“Quadrillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk? Quantifying animal welfare changes” by AdamC

How important is animal welfare as an issue? And how should it be traded against other concerns (if we must)? Work over the last few years has begun to highlight the case for quantifying animal welfare impacts in dollar terms – for the purpose of comparing different causes and costs and benefits – and arguably made progress with the necessary foundations to do that, including assessing how we should weight the experience of different animals. This post summarises some of that work, particularly 'Monetizing Animal Welfare Impacts for Benefit–Cost Analysis' by @Bob Fischer and others, and tries to impatiently rush to one end of this process by putting some $ numbers on animal suffering changes. Hopefully this post helps provide a useful walk-through of some of the concepts, makes the case for further work, and demonstrates why some people think farm animal welfare is not just a 'nice-to-have' consideration [...] ---Outline:(01:13) Quantifying health changes(05:52) An impact assessment example(11:07) What is the maximum potential welfare impact of changes to chicken farming?(14:26) Discussion / a few possible points of disagreement(14:41) Welfare potential values for different species(16:01) Questioning the use of human-based QALY values(19:46) Population ethics and states worse than death(23:03) Conclusion--- First published: February 9th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bL99PnBJBGnquHmed/quadrillion-dollar-bills-on-the-sidewalk-quantifying-animal --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.