Questions about animal welfare markets

By Austin @ 2025-07-21T21:54 (+43)

Last week, I joined “Revolutionist’s Night” — a cabal aiming to radically improve animal welfare, with some flavor of 1800s slavery abolitionism or the 1700s American revolution. Our topic for the evening was inspired by Aaron Boddy’s post “The current market price for animal welfare is zero”: can we create a market where anyone can directly buy credits for animal welfare?

I’m very sympathetic to this idea, and similar ideas like Paul Christiano’s for offsetting factory-farmed eggs. (A year ago, I spent some time brainstorming how one might actually implement the egg-offset-thing.)

Some reasons I’d be excited:

Markets are great at optimizing for particular objectives, if you shape them correctly. The world abounds in cheap high-quality consumer goods, thanks to markets.
There are some precedents for using markets for public goods, from carbon credit markets and renewable offsets (eg electric vehicle or solar credits)
Welfare credits let you buy directly what you want, vs labels like “organic” which bundle that together with food quality
Typical animal welfare interventions (going vegan, protests, corporate commitments) rely more on persuasion or coercion; markets rely on voluntary participation
Markets scale up well: they facilitate trillions of dollars of activity, a level of coordination only (perhaps) matched by major governments and religions
Corporations are better at interfacing with markets and price signals; an animal welfare market would let existing corporations participate, and might induce new corporations
On a personal level, it sure would be nice to just pay some $ every month and then be able to eat whatever I like, rather than thinking a lot about. (FarmKind offers a service approximating this).

We threw around a bunch of ideas during Revolutionist’s Night, though we didn’t end up with a concrete proposal or specific next steps. In lieu of that, here are some lingering questions I have around the whole concept:

What is the total addressable market (TAM) of animal welfare?
- We broke this down into “altruism” (doing good for animals) and “consumer” (offsetting harms caused by yourself)
- From an “altruism” perspective, we estimated ~$300M each year being spent by funders on farmed and wild animal welfare
- From a “consumer” perspective, we ballparked:
  - 300M US citizens * 5% vegetarianism rate * 1k meals/y * $2/meal welfare offset ⇒ $30B/y market
  - For an early adopter/MVP market, imagine: 10k EAs * 1k meals/y * $2/meal offset ⇒ $20M initial market.
- I think there might be an additional “corporate” perspective; something like: “how much are companies already spending beyond the bare minimum, to make animals happy?”
  - (I’m not sure how to estimate this)
What does the track record of carbon credits imply about animal welfare markets?
- Positives:
  - Stripe Frontier is an awesome example of using advance market commitments to kickstart a robust market; see this writeup by the founder Nan Ransohoff
  - Many companies have adopted “net zero” commitments, buying carbon credits to offset their electricity & operational usage.
  - Lincoln recent installed solar panels for his group house; ~1/3rd of the projected revenue for these panels comes from govt tax credits which incentivize renewables (vs 2/3rds from savings on electricity)
- Negatives:
  - Very few people I know actually offset their carbon usage. I haven’t done this myself; I vaguely feel like I should but haven’t yet
    - My friend Barak Gila wrote about spending $10k offsetting plane & car miles, in Cars and Carbon
  - Carbon credits famously suffer from verification and goodhearting problems.
    - Unclear how much of these problems are theoretical/nerdsnipe-y, vs fundamentally killing the entire concept
      - Xander Balwit mentions that many people who used to be excited by carbon credits have now moved on to other greener pastures
Why isn’t there already “human welfare market”? Should we aim to set up the human welfare market first?
- In one sense, Givewell is already a place to go to spend money to buy human welfare units (often QALYs). By analogy, Animal Charity Evaluators is already an “animal welfare market” — but this seems unsatisfying.
  - Verifying impact is hard! There are some criticisms of ACE as an evaluator specifically; and some broader concerns about epistemics in animal welfare-land.
  - Lincoln: “When I buy carbon credits, I believe it’s going into a marketplace where people are competing to deliver the product”. And this is less true for charity evaluators.
    - There’s some competition for impact among the charities being evaluated, but we’re mostly placing trust into fairly-subjective calls made by the evaluators.
What social technology might get people on board with buying these credits?
- Awareness: In some sense, the low absolute TAM of animal welfare is downstream of the fact that still, not that many people care about animal welfare.
  - What makes certain causes much more popular than others? Eg why is climate change a much bigger issue than animal welfare?
    - Constance suggested that people have more selfish reasons to care about climate (they’re concerned about themselves and their kids dying); and climate impacts are more visible (people see weird weather events & news reports, but not much of factory farms).
    - I suspect that’s part of the story, but there’s also some amount of contingency — eg Al Gore choosing to do “An Inconvenient Truth”
- Concrete pledges: The Giving What We Can pledge is a cool piece of social technology/coordination that successfully convinces many people to give a certain % of their income to charity. The Giving Pledge and Founder’s Pledge are similar examples.
  - Notably, these are all examples of pledging a certain % or $ amount (an input), rather than pledging to buy a certain amount of welfare (an output)
- Incepting with status: I like the story of how diamond monopolist De Beers manufactured the tradition of proposing with a diamond ring, by getting famous people on board and showcasing them in movies. Can we do this for animal welfare units?
  - Eg manufacture eg $500 tungsten jewelry or $50 3D-printed trinkets; attach a $10k “animal welfare” impact certificate; and convince all our EA friends to gift these during major life milestones (marriage, childbirth, etc?)
Could market-based credits work for other public goods we care about?
- It’s easy to brainstorm ways to commit dollars:
  - AI xrisk — safety-conscious lab employees could pledge some fraction of their income to safety work
  - GHD/human welfare — people in rich countries could pledge some fraction of the differential between their personal income and the poverty line, to GiveDirectly or other welfare causes
  - Abundance — people who own property could commit some fraction of land appreciation prices to a YIMBY fund; “voluntary Georgism”
- But dollars are an input, not an output. It’s harder to operationalize how to buy the thing we actually care about (units of welfare, basis point reduction in xrisk)
  - Carbon credits are reasonably well-operationalized (tons of CO2 removed); Covid vaccines for Operation Warp Speed are also well operationalized
  - Markets work best with fungible standardized units (think oil or corn commodities)
- Also: does this kind of moral offsetting lead to very high demandingness, to have to think through the downstream moral externalities of every action you take?
  - Perhaps it’d be ideal to aggregate these decisions higher up the stack than “individual consumers” — perhaps corporations, perhaps government
    - But aggregation also glosses over differences in values — eg some people might consider cows or pigs worthy of consideration, but not shrimp or bees
How can Mox (our coworking space, where Revolutionist Night was held) help push for animal welfare markets?
- I’ve been excited for Mox to be an early adopter of prosocial technologies — eg we’re the first coworking space to deploy far-UV (I think); we’re currently demo-ing lamps from three different providers
- For animal welfare, we currently exert some influence when we cater food, opting to serve more vegetarian meals than our members/event clients might otherwise choose. We also don’t stock meat snacks.
- Some market-based proposals:
  - We could tax all meat eaten on premises, eg charging people $5 for any meat meal
    - This is the most targeted and most internalizes externalities, but it seems high friction (so hard to actually implement) and seems like it’d be unpopular (has high social cost)
  - We could subsidize vegetarians, eg providing a 20% off discount code for memberships for pledged vegetarians, or a $40/mo rebate for vegetarians
  - We could commit some % of our general catering budget to buying animal welfare offsets, or estimate the number of meat meals each month. (To use a term coined by Lincoln, Mox could aim to be “welfare-neutral”)
- Similar proposals might also work well in other contexts where someone is aggregating lots of demand for food, eg at Manifest or EAGs

Thanks to Lincoln Quirk, Constance Li, and many others for discussion

Why isn’t there already “human welfare market”? Should we aim to set up the human welfare market first?
In one sense, Givewell is already a place to go to spend money to buy human welfare units (often QALYs). By analogy, Animal Charity Evaluators is already an “animal welfare market” — but this seems unsatisfying.
Verifying impact is hard! There are some criticisms of ACE as an evaluator specifically; and some broader concerns about epistemics in animal welfare-land.

Why would markets solve these concerns? I believe there is less evidence about animal welfare interventions than human welfare ones mostly because there is much less spending on the former, and this is determined by people caring much more about humans than animals, which markets would not change.

From a “consumer” perspective, we ballparked:
300M US citizens * 5% vegetarianism rate * 1k meals/y * $2/meal welfare offset ⇒ $30B/y market
For an early adopter/MVP market, imagine: 10k EAs * 1k meals/y * $2/meal offset ⇒ $20M initial market.

I do not think vegetarians would eat 2.74 (= 10^3/365.25) more meals with animal-based foods per person-day, or spend 2 k$/person-year (= 10^3*2) offseting the suffering caused to farmed animals.

Very few people I know actually offset their carbon usage. I haven’t done this myself; I vaguely feel like I should but haven’t yet

The organisation you consider the most cost-effective is more cost-effective than the one you would donate to to offset your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? If so, why not donating to the former?

On a personal level, it sure would be nice to just pay some $ every month and then be able to eat whatever I like, rather than thinking a lot about. (FarmKind offers a service approximating this).

The point I made just above applies similarly. Why not donating to the organisation you consider the most cost-effective instead of offsetting the suffering of farmed animals?

Austin @ 2025-07-23T20:16 (+6)

Quick responses:

I'm not familiar on the tradeoffs between farmed animals/mammals vs wild/invertebrates; I think arguments like yours are plausible but also brittle
My question is, "given that humans care so much about human welfare, why isn't there already a human welfare market? The lack of such a market may be evidence that animal welfare markets will be unpopular"
I think you're taking the ballparks a bit too literally - though I also invite you to put down your own best guess about how much eg US consumers would be willing to pay for welfare, I probably believe in higher numbers than you
I've come around to believing that narrowly focusing on cost effectiveness is the wrong approach for me, for moral parliament and learning reasons

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-24T08:33 (+2)

Thanks, Austin.

I agree the absence of a market for human welfare is evidence against the feasibility of one for animal welfare. Maybe it is not strong evidence considering human welfare is more seen as sacred, and therefore not subject to being traded in markets, whereas animal welfare may be seen more as a commodity (although not by random vegetarians, who I assume also see animal welfare more as sacred).

The value of learning can be (formally or informally) considered in the benefits of cost-effectiveness analyses. However, I am not sure what you would learn by offsetting your GHG emissions instead of donating to the charity you consider the most cost-effective (accounting for the value of learning).

Leroy Dixon @ 2025-07-22T15:06 (+4)

I think you're certainly right that the key lies somewhere in this approach. The main problem is reconciling it with the narrative companies wish to present and the narrative consumers present to themselves. Both fall along the lines of 'we are good, so let's not think about what might contradict that idea'. I think carbon credits (while debated) are somewhat successful because companies and individuals can be part of the programme without villifying themselves (you often can't avoid generating carbon in a practicable manner). However, to do the same for animal welfare requires an initial admission of guilt (inside the mind). I believe this is the major hurdle to not only implementing markets, but just about anything animal welfare related - working against the ostrich effect.

A thoughtful post, and definitely makes me want to further consider how it would be possible to address the hurdles of its implementation.

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-07-22T17:05 (+3)

Re-commenting the comment I left on Aaron Boddy's linked post, because would genuinely be interested to read a reply to this from a proponent of the idea (It was a sincere question, I wasn't looking to just shoot the idea down):

This is a really interesting idea. But does a system like this risk increasing the number of animals being farmed?

I'm struggling to wrap my head around the economics of it properly, but if you take it to extremes then it seems like it might?

Suppose I'm a wealthy individual who is willing to pay a very high price to keep a hen out of a cage (more than the market price of all of her eggs over her life). Now imagine that the demand for eggs drops to zero. In the current system, farmers would stop raising hens, and animal activists would be happy. But in this new system, if it is still legal to cage hens, then a farmer could keep raising hens, threaten to put them in cages unless I pay them not to, and just throw all their eggs in the bin? Or am I misunderstanding the system?

That's an extreme and unrealistic example, but just meant to illustrate that in principle paying for welfare (which is really paying someone not to do something bad) feels like it might carry a risk of increasing total amount of suffering, even if it decreases the average?

I'm not sure the same problem applies to things like carbon credits.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-23T16:14 (+3)

Hi Toby,

A market for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions decreases these if it functions well. Similarly, a market for the welfare of farmed animals would increase this if it functioned well. The welfare of farmed animals can be increased by i) decreasing the animal-years of farmed animals with negative welfare, ii) increasing the animal-years of farmed animals with positive welfare, or iii) making more positive animal-years of farmed animals with positive or negative welfare. I think iii) would increase the welfare of farmed animals more cost-effectively. I estimated School Plates in 2023, and Veganuary in 2024 increased the welfare of farmed animals 19.4 % and 1.20 % as cost-effectively as cage-free corporate campaigns. In addition, iii) generally increases the cost of animal-based foods, thus decreasing animal-years. So I expect a market for the welfare of farmed animals functioning well would decrease animal-years nearterm. Longterm, ii) may increase the welfare of farmed animals more cost-effectively than iii), and therefore animal-years may increase.

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-07-23T18:18 (+9)

Thanks Vasco! I have written a reply to both you and Austin in the thread under Austin's comment.

One thing that applies to your reply specifically: I don't see how a market for farmed animal welfare could decrease animal-years, as you suggest it might in the near term (though I may be misunderstanding how the system is supposed to work).

I get that animal welfare improvements often carry a cost, and that imposing an animal welfare improvement on a farmer with no compensation would therefore shift the supply curve, raise prices, and ultimately decrease the number of animals being farmed.

But my understanding of the animal welfare market idea is that these welfare improvements are not imposed, but bought. The person paying for the improvement would now need to pay enough that it is worth the farmer voluntarily implementing that improvement, which presumably would involve covering all of the cost of the improvement and then some. Since this is now an additional source of the income for the farmer, I think you'd expect it to shift the supply curve of animal products in the opposite direction, causing a drop in prices, and an increase in the amount of animal products consumed?

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-07-24T09:02 (+7)

Thanks for the great point, Toby! Strongly upvoted. I now agree iii) would tend to increase animal-years because the improvements in the welfare of farmed animals would be bought instead of imposed (by legislation, or animal welfare corporate campaigns).

Austin @ 2025-07-22T23:03 (+3)

We'd definitely want to avoid establishing perverse incentives (such as the famous "paying for dead cobras => cobra farming"). At first glance, your example seems to gesture at a problem with establish credits for "alleviating suffering" versus "producing positive welfare", which I agree we might want to avoid.

I don't think that paying for welfare has to be implemented as "paying for someone not to do something bad" -- some carbon credits are set up way (paying not to chop down trees), but others are not (Stripe Frontier's carbon capture & sequestration). Perhaps you as a wealthy individual would be better served by offering eg $1 per proven happy hen-year? So long as you set the prices correctly, I do think it would be a good thing to farm more animals in a way where the animals are generally happy, similar to how it would be a good thing to institute policies creating more happy human lives.

In practice, I think we'd want to balance considerations like potential perverse incentives/blackmail, versus "how feasible is it to actually implement", and also rely on sanity checks/monitoring/investigative reporting to understand how these markets are functioning.

tobycrisford 🔸 @ 2025-07-23T18:11 (+3)

Thank you both for these answers, this is helpful!

It sounds like it is useful to distinguish two possible ways of implementing a welfare market:

A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative (it would be better if they had never existed) to positive (it is better that they get to exist).
A farmer is paid to change the welfare of their animals from negative, to less negative, but the animals still lead net-negative lives overall.

I can see how on pure consequentialist grounds the first case would be good, and avoid the problem I was asking about. Although I expect a lot of vegans who have a principled objection to animals being treated as property will object to this, if increasing quantity of farmed animals is explicitly viewed as a positive outcome of the policy. I would certainly have reservations about it.

On the other hand, the second case seems like it does carry the risk I was asking about. We should expect the quantity of animals farmed to increase in a way that might outweigh the gain in welfare per animal (whether or not it does will I think depend on complicated economics things like the slopes of supply and demand curves?)

Nathan Young @ 2025-07-22T08:26 (+2)

My friend Barak Gila wrote about spending $10k offsetting plane & car miles, in Cars and Carbon

This seems way too expensive? I feel like make sunsets suggest you can offset a lifetime of carbon for like $500.

I think a big problem is it's hard to know what to believe here. And hence people don't offset.

Austin @ 2025-07-22T23:09 (+5)

Without knowing a ton about the economics, my understanding is that Project Vesta, as a startup working on carbon capture and sequestration, costs more per ton than other initiatives currently, but the hope is with continued revenue & investment they can go down the cost curve. I agree it's hard to know for sure what to believe -- the geoengineering route taken by Make Sunsets is somewhat more controversial than CC&S (and I think, encodes more assumptions about efficacy), and one might reasonably prefer a more direct if expensive route to reversing carbon emissions. I might make a rough analogy to the difference between GiveDirectly and AMF, with reasonable people preferring the first due to being more direct (even if less cost effective).

Questions about animal welfare markets

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