Most pro-vegetarian advocacy is not very effective. The problem isn’t the goal of making animals happy – it’s likely that farm animals have moral value, and almost everyone agrees that factory farm conditions are horrible. Instead, the problem is the most common strategy used to achieve that goal: namely, emotionally-charged rhetoric to convince people, either in person or on the Internet, that they should personally not eat meat.[1] This category of solution to animal rights problems is likely ineffective at best, and downright harmful at worst. As GiveWell says, non-profits shouldn’t “point to a problem so large and severe (and the world has many such problems) that donors immediately focus on that problem – feeling compelled to give to the organization working on addressing it – without giving equal attention to the proposed solution, how much it costs, and how likely it is to work.”
This essay doesn’t address whether animals have nonzero moral value, which has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. Nor does it look at other solutions to factory farming, like government legislation, or scientific research to develop meat substitutes. It simply tries to show that a lot of pro-vegetarian advocacy, as it’s currently practiced, is ineffective or outright counterproductive. Since there’s a wide range of arguments to consider, this writeup has been broken up into chunks, of which this is the first. This chunk looks at the simplest sub-question: is vegetarian advocacy a cost-effective way of reducing the amount of meat eaten?
First, we should check: is any kind of activism ever cost-effective? The answer seems to be yes. Eg., everyone knows about the campaign for gay marriage, which won a full victory in the US in 2015 (though after many decades of work). However, there seems to be a clear pattern in which activism campaigns are successful, and which aren’t. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman divides the brain into two systems: System 1, which is fast and intuitive, and System 2, which is slow and reflective. System 1 evolved before System 2, and is more connected to the physical actions we take, while System 2 is more closely linked with what we say, write, and think. The historical record shows that activism aimed at System 2 is difficult, but can sometimes be effective. On the other hand, activism aimed at System 1 is usually a waste of effort.
[Edit: The pattern of successful vs. unsuccessful activism still seems real, but the distinction being drawn here is not what Kahneman meant by System 1 and 2. Apologies for the mistake, further clarification to follow.]
For example, consider the history of activism against racism. In 1955, Rosa Parks started the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which triggered a wave of anti-racist advocacy across the US. Though it was a tough battle, after nine years, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, a sweeping bill that outlawed almost all racial discrimination. Over the next fifty years, advocates kept pushing harder and harder for an end to racism. On a System 2 level, this campaign was so successful that virtually no public figure now advocates for segregation, a radical change from 1950. When businessman Donald Sterling was caught being racist, it was such a big deal that it became the focus of his entire Wikipedia page. However, System 1 has been much more stubborn. After sixty years of advocacy, a psychology metric called the Implicit Association Test shows that most white Americans still have negative System 1 assocations with black faces.
There have been many other campaigns to persuade people’s System 1s through rhetoric, advertising, peer pressure, graphic images, and so on, but they usually get negligible or marginal results, compared with the effort invested. Consider smoking as another test case. There’s near-universal agreement that smoking is very, very bad for health, in both the short term and long term, and there’s been enormous efforts to convince smokers to quit. On one side, most smokers themselves know darn well how bad smoking is, and many make heroic efforts to stop. On the other side, governments, nonprofits, and smoking-cessation-aids companies spend billions researching how to help people stop smoking. Thousands of studies have been done on the effectiveness of anti-smoking programs, so we’ve put a lot of effort into finding the very best strategies.
The results of this enormous, expensive, fifty-year effort have been modest at best. The US smoking rate has fallen from ~40% to ~20%, a decline of ~50%, or a bit over 1% per year. Of that decline, much of it was caused by fewer people taking up smoking in the first place. Much of the remainder was caused by laws that make cigarettes more expensive and difficult to use, such as taxes, restrictions on sales, public smoking bans, restaurant smoking bans, and so on. Hence, all anti-smoking programs, cessation aids, addiction research, PR campaigns, etc. combined have given us a few tenths of a percent decline per year.[2] More generally, Scott has a long essay on how these types of programs are ineffective:
“We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean. And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs. (…)
What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone… keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades.”
To create a quantitative model, we can look at the test case of online ads, which Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) have done substantial research on. ACE says that “online vegetarianism and vegetarianism ads are currently our most cost-effective intervention recommendation”.[3] In economic terms, one should naively expect that one dollar of ad purchases causes about one dollar of money moved, where “money moved” equals the change in (retail price of goods purchased – marginal cost of goods sold), summed over all relevant goods. If each dollar of ads caused more than one marginal dollar of money moved, companies would just buy more ads to make more money, until decreasing marginal returns brought gains back down to $1.
Of course, that’s only a rough approximation. Any given ad campaign might be more or less effective, for any number of reasons. However, in this case, the sheer magnitude of the gap is cause for great concern. ACE estimates that the cost-per-click (CPC) of pro-vegetarian ads is about two to twenty cents, and that based on survey data, around 2% of ad clickers become vegetarian or vegetarian. American adults spend around $5,000 to $10,000 on food per year,[4] so total money moved through becoming vegetarian is on the order of $100,000. Hence, under the naive economic model, the chance of people becoming vegetarian because of an ad click is roughly 0.00002% – 0.0002%, a massive four to five orders of magnitude smaller than ACE’s estimate. A likely explanation for this, as ACE themselves note, is that people only click on the ads if they were thinking about becoming vegetarian anyway. About two thousand people typically see an online ad for each person who clicks, so even a very small number of existing proto-vegetarians in the ad audience fully account for the survey data.
[Edit: 0.00002% is inaccurate, even within this model. Two cents per click is only available in poorer countries, which have much less total money moved, bringing the estimated odds back to around 0.0002%. However, poorer countries also consume much less meat, which largely compensates for this effect in terms of benefit per dollar.]
What empirical data we have backs this model up. After decades of vegetarian advocacy, PETA says that “society is at a turning point” for veganism. But polling data suggests that only 5% of Americans are vegetarian, and that this percentage has gone down since the 90s. Only 2% consider themselves vegan. Further, these numbers are likely overestimates. Polls often show that a few percent will support any idea, no matter how crazy, like “all politicians are secretly alien lizards” (really!); in addition, most people who said “yes” to the vegan question said “no” to the vegetarian question, which suggests lots of confusion. Even among self-described vegetarians, more detailed surveys show that most still eat an average of one serving of meat per day, which nicely confirms the System 1/System 2 model. It’s easier to convince System 2 that vegetarianism is a good idea than System 1, creating a paradox where two-thirds of ‘vegetarians’ ate meat yesterday.
In addition, even if advocacy is successful, the benefits from one person going vegetarian are not very large compared to their cost. Statistics from vegetarian advocacy groups usually cite the large numbers of animals killed. However, each individual animal life is very short, because meat becomes cheaper when farmers breed animals for rapid growth. Consider chickens as an example. The average American eats 27.5 chickens per year; since a broiler chick takes about five weeks to grow, this gives us 2.64 chicken-years of life prevented by one year of vegetarianism. To evaluate the cost of not eating chicken, we must look at not the price of the chicken, but the “consumer surplus” – how much benefit the customer derives from the product. With some rough math, this comes out to around $18.84 per chicken;[5] this is averaged over both people who like chicken a lot, and people who only like it barely enough to buy it. That gives us a total value-from-chicken (after the cost of the chicken) of $518 per person per year, which can be given up to save 2.64 years of chicken suffering.
Comparing this to human charity, GiveWell estimates a cost-per-child-saved from malaria nets of $2,838. Since GiveWell’s numbers only count children saved, given developing-world life expectancy, each life saved creates about 60 extra person-years. That equals a cost of $47 per person-year, compared to the average cost of $196 per chicken-year from not eating chicken. Therefore, the person-years are a much cheaper buy, even if we assume that chicken lives are so incredibly bad that preventing one chicken-year is as good as saving one person-year.
In fact, this estimate is still biased in favor of chickens, for two main reasons. The first is that GiveWell’s estimate doesn’t include the benefits of mosquito nets beyond saving children; these include saving adults from death by malaria (though adults have a much lower fatality rate), preventing many more non-fatal cases of malaria, preventing mosquito-borne disease in general, and of course preventing mosquito bites, which (ignoring everything else) can be done at a cost of hundredths of a penny per bite. The second reason is that Against Malaria Foundation is selected for being extremely low-risk; given a donation to AMF of $X dollars, one can be extremely confident in at least Y lives being saved. GiveWell thinks it’s likely that if we take on riskier projects, like scientific research and policy reform, the expected cost per life saved will be even lower. Indeed, one of these riskier projects is actually US policy reform to improve farm animal welfare.
Several people have suggested this is an unfair comparison. Most donors have a limited “charity budget”, and $10 that they spend on one charity is $10 which they don’t spend on another. However, what if going vegetarian increases people’s willingness to do other kinds of good? Unfortunately, psychology research suggests this is unlikely – people often have a “do-gooding budget” in addition to their financial budget, and doing one altruistic act will decrease their willingness to do others. To quote Nick Cooney, founder of animal charity The Humane League:
“The contribution ethic refers to the feeling many people have that “I’ve done my part on issue A, so it’s okay for me to ignore issues B, C, and D.” During a Humane League campaign to get restaurants to stop purchasing products from a particularly cruel farm, owners would often tell us that they already do something to help animals (“We buy our eggs from a local farm,” or “I donate to the ASPCA”) so we shouldn’t be bothering them. This phenomenon worked across issues too, as we often had owners or chefs tell us how they supported some other social cause so we should leave them alone about this one.
In addition to feeling like they’ve done their part and therefore don’t need to do anything more, people often overestimate the amount of good they’ve done. Combined, these phenomena make it hard to move people beyond small actions for their one or two preferred causes (Thogersen and Crompton 2009).”
Footnotes
1. Of course, there are many different animal-rights diets. Other types of ethics-based dietary restrictions include “vegan”, “lacto-ovo vegetarian”, “pescatarian”, “flexitarian”, “reducetarian”, and so on. Since keeping track of all the different labels is unwieldy, for the most part I’ll simply say “vegeterian”, even though the main arguments also apply to many other ethics-based diets. I’ve seen people use “veg*n”, but that’s also unwieldy due to ‘*’ not being a letter.
2. One possible complication is that nicotine is chemically addictive. However, treatments to fight the chemical part of addiction have been available for decades, which I’d expect to largely cancel out this effect. In addition, similar problems (alcoholism, gambling, sugar consumption, etc.) have generally seen similar results.
3. Although I disagree with them on several issues, ACE should be commended for trying to be quantitative.
4. Data from this Gallup poll. Note that this data is based on self-reports, and is per-household rather than per-adult, so it is only approximate.
5. The cost of a whole chicken is roughly $1.50 per pound per this article, or $9 for a six-pound chicken. From this paper, the price elasticity of demand of chicken is around -0.8, so we can naively model the demand-price curve with the ODE dy/dx = -0.8*y/x, y(9) = 1, which has the solution y(x) = 5.8/x^0.8. Integrating from x = 9 to, say, 100, we get 27.84, which subtracting the $9 for the chicken’s price gives us a consumer surplus of $18.84. This is, of course, just a rough guess.
The Rationalist Conspiracy 
It doesn’t feel like an investment to be vegan for me, it feels like non-vegan material *isn’t* food, so I don’t really have a choice in the same way I don’t have a choice to eat people. People ask me about why I’m vegan, often, and I tell them. I felt that if I could inspire 3 other people to become vegan in my lifetime, it would keep the movement growing. In the last 10 years, it looks like 2 people are now vegan as a result of knowing me and I’m 35 so I have time left. I also don’t think that I have a “do good budget”, I work on other social justice things, give my time, etc. I appreciate the analysis but I always tend to cringe when I see these “vegetarianism isn’t useful” things.. it always feels to me like someone who doesn’t want to be vegetarian trying to convince themselves not to be in the face of their conscience.
You really mess up the System 1/2 terminology. You correctly state “System 1,[…] is fast and intuitive, and System 2, [..] is slow and reflective”, but then you interpret this as subconscious response vs. articulated expression in text or speech, which is not what it is about. Instead System 1 corresponds to associative, heuristic reasoning while System 2 is about deductive reasoning. Your own example illustrates how this differs from your use: It is practically NEVER the case, that a movement succeeds by addressing system 2: While one could argue that in a perfect world most people would support gay marriage because of a system 2 response (give them the right arguments and make them think about it), what eventually led to the supreme court decision was the tactic to associate the gay community with positive feelings (e.g. rainbow flag) and stereotyping opponents of gay marriage as unprogressive. Totally system 1.
In my opinione that’s a grave mistake and should be edited.
Good catch! I’ve added a note, and will edit some more later when I’ve clarified the model. My apologies for the mistake.
Complications can be tacked onto this analysis when you consider alternative moral systems to pure utilitarianism. The people who argue that pure utilitarianism is bad because it allows for the repugnant conclusion, or for slavery, or whatever, would probably think that it’s bad we continue to systematically hurt animals just because the current system of incentives makes it cheap to do so. You are doing “within system” analysis here, which is good, but the vegetarians could feasibly respond to this by saying that we need to have more radical change. Admittedly, vegetarians who seriously believe something like this are probably not effective altruists.
I know your essay can’t do everything and wasn’t trying to, I just felt like adding this comment because your essay was very powerful and so I feel the need to make sure vegetarians still have some mental breathing room. I like vegetarian ideals, even if neither the world nor myself are yet ready for them.
To address this line of reasoning:
“Comparing this to human charity, GiveWell estimates a cost-per-child-saved from malaria nets of $2,838. Since GiveWell’s numbers only count children saved, given developing-world life expectancy, each life saved creates about 60 extra person-years. That equals a cost of $47 per person-year, compared to the average cost of $196 per chicken-year from not eating chicken. Therefore, the person-years are a much cheaper buy, even if we assume that chicken lives are so incredibly bad that preventing one chicken-year is as good as saving one person-year.”
I think this is terribly superficial. The first problem is that a child saved by malaria nets doesn’t generate 60 free person-years. They will still have costs of living, medical care, education, and so on. This may be outweighed by the value of their productive contributions, or it may be excerbated by the negative value of potential crime, military conflict, or other negative activities these people may wind up engaged in. And I’m sure there is *some* effect on birth rates, too. The point being, you can’t just divide the life expectancy from a child saved by the $2,838 and pretend you’ve created useful knowledge.
The second problem is that one year of chicken suffering is morally equivalent to a person-year. For all I know, the average person-year may even be negative, due to, say, frequencies of torture and associated severity. Or the chicken pain dominated by sheer intensity. Or vice versa. The point being, these numbers could be orders of magnitude off and there is no actual reason to anchor them to an expectation of rough equivalence.
I actually think being vegetarian or vegan is one of the highest leverage things one can do to prevent the suffering of dozens or hundreds of animals annually, while saving money, potentially gaining social capital & health benefits if done right, and not spending any more time.
I’m unclear how it costs me $196 / year I don’t eat chicken. It cost me $0 to not eat chicken as I simply don’t buy it. I actually save money. It also doesn’t really cost me anything to have a conversation with someone when they ask me why I don’t eat chicken, in fact, depending on the company, I often gain social status or it gives us something interesting to talk about.
Being vegetarian or vegan doesn’t cost more money generally and after 10 years, I don’t notice any additional time investment — save occasionally reading a label or asking a server to make me a meal variation. By *NOT* doing something I prevent suffering. Contrast to things like Malaria, I’m not sure I can have an impact thereby not doing something, seems I would have to work more to make money to have to donate.
It’s about the monetary equivalence of the marginal culinary utility of having these products.
Perhaps you just don’t like chicken, but many people do. If ordinary chicken was banned, but there was an expensive Star Trek replicator for chicken meat, I’d probably pay an extra $50 per year to use it, compared to what chicken costs now.
This number would go up for dairy. Lacto-vegetarianism is quite doable and I wouldn’t pay much for the utility difference to omnivorism, but cutting out all dairy is unpleasant well beyond my acceptance for ethical consumption.
It also depends on how much money you have for discretionary spending. If you have a high-paying job that you dislike, it can make sense to spend thousands of dollars on small pleasures to compensate yourself.
This post seems to strive for breadth at the expense of depth (touching on social movement theory, Kahneman’s models of thought, civil rights activism and impact, addiction and the strategies and impact of programs designed to address/prevent drug use, obesity, the quirks of survey data, GiveWell’s estimates regarding AMF’s effectiveness and ACE’s CPC ad estimates, and, of course, the effectiveness of vegetarian advocacy), sacrificing an honest acknowledgement of the countless complicating factors in order to advocate for a position with relatively unchecked certainty throughout. Oversimplifying complex issues allows us to conveniently ignore facts that don’t fit into this very tidy worldview (just one example would be the benefits of a more plant-heavy diet to the prevention of chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc.). It seems anyone moved by this post might be relying too heavily on “System 1” (as you define it) – flying fast and loose with logic, associations, and the ratio of certainty to uncertainty, or the known and the unknown in relation to the many topics tackled – thus, as you put it, the result might simply be “wasted effort.”
What always baffles me about vegetarian advocacy is that one could very cheaply improve the welfare of farm animals simply by giving them drugs. One can cheaply synthesize synthetic opiates and surely research would reveal other drugs that would more effectively neutralize animal suffering without leaving any dangerous residue or interfering with producing.
Strangely, very few vegetarian activists even seem open to this idea much less supportive. Now one can reasonably disagree with the practicality of this point but the fact that so few people who claim to be interested in vegetarianism for animal welfare reasons even consider such a proposal is even more evidence that their advocacy is almost exclusively about signalling.
Indeed, I’ve found that suggesting “let’s drug our food animals” is very effective at separating people who are truly motivated by a desire to decrease animal suffering from those who merely want to signal since this proposal would decrease animal suffering but do so in a way that was less “natural” and less hippish. This is sad because I think it would be a very cost effective fix.
This just feels awful to me, though I can appreciate your interest in a solution to reduce the suffering — and I suppose all other things being equal, a factory farmed animal drugged vs. a factory farmed non-drugged would perhaps be better.
Something feels deeply unsettling about zombie animals in cages hopped up on opiates though. I don’t think people’s reflexive opposition is about “signaling” more an empathic response to the sense of horror one experiences thinking about that reality. I suppose we already do this in our school system though — we have a malignant education system that drugs kids up so they can numb the pain of their environment because the controllers of said environment aren’t willing to deal with the temporary discomfort of changing it.
Have there been studies on empathy levels in vegans vs. non-veg people? It feels so odd to me that people past a certain threshold of empathy and self awareness could consume animals.
Hmm I think you’re being kind of uncharitable here—just because people disagree with you doesn’t mean they don’t actually care what they say they care about.
On the object level, what makes you believe this would be a cost-effective intervention? A little research suggests that morphine costs about $1 per human dose and lasts about 3 hours, so it would maybe cost $0.10 per chicken dose. That means we’d spend about $1 per chicken per day, or $365 per chicken year. This might move a chicken’s life from being extremely bad to being net neutral (although perhaps it would still be bad—lots of terminally ill humans prefer to die than to continue living on morphine).
The Open Philanthropy Project believes that the evidence for cage-free reforms is strongest, so I’ll talk about that. Open Phil claims that cage-free campaigns can prevent about 300 caged-chicken-years per $1 spent. Let’s conservatively assume that this is 1/10 as good as providing morphine for chickens. In that case, cage-free campaigns are 10,000 times more cost-effective than morphine.
(Providing morphine has the additional problem that you have to convince factory farm owners to let you do that.)
Thanks for writing this post–it provides an interesting take on vegetarian advocacy.
It sounds like you’re making a few main points here:
(1) Some kinds of activism were effective (civil rights) and others were not (anti-smoking); ones that targeted System 2 were effective and ones that targeted System 1 were not.
(2) We should expect advertising markets to be efficient, so converting people to vegetarianism should be more expensive than it’s commonly claimed to be.
(3) People becoming vegetarian isn’t as effective as donating money to AMF.
On (1), I don’t really understand what the examples you give are supposed to demonstrate, and even after your clarifications I don’t know what you mean by System 1/System 2.
On (2), I agree with your main point that we should expect markets to be efficient if we don’t know anything else. This doesn’t necessarily mean vegetarian advocacy is ineffective. Studies on animal welfare interventions tell us a lot more than guesses, even if they haven’t been particularly strong so far.
Additionally, there are *a priori* reasons to doubt that vegetarian outreach should be as expensive as advertisement intended to get people to eat more meat. No one stands to make much profit by making people eat less meat, so the market for marketing here isn’t efficient. Fake meat companies, etc. probably do profit when people become vegetarian, but not much–they can do a lot better by trying to get people to eat their specific products.
On (3), it’s plausible that if you have a choice between not eating meat for a year and donating $500 to AMF, donating is better. I don’t believe this is actually the relevant choice in most situations, but this line of discussion is complicated so I won’t get into it. The more straightforward point is that almost everyone who becomes vegetarian wouldn’t have donated to AMF, so it doesn’t really matter whether they could do more good by donating to AMF instead of becoming vegetarian. If you can pay $100 to convince ten people to become vegetarian for a year, that’s pretty effective; the true cost for you here is $100, not $5,180. You could perhaps use this line of reasoning to argue that you shouldn’t try to convince EA’s to become vegetarian, which I believe is more justifiable (I’m not sure it’s correct but I’m at least sympathetic to it).