Progress Studies and Animal Welfare
We have the intellectual tools needed to make progress on animal welfare
I’m pleased to announce that I will be advising the fellowship program of the Roots of Progress Institute, one of the key institutions within the Progress Studies movement. Progress Studies has deeply influenced my own thinking about how to make positive change in the world, and I largely see this Substack as trying to flesh out a perspective on farm animal welfare that’s in line with the Progress Studies philosophy.
Progress Studies is something like a gratitude exercise. Most of us live lives of remarkable abundance, yet this simple fact can be surprisingly hard to recognize. Progress Studies seeks to restore an appreciation for the ways in which our lives and civilization have improved dramatically relative to the past. Then, it seeks to understand the mechanisms behind these advances to help ensure the future is even more abundant.
Because progress is multifaceted, Progress Studies has a remarkably diverse and broad ranging set of interests. Yet animal welfare has sometimes sat awkwardly within the Progress Studies portfolio. The average life of a farm animal has gotten worse in the last few decades, running counter to the central pro-progress narrative of Progress Studies, and some thinkers have struggled to integrate it into their broader worldview. For example, Tyler Cowen, one of the intellectual fathers of the Progress Studies movement, acknowledges in his broad philosophical treatise Stubborn Attachments that his theory “cannot resolve long-standing disputes over animal welfare and animal rights.” Noah Smith says that animal welfare is something that “tempers” his general progress-oriented mindset.
However, I would argue that the philosophy of techno-optimism, which Progress Studies already applies to areas like climate change, is already well suited to deal gracefully with the issue of animal welfare. In particular, agricultural technologies that directly improve welfare while keeping food prices affordable represent a promising yet neglected path to meet global protein demand while staying true to our morals.
Technology eliminates tradeoffs
The fundamental challenge of animal welfare is that human preferences are multifaceted: we want better animal welfare, but we also want cheap, abundant food. During the industrialization of the last decade when we’ve proven that life doesn’t have to be defined by poverty, hunger, and material scarcity, the latter preference has tended to win out.
However, now that there are animal products in every grocery store, and meat is a part of the daily diet of most Americans, we have the breathing room to look back and ask if we’re fully satisfied with what we’ve built. And many of the common agricultural practices that contribute to the affordability of food strike most people as clearly unacceptable.1 But the tradeoff remains: many believe that meeting our own standards for humane treatment means letting food prices rise unacceptably, or forgoing meat altogether.
In its pursuit to understand the mechanism of human progress, Progress Studies has a useful lesson: If a “solution” to a problem involves everyone suddenly changing their preferences, then it’s not a real solution. A real solution gives us everything that we want. In this case, the only way to meet our preferences for both food abundance and animal welfare is to use technology to dissolve the tradeoff entirely. This philosophy can be described as “techno-optimism.”
Noah Smith illustrates this philosophy through a thought experiment involving a group of people that are sustained by the seeds of a grove of fruit trees. First, they develop technology to cook these seeds, leading to a period of growth and abundance. However, this prevents them from re-using the seeds to grow more trees, and eventually their grove dies out. One approach, which Noah calls “degrowth,” is to simply not cook the seeds, and revert back to the way things were. This would be the equivalent of abstaining from meat consumption. The other approach, techno-optimism, is to develop technology to intensively cultivate the seeds so they can grow more seeds while still being able to cook them.
Progress Studies’ techno-optimist stance is most clearly seen in how it deals with climate change. Humans want a sustainable climate, but also the economic benefits gained from fossil fuels. Here, Progress Studies favors dissolving the tradeoff with technologies like cheap solar panels, shale gas, nuclear power, EVs, and lithium-ion batteries. The techno-optimist perspective on climate change is vindicated by the fact that per capita carbon emissions in the US now have dropped below WWI levels (yes, that’s true!).
The analogies between animal welfare and climate change run deep. Both deal with the unintended negative side effects of human economic progress. Both deal with commoditized, capital intensive parts of our economy. And both involve systems that every person interacts with multiple times a day—energy and food. Given the structural similarities, the solutions should be similar as well. Techno-optimism is suited to both precisely because it takes human preferences seriously and gives us everything that we want.
How to make progress on animal welfare
Applications of techno-optimism to animal welfare have historically been focused on alternative proteins like plant-based and cell-cultivated meat.2 The promise of alternative proteins has been to shift the method of producing meat to one where no animals are involved at all, while continuing to meet human preferences around meat consumption.
But more recently, lagging sales numbers for plant-based meat and concerns over the scalability of cultivated meat have cast into doubt the long term potential of the sector. While it’s natural for all new technologies to go through cycles of hype and disillusionment, it’s a mistake for alternative proteins to be the only bet that Progress Studies makes in the realm of animal welfare.
Fortunately, there’s another techno-optimist approach: advancing agricultural technologies that make it cheap for farmers and agribusiness to solve the biggest welfare challenges on farms.
In-ovo sexing is a recent example of the power of such technologies. One of the reasons chicken meat and eggs are so cheap today is because we’ve developed specialized breeds for each purpose. “Broiler” chickens are optimized to quickly and efficiently convert feed to meat, and “layer” chickens are optimized to lay eggs as efficiently as possible. However, one unintended consequence is that male chicks of the layer breed serve no economic purpose and are therefore killed immediately after hatching. In a practice that’s extremely unpopular among consumers who know about it, six billion day-old male chicks are killed each year in the global egg industry.
In-ovo sexing allows egg producers to use advanced biotechnology to identify which eggs will hatch male and which will hatch female. Male eggs can be removed and destroyed before they can feel pain, leaving only females to hatch. This technology is now widely available in Europe, and more recently launched in the US, with the first eggs expected to hit shelves in the summer.
Similar opportunities exist throughout animal agriculture. Precision livestock farming, for example, can give us the ability to monitor the health and welfare of millions of individual animals at once. Fish stunning equipment can allow aquaculture farmers to ensure each fish is unconscious before slaughter. And new vaccines can allow us to treat health issues that currently kill hundreds of millions of animals per year.
The proliferation of such technologies into animal agriculture won’t happen automatically, but will require continual focus and effort. We need more scientists and engineers to conduct R&D around cost-effective ways to solve big welfare challenges, and we need more funding for their research. We need to create stronger market incentives for the commercialization and scale up these technologies through government subsidies, advanced market commitments, and innovation prizes. We need consumers to support innovative companies with their wallets, and we need a transparent supply chain that better transmits willingness-to-pay signals so that producers can be properly compensated for doing things better.
The details of this perspective still need fleshing out, and one goal of this newsletter is to develop its intellectual foundations more fully. But in the long term, I believe that agricultural technologies have the potential to transform the way we do animal husbandry and ideally give animals a quality of life that’s impossible even in nature, just as progress has made our quality of life unimaginable to our forebears. Our task now is to thoughtfully apply the intellectual tools that created progress for humans to create steady, meaningful progress for animals as well.
There is some disagreement over why exactly animal welfare matters. Some like Ezra Klein believe it matters morally, and is a defining problem of our age. Others like Jason Crawford and Maxwell Tabarrok take a more human-centered view that says that animal welfare matters only because people care about it.
However big this disagreement seems, the practical implications are limited. Regardless of whether animals have innate worth philosophically, the tools that we have to improve their welfare have force because humans care about it. Animals don’t have any agency within our political and economic systems, so there’s no way for their preferences to be factored in, except insofar as they align with the preferences of agents. If people choose to buy higher-welfare products, or enact welfare-focused public policies, they do so because they care about animal welfare. Therefore, from a practical perspective we have to understand animal welfare solely through the preferences that humans have about it.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book Abundance opens with an optimistic vision of a prosperous world in 2050. Their vision involves limitless clean energy, desalinated water, vertical farming, affordable housing, and:
As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular-meat facilities, which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and ribeye steaks—no live animals needed, which means no confinement and slaughter. Once prohibitively expensive, cultivated meat scaled with the help of plentiful electricity.
Noah Smith and Richard Hanania also pin their hopes of progress for animal welfare on cultivated meat.
Innovate Animal Ag, the think tank behind The Optimist’s Barn, is hiring! And if you read this newsletter, that’s a pretty good indicator of potentially being a fit. To learn more, visit our Careers page.