climate change, then to some idea that climate change isn't worth fixing, then to climate change is real and dangerous but it's the plastic straws & personal responsibility that we need to think about.
This, in my mind, strongly implies that it is not a bottom-up demand for climate change denial, but a mix of bottom-up and top-down demand, but with a heavy lean towards top-down. And much of the bottom-up demand has been created artificially (in the Manufacturing Consent style of "artificially")
To be clear, I agree with the narrow point you actually made, I don't expect Fox News has some controlling factor over how many people want to be vegetarian. Vegetarianism isn't even a majority in deeply left-wing communities. Fortunately there's a lot of ground to be gained on switching to bird meats, or even just dodging the issue entirely with cultured meats. It's a shame Fox News disdains these options too.
Clearly extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, while some efforts are being proposed (e.g. recent EU Climate Action [1]), it is far too too little, much too late.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/food-systems-summit/news/2021-going-be...