What is this?
Every year, Give Well produces a massive Cost-Effectiveness Model to quantify the impact of global health and development interventions. This is the first step towards producing the equivalent analysis for animal welfare.
What does the analysis show?
The initial work compares the cost of eating chicken vs beef, assuming you offset the ethical and environmental harms. The costs end up being similar, especially given how much uncertainty there is in underlying parameteres.
Where can I see the model?
It's available here as a Google Sheet. You can also read an explanation here.
What should future work target?
I only looked at one analysis of one intervention to figure out the cost of ethical offsets, and came up with huge error bars. I would encourage future work on improving these estimates.
Why should we care about animal suffering?
Per Luke Muehlhauser's investigation, it seems likely that animals have moral patienthood. In principle, if you're uncertain whether a creature is capable of suffering, it's probably best to avoid killing 60 billion of them every year.
Who maintains the analysis?
You can contact Applied Divinity Studies with questions or comments. Scott Alexander, Kelsey Piper and Brian Tomasik produced the work this analysis is based on. All faults mine.
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