Economists on Ethics and Animals: Blackorby and Donaldson (1992)

Charles Blackorby and David Donaldson, "Pigs and Guinea Pigs: A Note on the Ethics of Animal Exploitation." The Economic Journal 102: 1345-1369, November 1992. 

The leading general economics journals are not exactly replete with articles centered on the treatment of nonhuman animals, but they are not totally bereft of such articles, either, thanks mainly, I think, to Blackorby and Donaldson (1992). Here are some notes about this outlier of an economics article...

Human use of animals for food and research imposes harms on animals -- but by increasing the demand for animals, these exploitative uses result in many more animals being bred than the numbers that otherwise would be brought into existence: if humans didn't eat cattle, the world would have a lot fewer cattle. (Right now, there are nearly one billion cattle in the world.) So perhaps, if the average animal has a life that is worth living, despite the human-imposed ravages, one could argue that human exploitation of animals is good, on net, for the animals. (This "logic of the larder" has come up before in Animals and Econ.) Blackorby and Donaldson offer a structured examination of the possible trade-off, where animal exploitation simultaneously imposes direct harms but indirectly increases animal populations and possibly improves some measures of overall welfare.

Comparing overall wellbeing across situations with different quantities of "beings" is not a straightforward exercise. Blackorby and Donaldson invoke "critical-level utilitarianism", which is one approach for making such comparisons. In doing so, they also employ Singeresque equal consideration, where the weight given to the wellbeing of a creature is independent of what species (human or nonhuman) the creature happens to be. So, two states of the world with equal numbers of creatures would be compared on a classical utilitarian basis, by the sum of the wellbeing of each creature.  

With different numbers of creatures or different lifespans, the evaluation of social states still involves summing lifetime utilities (so it is a form of aggregate wellbeing, not per capita wellbeing, that ranks states), but with some twists. A hedonically neutral life is normalized to a lifetime utility of zero. What is summed is the excess of individuals' lifetime utilities above some specified critical value. Consider two situations (A and B) that are identical, except that state B has one more individual than does state A -- all the individuals "shared" between the two states have the exact same lifetime utility whether they are in state A or state B. Is state B preferred to state A, because B has everything A has plus one more creature? The answer depends on whether that individual's lifetime utility (in state B, the only state that has that individual) exceeds the critical value: if the creature's utility exceeds the critical value, B is better than A. If the creature's utility falls short of the critical value, A is preferred to B. "Higher" critical values, then, make it more likely that additional creatures per se do not make social states more appealing. Indeed, if the average utility is below the critical value, adding more folks with such an average utility would make the situation worse. (Classic utilitarianism can always make situations better by adding more individuals with above-neutral hedonic evaluations.) If the critical utility value is 3, "a population of [size] one with a utility equal to 4 is preferred to a population of [size] two with utilities of 4 and 2 [p. 1348]." Nonetheless, killing the person with utility of 2 does not improve the social state: that person's lifetime utility is lowered by the death, and the utility of any creature alive for any part of a "state" counts towards that state's evaluation. (But the birth of someone with a lifetime utility of 2 should be avoided, as that would lower the evaluation of the second state: killings of existing creatures and births of new ones do not have identical effects on measuring overall wellbeing!) A lifetime utility can fall below the critical value if the per-period hedonic payoff is low, or if the lifetime is short (as it is with farm animals). In principle, this set-up can provide a basis for making claims about optimal population sizes as a function of the critical wellbeing level. The authors give an example where it is better to mistreat a single mouse three times for research purposes than it is to mistreat three mice, one time each. 

Further complex developments (dozens of equations, eight graphs) fill out much of the article, but from my perspective, they are of marginal interest. Section V (pages 1363-1365) and the Conclusion (1365-1367) are more pertinent; the former compares the critical-level utilitarianism framework with other ethical systems. The authors note the centrality of the critical utility level (possibly different for different species) to their framework, and suggest that for "simpler animals" who lead "less coherent lives," a sub-human critical utility level might be appropriate. 

The Conclusion features the author's answers to some fundamental questions at the human/animal nexus. "There is a case for raising animals for food, but it is possible that the ethical vegetarians are right that the optimal level of meat consumption is zero [p. 1366]." The case for exploiting animals for useful medical research is stronger, but replacement and reduction and refinement are called for here, too, up to a point. Also stronger is the case for reducing our consumption of meat, and for providing better conditions for animals than profit-maximization alone would offer. A tax on exploitative uses of animals is probably helpful in moving us closer to optimal population numbers.

PETA on a Meat Tax

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals support a meat excise tax "to help cover the health and environmental costs that result from using animals for food." They detail the usual health and environmental impacts of meat consumption and production, and (as is usually the case, it seems) do not distinguish between internal and external health costs. PETA does, however, mention the potential cross-subsidy inherent through our health care financing: "It doesn’t make sense that the millions of meat-free Americans have to help pick up the tab (through taxes and health-insurance premiums) when meat-eaters get sick." On their "Tax Meat" FAQ page, PETA also notes the health impacts of the production of meat, the significant health and safety risks within the meatpacking industry -- an industry with working conditions that have been found further wanting during the Covid pandemic. The revenues also can be earmarked: "Revenue from the tax could be used to clean up areas polluted by animal agriculture, assist farms in transitioning away from animal-based agriculture, and increase access to healthy plant-derived foods in communities that need it most." I didn't see a specific tax rate in the PETA material, but they do indicate (on the FAQ page) that the tax payments from a typical (non-vegetarian!) family would come to about $5 per month. Given standard household meat expenditures in the US, that suggests something like a 5% meat (ad valorem) excise tax. 

PETA end their appeal for a meat tax by identifying the victims of the current system, the millions and millions of abused animals: "When it comes to Americans’ meat habit, animals are paying the biggest costs. A tax on meat could help persuade humans to save other animals (and their own bodies) from abuse."

Katare et al. (2020) on Optimal Meat Consumption

 Bhagyashree Katare, H. Holly Wang, Jonathan Lawing, Na Hao, Timothy Park, and Michael Wetzstein, "Toward Optimal Meat Consumption." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 102(2): 662-680, March 2020.

Meat consumption worldwide increased by more that a factor of five between 1992 and 2016, with concomitant negative effects on the environment and health. Many of these harms are of the external variety, and thus present the usual case for potentially welfare-improving policy interventions -- including a Pigovian meat tax. But the existence of external costs does not in itself establish the optimality of a Pigovian tax; perhaps improved consumer information or a campaign aimed at voluntary reductions in meat consumption would be preferable policy responses. Alternatively, changes in production methods could reduce the environmental impact of the meat industry.

The authors compare a meat tax with a mandatory labelling scheme, where the labels on meat products would indicate the environmental and health costs of meat production and consumption. The authors note that individuals enjoy behaving in what they see as a prosocial manner, providing an intrinsic motivation to reduce meat consumption. This intrinsic motivation, they argue, can be counteracted by the presence of external motivations to reduce meat consumption, via a meat tax, for instance -- this type of crowding out has been examined pretty broadly within behavioral economics. Green labelling (as opposed to the tax) could promote, not undermine, intrinsic incentives to reduce meat consumption. (Although the opposite effect, that being constantly lectured to cut back on meat could incentivize more meat consumption, seems possible, too.) Other issues to consider are the potential that the substitutes to meat consumption might involve external social costs of their own, and the revenues collected by a meat tax could be spent in ways to further reduce meat consumption.

In their baseline scenario, the authors find that green labelling has little impact on reducing meat consumption; they also find that the optimal meat tax is quite significant, at more than 67% of the pre-tax price. Of course, different parameterizations could alter the specific findings, but a significant meat tax combined with a supplementary informational campaign seems to me like a big improvement over the status quo.

Forero-Cantor, Ribal, and Sanjuán (2020) on Carbon Footprint Meat Taxes

Germán Forero-Cantor, Javier Ribal, and Neus Sanjuán, "Levying carbon footprint taxes on animal-sourced foods. A case study in Spain." Journal of Cleaner Production 243, 10 January 2020, 118668.

Meat production as practiced today is not friendly to the environment, with animal agriculture responsible for some 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. Other environmental harms associated with animal agriculture include water pollution and rain forest destruction. 

With respect to greenhouse gas emissions alone, Forero-Cantor et al. (2020) calculate (Pigovian?) taxes for pork, beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, eggs, and fish, using quarterly Spanish data from 2004 to 2015. (During this period, the total Spanish consumption of beef, eggs, and lamb decreased. The modal meat meal is fish -- that is, the weight of seafood consumed each year globally exceeds that of pork or poultry, the most common land-animal-sourced meats; fish is undifferentiated in the data, as opposed to the separate types of land-animal-sourced meats.) The researchers need to know not only the carbon footprint throughout the meat supply chain -- lamb and beef are the biggest carbon releasers on a per kilogram basis, while fish have the lowest carbon footprint -- they also have to understand demand elasticities, how changes in prices will alter the quantities of meat and other products that consumers purchase. 

The researchers simulate the effect of various taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, and find, counterintuitively, that a tax on fish does best at lowering the overall carbon footprint. A tax on pork, alternatively, given the induced product substitutions, would have a perverse effect, it would raise the overall carbon footprint. A tax on poultry (chicken or turkey) wouldn't help much in curtailing greenhouse gasses, either. Given the huge (1 trillion? -- pdf) number of fish killed each year for human and animal consumption, animal welfare considerations would seem to bolster the (relative?) case for taxing seafood.

The New Beyond Meat Ad...

 ...is here. [The original link stopped working, so this is a link to what might be the same(?) ad from summer 2020; still worth seeing!]

Springmann et al. (2018) on Health-Motivated Meat Taxes

 Springmann M, Mason-D'Croz D, Robinson S, et al. Health-motivated taxes on red and processed meat: A modelling study on optimal tax levels and associated health impacts. PLoS One. 2018;13(11):e0204139. Published 2018 Nov 6. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204139

The authors look at the health impacts of an increase of one serving per day in the consumption of red and processed meat. (Red meat here is beef, pork, and lamb, despite what the ads have told us; processed meats include sausage, hot dogs, and many deli-style lunchmeats.) They monetize these health impacts, and then examine taxes that would internalize the incremental health costs; here's a schematic representation of their analytic approach.

Red and processed meats come out of the study as fairly lethal, accounting for something like 4.4% of deaths. In high-income countries, "internalizing" the mortality and morbidity effects would raise prices of red meat by about one-fifth, and more than double the prices of processed meat. These price changes would result in lots of substitutions in terms of food consumption, and meat-related deaths worldwide would decline by some 9%. The remaining meat-related health care costs would exceed meat tax revenues.

While I learned a lot from the useful exercise presented in Springmann et al. (2018), I don't think that it sheds much light on "optimal" meat taxes, at least when that term is used in the Pigovian sense (which the authors reference). Their approach treats all incremental meat-related health care costs as external, that is, as if they are ignored entirely by the consumer. But people engage in lots of risky activities even when they know the risks and even know that they will bear the costs if the risks materialize. Is the additional utility that people get from that incremental serving of meat more valuable than the additonal (expected) health care costs? We can't know the answer to this question from the approach taken in the article. We don't know benefits, we don't know what portion of costs are truly external, and we don't know the extent of underweighting of non-externalized costs, so-called internalities. Hence, this approach does not possess the building blocks required to provide reliable estimates of Pigovian meat taxes -- a point similar to one I raised concerning the analysis in Meatonomics. I suspect the underlying issue (with Springmann et al. (2018)) is a reliance on a cost-of-illness approach, which is inadequate for capturing economic optimality.