On the marginal impact of veganism

or "Why you shouldn't eat meat if you hate factory farming"

[day 9/30]

The title of this post may seem obvious, but this is mostly a rebuttal to “Why you should eat meat - even if you hate factory farming” by Kat Woods which you should probably read first.

While I’m at it, I'll also present a critique FarmKind’s¹ vegan impact estimate.

From their site:

Donating is more accessible and scalable: Just $23/month to effective charities can do as much good as going completely vegan. Unlike diet change, there’s no upper limit to how much good you can do through donations. Instead of focusing on harming as little as possible, we focus on preventing as much harm as possible — it’s both a bigger and easier opportunity.

This number is wrong. I think it’s so wrong they should seriously consider changing it. See, this stat conflates eating plant-based and living life as a vegan. It underestimates the strongest aspects of us vegans: how annoying we are. The impact of “eating plant-based” ≠”going vegan”. Let me explain

#1: Ideas are contagious

Remember the pandemic? I hope you do!

There was lots of talk about epidemiology back then and I think most people reading this blog will have learned about the Basic Reproduction Number back then (also known as the “R number”).

The R number is the expected value of how many people you will spread your disease to. In this case: spreading the vegan mind-virus.

Now, I don’t know what the exact r number is of spreading veganism when you’re vegan for a lifetime, but I conjecture that if you’re smart about it, you can easily get it up to 1. (I personally have played a big role in getting 3 people to go vegan, and I’m only 23!)

You have to realize that even if we put the average number at a quite conservative 0.6, this applies recursively (because your expected value of people will also go infect the expected amount of people until all of us are grass-eaters).

\(r + r^2 + r^3 + ... = \frac{1}{1-r}\)

Which would work out to 1.5. Naturally, the closer your number gets to 1, the more this blows up. (but it doesn’t really, immediately, since this stat is over your entire life, but I digress)²

I think there are good arguments for an R value closer to 1 or even exceeding 1. Now you’re getting into serious longtermist impact territory. especially if you do a good job at instilling a certain kind of veganism that makes people want to spread it.

This is not built into the FarmKind estimate that everyone cites.

#2: We’re probably all going to need to go vegan to end factory farming

This one is extremely obvious yet not mentioned in the post. You can offset all you want and try to avoid the most harmful industries all you want but unless we get a breakthrough in cultivated meat, (which is probably way harder than you think) we will have to stop eating animal products to meaningfully halt factory farming. It’s kind of that simple.

#3: Price opportunity cost

Some aspects of the reducetarian diet are more expensive than their vegan counterparts. For example: the most ethical beef will also be the most expensive. This money could be spent donating. This is not insignificant at all. The average american spends 425 dollars on beef a year. More ethical beef is significantly more expensive than average-american-consumer-beef. Habits add up. That’s 595000 shrimp you could help!

#4: Friction

When you’re vegan, you have a thing to say to people when you get offered animal products that instantly makes them go “ah, sorry, won’t bother you with that”. Furthermore you get them to reflect on their own consumption habits.

Going “I am a lacto-bovitarian for the animals because of the inherent uncertainty of nutritional science I’ve calculated that this is the best way to maximize my impact” sounds more like a ACX bay area house party story than something that will make the average person question their own impact.

Communicating “I’m vegan” is way lower friction. This matters because you have to do this a lot. People don’t even know what veganism is half the time and I personally find it to be the most tiresome aspect of being a vegan.

It’s also just way higher effort to debate whether to get beef at all and weigh if “it is ethical enough”. Optimizing for something is always more cognitive load than following a deontology.³

#5: Health effects are overblown

You can be vegan and healthy. Since we all need to go vegan anyway to end the worst injustice on earth, this should suffice, even if you are less healthy.⁴

#6: Value drift

I don’t have studies to back this up but I strongly suspect that if you eat the animals you advocate for you’re way more likely to value drift away from effective giving for vegan causes. I conjecture you’re more likely to stick to a thing when you tie it to your self-image. “I’m a marginal reducetarian” probably won’t stick as well as “I’m vegan for the animals”. Complicated narratives easier to forget than simple ones and you’re way more vulnerable to confirmation bias than you think.

There’s a crisis of people becoming vegan and quitting. 84% of vegans quit!⁵ We should take this very seriously. 84% of quitters were not actively involved in a vegetarian/vegan group or organization. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to conjecture a lot of them wouldn’t have quit if they did. You likely won’t find community as a marginal reducetarian.⁶

Conclusion

When it comes to the farmkind estimate, I think they should raise the number to adjust for the expected impact being vegan has in turning other people vegan or they could change the phrasing to “impact of eating a plant-based diet” instead of using the word vegan.

I really wanted to cite and do more research for this piece but this is part of my 30-day writing challenge and I got lectures in the morning. I hope you got a rough idea of my case against the ovo-bovinian marginal reducetarian hordes (probably 3 people) ⁷.

1. For the record: I love these guys and I think you should give them infinite money

2. You might rebut: “You can do all of this while being a marginal reducetarian”. For the reasons that come later in this article I think this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I think veganism will have a significantly higher R number, mainly due to argument 4 and 6.

3. This is also why I think flexitarian or “just eat less meat“ arguments are really bad.

4. I can hear you going “but in the meantime” in the back, I consider it covered ground by the other arguments

5. yes I realise this hurts my R number argument from beforehand. This is hard okay? I get a day for this.

6. Again, schelling point!!!

7. in all seriousness it’s very important no vegan gets convinced away from this