Canceling Science and Monetizing Outrage

If we maintain the fantasy of a puritan separation of science and business then innovation will dry up and die. There will be no one left to block and tackle for science or help us navigate the valley of death that lies between a scientific discovery and a cure, product, or better policy. The negative epistemic valence being cast by digital and mainstream media is polluting the commons of scientific communication, hindering the public's ability to distinguish fact from fiction. The implications for health, climate, democracy, and human welfare are tremendous.

Background

In a recent article in the New York Times the intersection between business and science are at the center of debate regarding ongoing climate research by Dr. Frank Mitloehner at UC Davis. This parallels a prior article from some years ago about  Dr. Kevin Folta and his work as it relates to agricultural biotechnology and science communication and outreach.

In the article, it seems to assert that Mitloehner's industry connections and collaboration are compromising his integrity and research as it relates to the relationship between livestock and GHG emissions.

Below are some of the most critical comments from the article:

“Industry funding does not necessarily compromise research, but it does inevitably have a slant on the directions with which you ask questions and the tendency to interpret those results in a way that may favor industry,” said Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor in environmental studies at New York University.

“Almost everything that I’ve seen from Dr. Mitloehner’s communications has downplayed every impact of livestock,” he said. “His communications are discordant from the scientific consensus, and the evidence that he has brought to bear against that consensus has not been, in my eyes, sufficient to challenge it.”

Communicating the Science

Assertions are made, but no evidence is offered in relation to how Mitloehner's research is compromised or in what ways his work contrasts with any scientific consensus. But it certainly puts his communications about his research on the chopping block. This is a big risk of doing science communication and outreach, as I have discussed before here.  In attempting to simplify complex scientific ideas for a broader audience, communicators are at risk for getting called out for any particular nuance they failed to include. It also creates enough space for any critic to write an entire thesis about why you are wrong. As I stated previously:

"Usually this is about how they didn't capture every particular nuance of the theory, failed to include a statement about certain critical assumptions, or over simplified the complex thing they were trying to explain in simple terms to begin with. This kind of negative social harassment seems to be par for the course when attempting to communicate on social media ... A culture that is toxic toward effective science communication becomes an impediment to science itself and leaves a void waiting be filled by science deniers, activists, policy makers, decision makers, and special interests."

One example called out in the NYT article was the production of a video called Rethinking Methane:

The article states: 

“The message of the five-minute video is that, because methane is a relatively short-lived greenhouse gas (once it’s in the atmosphere, it becomes less potent as the years go by), cattle would not cause additional warming as long as their numbers did not grow.”

“The argument leans on a method developed by scientists that aims to better account for the global-warming effects of short-lived greenhouse gases like methane. However, the use of that method by an industry “as a way of justifying high current emissions is very inappropriate” 

When considering sources of GHG emissions, understanding the way methane behaves is fundamental to understanding climate change, and personal and policy decisions related to mitigating future warming.  Understanding this can help direct attention to those areas where we can make the biggest difference in terms impacting climate change. As discussed in Allen et al. (2018):

"While shorter-term goals for emission rates of individual gases and broader metrics encompassing emissions’ co-impacts remain potentially useful in defining how cumulative contributions will be achieved, summarising commitments using a metric that accurately reflects their contributions to future warming would provide greater transparency in the implications of global climate agreements as well as enabling fairer and more effective design of domestic policies and measures."

But instead of diving into the meat (pun intended) of the science, the second statement about this video makes an assertion about using this science to justify high current emissions. 

Is that what Dr. Mitloehner is doing in his many communications, or is it actually the case that when we estimate the impact of climate change he thinks we should be using metrics that do a better job capturing the dynamics of different GHGs?  If his science really led him to dismiss the 'current high emissions' related to methane then why would he be spending time and energy researching and communicating about ways to reduce GHG emissions related to methane via feed additives and other management practices? 

And when we talk about current high emissions related to livestock what do we mean - compared to what?  The article states:

"scientific research has long shown that agriculture is also a major source of planet-warming emissions, ranking below the leading causes — the burning of coal, gas and oil — but still producing almost 15 percent of global emissions, the United Nations estimates."

That is a nice factoid, but it conflates all global emissions from agriculture with livestock emissions. It also makes kind of an ecological fallacy if we attribute that global number to the specific GHG emissions related to livestock of a specific country, particularly when the audience here is U.S. consumers who mostly eat beef produced in the U.S. (where in fact the the contribution to total global GHG emissions is less than 1/2 of 1%.)

The fact about global numbers is relevant to Mitloehner's work only in the sense that his research could have much greater impact in developing countries where GHG emissions may be 10X greater (EPA GHG Emissions Inventory, Rotz et al, 2018). As stated in a recent article in Foreign Policy: 

"Generalizations about animal agriculture hide great regional differences and often lead to diet guidelines promoting shifts away from animal products that are not feasible for the world’s poor....A nuanced approach to livestock was endorsed in the latest mitigation report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).....there is great room for improvement in the efficiency of livestock production systems across developing countries" 

But these nuances are lost in the NYT article along with recognition that there are multiple margins to consider when thinking about the tradeoffs related to food production and consumption. Policy should consider the numerous choices consumers and producers make in a modern and global economy in relation to nutrition, energy, and climate.  

Parallels with the Past

When reflecting on this NYT article and the prior article focused on Dr. Kevin Folta I see at least three parallels:

1) An appeal to the nirvana fallacy of a perfect separation between science and business. While this is not explicitly stated, both stories paint a picture of malfeasance and industry influence connected with the work of these scientists, without providing evidence that that their research or findings are biased or conflict with any major consensus. They simply imply that any industry connection is questionable, Guilt by association alone.

2) Establishing some theatre of doubt around the integrity and character of these scientists in the mind of readers, the next step involves a kind of ad hominem reasoning suggesting that because of these industry connections and questionable integrity of the researchers, anything they claim must be false or misleading or contradictory to the mainstream scientific consensus.

Having established the first two parallels, the public is then set up to make a third mistake in reasoning:

3) Argument by intimidation. The implication here is that anyone that references or leans on the work of these scientists must also have questionable integrity or character. This can be invoked as a way to bypass debate and avoid discussing the actual science or evidence supporting the claims one may be making. I'm not saying that the NYT article does this explicitly, but this article pollutes the science communication environment in a way that makes this more likely to happen..

This leads me to ask - why would mainstream media follow this kind of recipe when producing stories?

Changing Business Models for Modern Media

In Jonathan Rauch's book, the Constitution of Knowledge, he discusses how in the old days of print media economies of scale supported the production of real news or reality based content. But new business models have been built on information, not knowledge and are geared toward monetizing eyeballs and clicks. This new business model favors "professionals in the arts of manipulative outrage: the kinds of actors who were more skilled at capturing attention not persuasion and who were more interested in dissemination than communication."

Rauch observes: "By the early 2020s high quality news was struggling to stay in business, while opinion, outrage, derivative boilerplate, and digital exhaust (personal data generated by internet users) enjoyed a thriving commercial market."

Quoting one digital media pundit: "you can't sell news for what it costs to make."

As mainstream media has adopted social and digital media strategies it may not be surprising to see patterns like those above emerge.

 In 2020 former President Barak Obama said in The Atlantic: 

"if we do not have the capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn't work. And by definition our democracy doesn't work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis." 

Communicating science is challenging enough. The battle with misinformation and disinformation did not begin or end with the COVID pandemic. It doesn't help when major media outlets would rather cash in on eyeballs and outrage, rather than communicate science.

Related Readings and Resources

Allen, M.R., Shine, K.P., Fuglestvedt, J.S. et al. A solution to the misrepresentations of CO2-equivalent emissions of short-lived climate pollutants under ambitious mitigation. npj Clim Atmos Sci 1, 16 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41612-018-0026-8

C. Alan Rotz et al. Environmental footprints of beef cattle production in the United States, Agricultural Systems (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2018.11.005 

Facts, Figures, or Fiction: Unwarranted Criticisms of the Biden Administration's Failure to Target Methane Emissions from Livestock. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2021/12/facts-figures-or-fiction-unfair.html  

The Ethics of Dietary Nudges and Behavior Change Focused on Climate and Sustainability. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-ethics-of-dietary-nudges-and.html

Will Eating Less U.S. Beef Save the Rainforests? http://realclearagriculture.blogspot.com/2020/01/will-eating-less-us-beef-save.html

Nominal GDP (NGDP) Targeting and the Supply Chain Knowledge Problem

Background: The Supply Chain Knowledge Problem

Last year a wrote a post titled The Supply Chain Knowledge Problem addressing what I believed to be some of the core and fundamental drivers of the increase in prices over the last couple years. Describing the knowledge problem as the fundamental problem of economics (and society), 'know how' and 'know what' are spread across many minds and the knowledge required to make anything isn't possessed by any one person, company, or policy maker. And, especially can't be resolved by any central banker. 

In reference to COVID and our economy I used an analogy of an environmental disaster like a forest fire and the recovery of our economy being analogous to an ecosystem. 

"Just as restoring an ecosystem after an environmental disaster requires an understanding of ecology, we must understand the ecology of our markets and supply chains in order to restore our economy and avoid an even worse ecological disaster. We must recognize that the knowledge problem post COVID is more challenging than pre COVID made evident by recent price spikes and shortages that some people could be confusing for monetary inflation."

"COVID and our response to it unfortunately destroyed the ‘know what’ and ‘know how’ that was spread across millions of minds and across decades of building our supply chains. There is no simple blunt monetary or fiscal policy that can substitute for the ‘know how’ and ‘know what’ it’s going to take to rebuild them. It’s going to take time. Prices have to search and signal for the ‘know how’ and ‘know what’ to rediscover and rebuild what was lost."

I have been dreadfully concerned that if we get out of the way and just let 'P' do its job searching and signaling that there would be political pressure to paper over the damage with an excessive increase in interest rates by the Fed, or even worse politicians passing bills in the name of inflation reduction that might make matters worse. And even more dreaded, we'd experience complete economic amnesia manifested by calls for price controls. 

At the same time, a person would be blind not to consider the impact of the expansive monetary policy of the Federal Reserve prior to, during, and after the pandemic, not to mention the aggressive but necessary fiscal response. This made the knowledge problem above seem even more intractable. How much of the current inflation is truly 'inflation' in the monetary sense, and how much is P just doing its job? How can we tolerate temporary price fluctuations and spikes so that P can do its job, and at the same time mitigate what constitutes actual monetary inflation at the same time? 

To this point no economist or commentator has really come close to answering this call of concern. Too few were talking about the fundamental micro foundations of the knowledge problem, and too many had appeared to abandon it completely in pursuit of sky high interest rates. 

Nominal GDP (NGDP) Targeting 

Recently in the essay The Causes and Cure of the 2021-2022 Inflation Surge, David Beckworth provides the synthesis that I was looking for as both a student and consumer of economics. As I read it, NGDP targeting allows us to both address the challenges of monetary inflation while at the same time letting P do its job.

What is NGDP targeting? Beckworth explains:

"NGDP measures total current-price spending on final goods and services in the economy—it is the economy we see in the real world. Put differently, NGDP growth has both real GDP growth and inflation embedded in it. Using this measure creates a monetary policy framework that is called NGDP targeting."

Dr. Beckworth has been carrying the torch for NGDP targeting for quite a while so it's not totally new to me. But I never quite understood the power of it until he put it in the context of our current economic challenges and became the first economist to offer in my mind a satisfactory explanation and policy direction. (As I said above, and full disclosure, I am a consumer and student of economics, not an academic producer of economics, especially not macro, and heavily influenced by the mainline economic thinking of the Austrian, Public Choice, and New Institutional schools).   

In the excerpts below Dr. Beckworth takes the knowledge problem discussed above head on with NGDP targeting:

The distinction, then, between rising inflation caused by supply shocks and inflation caused by excess aggregate demand growth is essential for successful central banking. But therein lies the rub: It is impossible to know this distinction in real time.

So what are central bankers to do? How can they overcome this knowledge problem? 

Instead of trying to divine what part of inflation is due to aggregate demand shocks and should be managed, we should look directly at aggregate demand itself. This approach cuts out the middleman of inflation and goes straight to the underlying source of inflation movements that is amenable to monetary policy.

The amazing thing about this approach is that it provides a clever workaround to the central banker’s knowledge problem. That is, by forcing monetary authorities to focus on stable aggregate demand growth, it keeps trend inflation anchored but allows for temporary inflation caused by supply shocks. 

NGDP targeting allows for price fluctuations caused by supply shocks while still aiming for a stable trend inflation rate.....NGDP targeting, in other words, is a two-for-one deal that gives central banks the inflation cure they are seeking.

He goes on to explain how this approach would have allowed the Fed to get ahead of the curve and act quicker last year regarding monetary inflation and how NGDP targeting can plot a course going forward. This sounds a lot better to me than the rather blunt approaches we have seen to this point with the Inflation Reduction Act and no end in sight interest rate increases that risk papering and plastering over the supply chain problems only to find them again later when we're remodeling our economy after the recession that's projected as a result. Without NGDP targeting, how many remodels can our economy take?

The Ethics of Dietary Nudges and Behavior Change Focused on Climate and Sustainability

As discussed in McFadden, et al., 2022, when focusing on policies and behaviors related to climate change and sustainability we should consider actual abatement potential and plasticity.   

 "Policy interventions are likely to provide the best return on investment when they target choices and behaviors for which abatement potential and plasticity are high enough to lead to meaningful reductions in GHG emissions"

A lot of important work needs to be done to understand which solutions are technically correct but also the most impactful at scale from a behavior change perspective. And importantly - ethical and honest.  It is important when designing for behavior change that choice architectures reflect the science and honestly represent tradeoffs that are relevant to the context and particulars of circumstances and place. Often behavioral designers are challenged by the fact that nudges are sensitive to context, so may be less impactful when context changes in different environments.  Good science and good business practices and good ethics mandate testing in different contexts to understand the impact. We must also recognize, as I discuss below, that the science and tradeoffs that can be implicitly baked into choice architecture also depend on context and must be considered. When we design choice architectures it should reflect this in ways that are honest and transparent, and not let politics and personal biases get mixed into the batter. If nudges are successful, we want to make sure we are not doing more harm than good at scale. We don't want to unintentionally embed misinformation into product design, and certainly don't want to do this willfully (see here and here for posts discussing misinformation getting been baked into 'GMO' labeling). 

Recent Work Related to Dietary Nudges Focused on Climate and Sustainability

Blondin et al. (2022) investigate adding descriptive messages to nudge consumers to choose plant based food choices. They find that the most impactful framing was related to a 'small changes big impact' frame: 

"Each of us can make a positive difference for the planet. Swapping just one meat dish for a plant-based one saves greenhouse gas emissions that are equivalent to the energy used to charge your phone for two years. Your small change can make a big difference."

This nudge more than doubled vegetarian selections compared to the control group (25.4 percent versus 12.4 percent). They conclude that these types of descriptive messages represent a low cost and scalable intervention that could be adapted and tailored to a variety of retail contexts.  But as I will discuss below - context matters. 

De-loyde et al. (2022) investigated the impacts of eco-labelling and social nudging on sustainable food choices using randomized online experiments. These learnings are important because of the relative cost and difficulty of leveraging eco-labeling vs. more easily scalable social nudges. The costs of eco-labeling are related to the cost of information involved in creating eco-labels that are accurate and transparent (something I will discuss further) as well as the logistical costs of having to provide that information via menus or other media. Understanding the impact on consumer choice relative to cost is important for informing business decisions concerning the use of these nudges. 

Social nudges applied a simple indication on the menu (a star) annotated as 'most popular.'  Eco nudges were more elaborate:

"The three burrito types were displayed alongside a traffic light system, with a scale of 1–5, which was circled at the appropriate sustainability level for that burrito: beef burrito – unsustainable, chicken burrito – neither sustainable nor unsustainable and vegetarian burrito – sustainable (Figure 1). This is consistent with research measuring the CO2 emissions (Espinoza-Orias & Azapagic, 2012), water usage (Mekonnen & Hoekstra, 2010) and impact on biodiversity from the different burrito ingredients (Crenna Sinkko & Sala, 2019)."

Authors conclude:

"This study suggests that future policy could include eco-labelling and/or a social nudge to reduce meat consumption and meet global climate change targets."

Challenges Related to Dietary Nudges Focused on Climate and Sustainability

Metrics Matter

When it comes to measuring climate impact the important human, sustainability, and nutrition tradeoffs related to the metrics we use matter. In Blondin et al. (2022) it was not clear to me how they defined the relationship between food choices and greenhouse gas emissions.  In the article above De-loyde et al. (2022) they cite Espinoza-Orias & Azapagic (2012) in relation to greenhouse gas emissions. While that analysis was super detailed and rigorous, I'm not sure it represents to most accurate or transparent information when it comes to making these choices as it relates to CO2 equivalents. 

When considering beef and dairy specifically, understanding the differences in the way CO2 vs. methane behaves is fundamental to understanding their respective roles impacting climate change, and personal and policy decisions related to mitigating future warming.  Understanding this can help direct attention to those areas where we can make the biggest difference in terms impacting climate change over the long term. As discussed in Allen et al. (2018):

"While shorter-term goals for emission rates of individual gases and broader metrics encompassing emissions’ co-impacts remain potentially useful in defining how cumulative contributions will be achieved, summarising commitments using a metric that accurately reflects their contributions to future warming would provide greater transparency in the implications of global climate agreements as well as enabling fairer and more effective design of domestic policies and measures."

It's not clear that the work cited from 2012 cited in  De-loyde et al. (2022) or the work in Blondin (2022) appropriately accounts for the biogenic carbon cycle and the role of methane as a flow vs. stock gas in their estimates of GHG emissions and warming potential.

Are consumers scanning QR codes on their smartphones (pumping new permanent sources of GHG into the atmosphere) to read a menu nudging them away from beef being distracted from focusing on other seemingly arbitrary choices they could be making to positively impact the climate in more meaningful ways? (This post compares GHG emissions and warming potential of internet use vs. beef consumption)

Additionally, even an accurate measure of GHG emissions and warming potential isn't enough to transparently relate all of the tradeoffs involved. 

In a 2010 Food and Nutrition Research article, authors introduce the Nutrient Density to Climate Impact (NDCI) index. Metrics like this could add some perspective. According to their work:

"the NDCI index was 0 for carbonated water, soft drink, and beer and below 0.1 for red wine and oat drink. The NDCI index was similar for orange juice (0.28) and soy drink  (0.25). Due to a very high-nutrient density, the NDCI index for milk was substantially higher (0.54) than for the other beverages. Future discussion on how changes in food consumption patterns might help avert climate change need to take both GHG emission and nutrient density of foods and beverages into account."

Authors Drewnowski, Adam et al. apply this more nuanced approach to 34 different food categories including meat and dairy:

"Efforts to decrease global GHGEs while maintaining nutritionally adequate, affordable, and acceptable diets need to be guided by considerations of the ND [nutrient density] and environmental impact of different foods and food groups. In a series of recent studies, the principal sustainability measure was carbon cost expressed in terms of GHGEs (8, 14, 15). Testing the relation between nutrient profile of foods and their carbon footprint can help identify those food groups that provide both calories and optimal nutrition at a low carbon cost."

While it does not impact the major findings related to how to influence consumer choices about food and sustainability, it is not clear to me that Blondin et al. (2022) or De-loyde et al. (2022) sufficiently consider these tradeoffs in the choice architectures that they proposed for nudging consumers to make decisions about food consumption. 

If appropriately accounted for in their specific contexts, it does not necessarily imply that these tradeoffs would be appropriately accounted for in different contexts which is what I turn to next.

Context Matters

When it comes to behavior change, context and environment matter immensely.

As discussed in Kanemoto et al. (2019)

"most global-scale models have an important shortcoming; they do not consider subnational variations in food production and consumption. This lack of subnational detail is significant because subnational detail could be more important than global coverage and may show the opportunity to promote and use different subnational policy"

Using combined microdata on 60,000 households collecting information about diet, income, and demographics and a subnational input-output model for production and trade across 47 prefectures in Japan they find: 

"higher-CF  [carbon footprint] households are not distinguished by excessive meat consumption relative to other households but rather have higher household CF intensity because of elevated consumption in other areas including restaurants, confectionery, and alcohol."

De-loyde et al. (2022) start off their article with a global framing of the impact of livestock on GHG emissions: 

"Livestock production contributes an estimated 14.5% of human-induced global greenhouse-gas emissions."

Despite some of the questions above about the metrics used to relate food to climate impact and the nutritional tradeoffs involved when presenting consumers with options, maybe this global framing is appropriate for consumers in the U.K. but is this the most honest framing to use if we try to transport these results to other consumers like U.S. consumers? Are the tradeoffs the same? 

Kanemoto (2019) was based on Japanese consumers who consume relatively low amounts of beef compared to U.S. consumers. When considering U.S. consumers, there are important differences we should consider when attempting to adopt choice architectures used in other contexts designed to influence consumer choice.

Ignoring change in context ignores important differences between technological capabilities and production practices but also differences in incomes, tastes, and preferences. As stated in a recent article in Foreign Policy: 

"Generalizations about animal agriculture hide great regional differences and often lead to diet guidelines promoting shifts away from animal products that are not feasible for the world’s poor....A nuanced approach to livestock was endorsed in the latest mitigation report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." 

When we are designing choice architectures to influence dietary choices related to climate and sustainability, a nuanced approach is also necessary. 

A lot of the criticism of U.S. beef misappropriates or conflates the environmental footprint of beef produced and consumed in the U.S. with beef from other parts of the world. These criticisms may not be appropriate when applied to U.S. consumers. When we drill into agriculture and focus on beef in the U.S. we find that it accounts for about 4% of total emissions. But on a global scale, which matters most to climate change, overall, total GHG emissions related to U.S. beef consumption are 10X lower in the U.S. than beef produced in other places in the world and accounts for less than 1/2 of 1% (i.e. .5%) of global GHG emissions.  (EPA GHG Emissions Inventory, Rotz et al, 2018). See also Allen, M.R., Shine, K.P., Fuglestvedt, J.S. et al., 2018. 

Similar to Kanemoto et al. (2019) and McFadden, et al., 2022 when it comes to U.S. consumers it may be the case that the real meat on the bone so to speak (what has the most potential impact given consumer plasticity and realistic assessments of climate impact) as it relates to climate may have more to do with where the food is consumed than what is consumed. It may be the case that once you are already in the restaurant reading the menu that having a salad vs. steak sourced in the U.S. is inconsequential when looking at the global impact. It could even be the opposite case, considering nutritional density and climate tradeoffs, when appropriately quantified, the salad in the restaurant may not be the best choice. 

Scaling and Ethics

In their paper Monetizing disinformation in the attention economy: The case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) Ryan, Schaul, Butner and Swarthout provide an in depth background on the attention economy, disinformation, the role of the media and marketing as well as socioeconomic impacts. They articulate how how rent seekers and special interests are able to use disinformation in a way to create and economize on misleading but coherent stories with externalities impacting business, public policy, technology adoption, and health. These costs, when quantified can be substantial and should not be ignored:

"Less visible costs are diminished confidence in science, and the loss of important innovations and foregone innovation capacities"

One of the big challenges presented by misinformation and disinformation is its clever use of our fast thinking system 1, its use of social proof and confirmation bias, magnified by technology and social media that focuses on capturing attention and dissemination vs. communication and persuasion. To say the least it can be dangerous at scale. In today's information age and polarized political climate we need to be careful about the things we do at scale. Low cost scalable interventions can be dangerous.

If lots of businesses used nudges and choice architectures that did not accurately reflect the tradeoffs for a given context, or government became involved as an enforcer, or it became a common strategy for corporations to juice up their ESG reporting, these issues could have negative impacts at scale. The harm would be greatest if this becomes a distraction and diverts attention and resources away from more impactful behavior change or reduces investment in greener food technologies. 

We can look at what has happened to the use of rBST in milk production for instance. According to Perkowski (2013) "more than two-thirds of dairy farmers who have ever treated their cows with rBST have stopped using it" despite the fact that rbST in dairy (just one technology) has the equivalent impact of removing 300,000 cars from the road annually (see Capper, 2008). Would consumers favor milk produced from cows supplemented by rBST (leading to an economic premium to encourage its adoption by producers) if they were made more aware of these tradeoffs? Are current labels related to rBST doing consumers justice by providing them better information or are they reinforcing false negative perceptions? 

We could ask similar questions regarding other technological advances in food production and manufacturing like finely textured beef which was so maligned by social media that its developer Beef Products Incorporated (BPI) forced a settlement with NBC for spreading misinformation characterizing it as unsafe pink slime (Mclaughlin, 2017). 

Do current GMO labeling regulatory requirements and food packaging accurately reflect the tradeoffs involved? Would consumers view GMOs differently if they were presented with knowledge that their adoption currently has offset the emissions equivalent to 15 million cars annually. That is more than the total new cars typically sold in the U.S. every year, and about 20% of all new cars sold globally. Or 3X the number of EVs currently being sold in the U.S. annually. 

Whether intentionally designed or not we are always nudging. Are we nudging consumers in the wrong direction (in terms of environmental impact) with labels claiming 'no rBST' on milk cartons and non-GMO labels on other food products? 

Damage can be done when attention and perceptions are manipulated and consumer sentiment leads us to abandon promising technologies that could really make a difference when it comes to climate. 

Misinformation and disinformation have played a major role driving vaccine hesitancy and may have even been accelerated during the COVID19 pandemic. See Johnson et al. (2020) & Vaidyanathan (2020). Both misinformation and disinformation play large roles in other areas like climate denialism and GMO hesitancy and act as bottlenecks to adopting better technologies and policies.  Behavioral designers often strive to identify nudges that are both as effective and scalable. In the research above, De-loyde et al. (2022) and Blondin et al. (2022), social nudges seem to fit the bill here.  But misinformation and disinformation unfortunately represent some of most effective and scalable social nudges you will find. Even with the best of intentions, we need to be careful in the design and deployment of social nudges. 

When it comes to developing nudges and choice architectures related to food choices, we want to be careful that what we do is based on sound science and transparently reflects tradeoffs vs. simply manipulates consumers to act according to our own biases and preferences that may not necessarily represent the optimal choice in every context.

A Guide for Ethical Nudging

The Observatory of Public Innovation has recently published a document titled Good Practice Principles For Ethical Behavioural Science In Public Policy that includes checklists and questions that may speak to many of the issues above. 

They provide a checklist and prompting questions focused on four areas: Scope, Design, Research and Evaluation, and Policy Implementation. Below are some relevant prompting questions based on the discussion above: 

 - Did you establish clear criteria for why the behavioural change has a positive outcome for the affected population? Are these criteria monitored and evaluated regularly? (related to Scope)

-Set up protocols to identify and mitigate ethical risks (such as unintended negative side-effects, both in general and to particular groups (related to Design)

- Have you considered new ethical concerns resulting from scaling and adapting in new contexts?

The criteria for the nudges mentioned above seem to be based on measures of CO2e. But we know that those metrics don't necessarily reflect the latest science and don't necessarily encompass all the relevant tradeoffs implied in the choice architectures being presented to consumers. As a consequence, if these nudges were scaled, we might nudge people to make choices that may not be as optimal as advertised when the goal is climate impact, especially for certain groups in given contexts. These are important side effects to consider. 

Perhaps in the research and design phase when there is debate in the literature or the metrics are complex (as they are in climate science and nutrition and health) it is hard to claim that any of the papers discussed above represent a marked violation of ethics. No standard of ethics should require human infallibility or perfect knowledge - especially when the goals are learning. I don't think this guide is necessarily meant to catch all of the nuances discussed in this post. But when it comes to adoption and scaling of interventions or policies, the ethics involved probably merit greater attention. I think the checklist and prompting questions as they are may be quite useful and can be refined to better reflect certain domains. 

Conclusion

Learnings from studies like Blondin et al. (2022) and De-loyde et al. (2022) are very important for understanding how choice architecture and nudges can be used to influence behaviors that may represent impactful solutions for important societal problems like climate change. We should take these learnings and test them in other contexts to confirm they work in different environments before scaling. We also want to make sure that as we learn about nudging and behavior change to improve choices related to food and sustainability in non-coercive ways, that we do not inadvertently do more harm than good on a grander scale in terms of loss of trust in the science, institutions, and innovations that can have the greatest impact. We need to make sure that we are using choice architecture responsibly, and the ingredients are based on sound science and transparent in the tradeoffs they represent and sensitive to the context in which choices are being made. 

Additional and Related Reading

More recent related posts and updates: 

Nudging Back: Turning off your Zoom Camera May Be Good for the Climate. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2023/02/nudging-back-turning-off-your-camera.html 

Picture This: Putting Beef and Climate into Perspective. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2023/03/putting-beef-and-climate-into.html

Rational Irrationality and Behavioral Economic Frameworks for Combating Vaccine Hesitancy https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2021/08/rational-irrationality-near.html

Facts, Figures, or Fiction: Unwarranted Criticisms of the Biden Administration's Failure to Target Methane Emissions from Livestock. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2021/12/facts-figures-or-fiction-unfair.html 

The Limits of Nudges and the Role of Experiments in Applied Behavioral Economics. https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-limits-of-nudges-and-role-of.html 

Will Eating Less U.S. Beef Save the Rainforests? http://realclearagriculture.blogspot.com/2020/01/will-eating-less-us-beef-save.html

Can Capitalism Be A Force For Good When it Comes to Food? https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-capitalism-be-force-for-good-when.html

GMOs and QR Codes: Consumers need more than a label they need a learning path https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2016/08/gmos-is-just-any-label-enough.html

Modern Sustainable Agriculture Annotated Bibliography (updated) http://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2011/02/modern-sustainable-agriculture.html

References

Allen, M.R., Shine, K.P., Fuglestvedt, J.S. et al. A solution to the misrepresentations of CO2-equivalent emissions of short-lived climate pollutants under ambitious mitigation. npj Clim Atmos Sci 1, 16 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41612-018-0026-8

Blondin, Stacy & Attwood, Sophie & Vennard, Daniel & Mayneris, Vanessa. (2022). Environmental Messages Promote Plant-Based Food Choices: An Online Restaurant Menu Study. World Resources Institute. 10.46830/wriwp.20.00137. 

Graham Brookes & Peter Barfoot (2020) Environmental impacts of genetically modified (GM) crop use 1996–2018: impacts on pesticide use and carbon emissions, GM Crops & Food, 11:4, 215-241, DOI: 10.1080/21645698.2020.1773198

The environmental impact of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST) use in dairy production Judith L. Capper,* Euridice Castañeda-Gutiérrez,*† Roger A. Cady,‡ and Dale E. Bauman* Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 July 15; 105(28): 9668–9673

De-loyde, K., Pilling, M., Thornton, A., Spencer, G., & Maynard, O. (2022). Promoting sustainable diets using eco-labelling and social nudges: A randomised online experiment. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-17. doi:10.1017/bpp.2022.27

Drewnowski, Adam et al. “Energy and nutrient density of foods in relation to their carbon footprint.” The American journal of clinical nutrition 101 1 (2015): 184-91 .

Johnson, N.F., Velásquez, N., Restrepo, N.J. et al. The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views. Nature 582, 230–233 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1

Keiichiro Kanemoto, Daniel Moran, Yosuke Shigetomi, Christian Reynolds, Yasushi Kondo,Meat Consumption Does Not Explain Differences in Household Food Carbon Footprints in Japan, One Earth, Volume 1, Issue 4, 2019,Pages 464-471, ISSN 2590-3322, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.004.

Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. McFadden BR, Ferraro PJ, Messer KD (2022) Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. PLOS ONE 17(1): e0261372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261372

ABC TV settles with beef product maker in 'pink slime' defamation case. By Timothy Mclaughlin https://www.reuters.com/article/us-abc-pinkslime/abc-tv-settles-with-beef-product-maker-in-pink-slime-defamation-case-idUSKBN19J1W9 

Dairymen reject rBST largely on economic grounds. Mateusz Perkowski Dec 10, 2013 Updated Dec 13, 2018 .https://www.capitalpress.com/dairymen-reject-rbst-largely-on-economic-grounds/article_335ce36b-ec75-5734-9aad-80f11cae1d43.html

Camille D. Ryan, Andrew J. Schaul, Ryan Butner, John T. Swarthout, Monetizing disinformation in the attention economy: The case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), European Management Journal, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2020, Pages 7-18, ISSN 0263-2373

C. Alan Rotz et al. Environmental footprints of beef cattle production in the United States, Agricultural Systems (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2018.11.005 

News Feature: Finding a vaccine for misinformation. Gayathri Vaidyanathan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug 2020, 117 (32) 18902-18905; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013249117 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/18902

The Role of Identify Protective Cognition in the Formation of Consumer Beliefs and Preferences

Background

People pick and choose their science, and often they do it in ways that seem rationally inconsistent. One lens through which we can view this is Bryan Caplan's idea of rational irrationality along with a Borland and Pulsinelli's concept of social harassment costs. 

According to Caplan:

 "...people have preferences over beliefs. Letting emotions or ideology corrupt our thinking is an easy way to satisfy such preferences...Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world."

This means that:

"Beliefs that are irrational from the standpoint of truth-seeking are rational from the standpoint of utility maximization."

In a previous post, I visualized social harassment costs that vary depending on one's peer group. If these costs exceed a certain threshold (k), consumers might express preferences that otherwise might seem irrational from a scientific standpoint. For example, based on peer group, a consumer might embrace scientific evidence related to climate change, but due to strong levels of social harassment, reject the views of the broader medical and scientific community related to the safety of genetically engineered foods. 

See here, and here.

Identity Protective Cognition

In Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition (Kahan, 2017) the concept of identity protective cognition adds more to the picture. Below are three aspects of identify protective cognition:

1. What people accept as factual information is shaped primarily by their values and identity
2. Identity is a function of group membership, i.e. it's tribal in nature
3. If people choose to hold beliefs that are different from what the 'tribe' believes, then they risk being ostracized (i.e. they face social harassment costs)
4. As a result, individual thinking and thought patterns evolve to express group membership and what is held to be factual information is really an expression of 'loyalty to a particular identity-defining affinity group.

Additionally Kahan discusses some important implications of this sort of epistemic tribalism. Additional education and more accurate information aren't necessarily effective tactics for addressing the problems of misinformation and disinformation. In fact, what Kahan's and others research have shown is that it can actually make the problem worse. 

'those highest in science comprehension use their superior scientific-reasoning proficiencies to conform policy-relevant evidence to the position that predominates in their cultural group....persons using this mode of reasoning are not trying to form an accurate understanding of the facts in support of a decision...with the benefit of the best available evidence....Instead they are using their reasoning to cultivate an affective stance that expresses their identity and their solidarity with others who share their commitments.' 

In this way, identity protective cognition creates a sort of spurious relationship between what may be perceived as facts and the beliefs we adopt or choices we make. It gives us the impression that our beliefs are being driven by facts when the primary driver may actually be cultural identity. 

This sort of tribalism can result in a sort of tragedy of the science communication commons - similar to the tragedy of the commons in economics where what seems rational from an individual standpoint (adopting the beliefs of the group to avoid punishment) is irrational from the standpoint of accuracy of beliefs and has negative consequences for society at large. As a result:

'citizens of a pluralistic democratic society are less likely to converge on the best possible evidence on threats to their collective welfare.'

Of course this has consequences for elections, the regulatory environment, and decisions by businesses and entrepreneurs in terms of what products to market and where to invest capital and resources. Ultimately this impacts quality of life and our ability to thrive in a world with a changing climate and bitter partisanship and social unrest. 

The Problem and the Solution

As discussed above, this sort of tribal epistemology is not easily corrected by providing correct information or education. In fact it drives one to seek out misinformation in support of one's identity while ignoring what is factually correct. The authors speak broadly about the role that 'pollutants' or 'toxins' in the science communication environment play in promoting this tribal mentality. One form of social harassment cost that may be driving this is cancel culture or call out culture. Cancel culture works like an immune system that scans the network of believers and seeks out non-conforming views, and tags it to be attacked by others in the group. This drives even the brightest to seek out misinformation instead of avoiding it. 

Another pollutant to the science communication environment is troll epistemology and related efforts to produce a 'firehose of falsehood' (see Paul and Matthews, 2016). Whether intentional or not, modern media technology provides the infrastructure to produce an effect similar to modern propaganda techniques pioneered in Russia.  This emphasizes flooding the science communication environment via high-volume and multichannel, rapid, continuous, and repetitive false or unsubstantiated claims with no commitment to objective reality or logical consistency. 

Authors conclude:

'the most effective manner to combat the effect of misconceptions about science and outright misinformation is to protect the science communication environment from this distinctive toxin.'

Related Posts and References

Borland,Melvin V. and Robert W. Pulsinelli. Household Commodity Production and Social Harassment Costs.Southern Economic Journal. Vol. 56, No. 2 (Oct., 1989), pp. 291-301

Frimer, J. A., Skitka, L. J., & Motyl, M. (2017). Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.04.003

Kahan, Dan M., Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition (May 24, 2017). Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164, Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 605, Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 575, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2973067 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2973067

Paul, Christopher and Miriam Matthews, The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html.

The Limits of Nudges and the Role of Experiments in Applied Behavioral Economics

In a recent article in Nature, Evidence from a statewide vaccination RCT, authors found that eight different nudges previously shown to be effective for encouraging flu and COVID vaccination failed to show impact when tested on more reluctant populations. I think a knee jerk reaction is that maybe nudges aren't effective ways to increase vaccination after all. But that completely misses a very important aspect of nudges. Nudges work in most cases because humans can be sensitive to context. And applied behavioral design processes work to understand this context and test the impact of interventions to know if they are effective in a given context. At the highest level I think this paper is less about the ineffectiveness of nudges per say and more about the important role of changing context on behavior. 

I'd like to try to unpack more by focusing on the following: 

• The importance of testing. You can’t blindly chuck nudges over the fence at your customers and simply assume they will be effective just because they worked in prior published studies or in other businesses. In this paper they tested 8 different nudges. If they had just scaled any or all of these without testing we would not have learned anything about effectiveness or the other lessons that follow relating to why they may not have worked. And vice versa - just because something failed to replicate in one context doesn't invalidate prior work or imply it won't work in yours. We just know findings are not generalizable across all contexts. The only way to really know about your context is to test. That is part of the value of business experiments.

• Context matters. In the paper they discussed important differences in context between late stage COVID vaccination and vaccination earlier in the pandemic, as well as differences between flu and COVID.

• The utility of behavioral personas and behavioral mapping to guide our thinking about why a given nudge may work or not. To take context a bit further, authors discussed differences in populations (age) and different challenges to flu vs COVID vaccinations and the differential impact related to how both logistical and psychological barriers may have been addressed in different populations and different contexts with different designs. All of these are things that we can point to or think about in the framework of behavioral mapping. Other issues related to 1) different kinds of hesitancy and changing norms over time, 2) whether some participants may have already been vaccinated (and not mentioned perhaps how prior infection may have changed the sense of effectiveness or urgency). These things may relate more to the kinds of personas that any given nudge may speak to. Although the paper doesn't discuss behavioral mapping or developing personas their utility here seems palpable.

• Behavioral design frameworks. Additionally, authors discussed the impact of things like message saturation and novelty effects in addition to timing. These are things that I tend to think about in the context of Stephen Wendel’s CREATE action funnel as a design framework that speaks to issues like the importance of Cue and Timing. (Actually every aspect of CREATE speaks to almost all of the aspects of this messaging in some way).

• The importance of operationalizing applied behavioral science through repeatable iterative cycles of learning. Even if one constructed behavioral maps and personas in the design of these nudges, the findings in this paper (and in many instances where we leverage experiments to test impact) dictate that we go back and revise our maps and personas based on learnings like these.

There has also been some recent discussion about the failure of nudges because they focus too much on individual behavioral (i-frame) vs. larger systemic issues  (s-frame). It seems to me that best practices in the 'diagnosis' phase of behavioral design process would be helpful in both of these areas if the behavioral lens is widened to include deeper thinking about the broader system (s-frame). As discussed in The Consitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth Jonathan Rouch discusses the challenges of changing behavior when beliefs and identity become tightly braided together. Sometimes people first have to be moved to a 'persuadable place emotionally' and their 'personal opinions, political identities, and peer group norms' have to be 'nudged and cajoled simultaneously, which is a long slow process.' To quote Jim Manzi, you can't test your way out of a bad strategy. It does not mean that we should give up on leveraging applied behavioral science to make a positive change in society, but it does make understanding of the larger ecosystem in the implementation of nudges all the more critical. 

As discussed in a recent article in The Behavioral Scientist:

"Our efforts at this stage will determine whether the field matures in a systematic and stable manner, or grows wildly and erratically. Unless we take stock of the science, the practice, and the mechanisms that we can put into place to align the two, we will run the danger of the promise of behavioral science being an illusion for many—not because the science itself was faulty, but because we did not successfully develop a science for using the science." 

The authors follow with 6 guidelines echoing some of the above sentiments above that are well worth reading. 

Reference: 

Rabb, N., Swindal, M., Glick, D. et al. Evidence from a statewide vaccination RCT shows the limits of nudges. Nature 604, E1–E7 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04526-2

Chater, Nick and Loewenstein, George F., The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray (March 1, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4046264 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4046264

Agricultural Economics in the Healthcare Space

During the pandemic, it wasn't too uncommon to hear the criticism that economists should stay in their lane when it comes to issues related to health. So I thought I would write a short piece discussing what role I have had as an applied (agricultural) economist working in the healthcare space for almost a decade now. 

Economics is the study of people's choices and how they are made compatible. At a high level, agricultural economics focuses on choices related to food, fiber, natural resources, and energy production and consumption. This makes the intersection of food, health, and the environment an interesting space in agricultural economics. 

How do choices in this space impact health? What factors lead individuals to make healthy choices? In graduate school I specifically focused on why people seem to pick and choose their science and the role of evidence in food choices and attitudes toward food technology. What is the role of information and disinformation in the formation of consumer preferences and the choices they make? How can we design better policies, products, services, interventions, or choice architectures for better outcomes? How can we communicate science and risk more effectively? And, what are the best approaches in experimental design and causal inference to measure the impact in these areas? How do we bring this all together to make better decisions as individuals, business leaders, and as a society? At an applied level, which is where I work, this is not so much about making a novel contribution to the literature or advancing the field as much as it is about implementation - applying the principals of economics to develop solutions or provide frameworks to solve or better understand questions and problems in this space.

This line of reasoning has value not just in the context of food choices but for a myriad of behaviors related to healthcare at both the patient and provider level. From a business perspective, this is about how to identify opportunities to move resources from a lower to a higher valued use, and how we monetize behavior change. Of course applying this economic lens also requires bringing an ethical perspective to the table as well, which is important when we consider all of the tradeoffs involved in human decision making. 

When we are faced with wicked problems that may have alternative solutions, we can't just jump directly form the science to a cure, better policy, or product or service.  We learned from the pandemic the difference between having a vaccine and having people get vaccinated. At the end of the day there are no solutions really, only tradeoffs, and we need a framework for understanding those tradeoffs so we can make better decisions about food and health. That is squarely in the lane of theoretical and applied economists.

Related Posts and Readings

Why Study Economics / Applied Economics 

The Convergence of AI, Life Sciences, and Healthcare

The Economics of Innovation in Biopharma

Science Communication for Business and Non-technical Audiences 

The Value of Business Experiments

Statistics is a way of thinking not a toolbox

Causal Decision Making with Non-Causal Models

Rational Irrationality and Behavioral Economic Frameworks for Combating Vaccine Hesitancy 

Consumer Perceptions, Misinformation, and Vaccine Hesitancy

Using Social Network Analysis to Understand the Influence of Social Harassment Costs and Preferences Toward Biotechnology

Fat Tails, The Precautionary Principle, and GMOs

Innovation, Disruption and Low(er) Carbon Beef

Examining Changes in Healthy Days After Health Coaching. Cole, S., Zbikowski, S. M., Renda, A., Wallace, A., Dobbins, J. M., & Bogard, M. American Journal of Health Promotion. (2018)

Intrapersonal Variation in Goal Setting and Achievement in Health Coaching: Cross-Sectional Retrospective Analysis. Wallace A.M., Bogard M.T., Zbikowski S.M. J Med Internet Res 2018;20(1):e32

Innovation, Disruption, and Low(er) Carbon Beef

Is There Really Such a Thing as Low-Carbon Beef? That is the title of a recent article in Wired. The article was referring to a new USDA program that will allow beef to be labeled and marketed as having a lower carbon footprint based on a lifecycle assessment and audit of production practices. To be lower carbon it must be 10% lower. Here is a bit more detail:

"Verification of reduced greenhouse gas emissions in a group of cattle using a comprehensive life-cycle assessment model that incorporates impacts associated with management practices and cattle performance throughout the life of the animals.A qualified group of cattle must have life-cycle greenhouse emissions at least 10% lower than industry baseline based on the Low Carbon Beef Scoring Tables." 

Before getting into this further I will first answer the question posed by the title. Yes - on a relative global basis, beef produced and consumed in the U.S. is low carbon. Beef in the U.S. accounts for about 4% of total GHG emissions. But on a global scale, which matters most to climate change, overall, total GHG emissions related to U.S. beef consumption accounts for less than 1/2 of 1% (i.e. .5%) of GHG emissions (EPA GHG Emissions Inventory, Rotz et al, 2018). Additionally when compared to beef produced and consumed in other parts of the world, the carbon footprint of beef produced and consumed in the U.S. is 10 times or more lower (Herrero et al., 2013). There is no arguing against the fact  that when we look at the big picture, U.S. beef is low carbon beef. Of course it is fair to ask, within the U.S. can we improve our carbon footprint? Our history tells us yes we can and as I will discuss below, the new USDA labeling program cited in Wired may be one way to incentivize getting there. 

Will this new labeling and certification initiative be misleading as the article says? I am one of the first people to speak out against misleading food labels. Just see related posts below. There is currently a lot of confusion about the sustainability of our food choices,  and consumers are having to use a lot of proxies that are less than ideal to attempt to understand their carbon footprint. Examples include local, organic, 'hormone free', or non-GMO products (see my post about issue related to free-from food labeling). All of these options can in fact have higher carbon footprints, lead to more intense resource use, and have negative social and environmental consequences despite how popular some fads may be or what food marketers may imply about their product. By having a verified measure of carbon footprint associated with beef, the new USDA initiative should actually provide clarity to a confused and often misled consumer. Precisely the opposite of the concern raised in Wired.

Misleading or Realistic Recommendations?

The article in Wired quotes the following recommendation: "low-carbon certifications won’t fix the problems caused by beef consumption. “We need to substantially readjust our diets'

Another common suggestion to go along with this is to consume more plant based or cultured alternative meat sources. These suggestions suffer from two major drawbacks. From a behavioral science perspective, they are challenging behaviors to target. 

In a previous post, I discussed how we need to think about the problem we are trying to solve or outcome we are trying to achieve (climate change mitigation) and consider the behavioral map that relates all of the target actions we could take to achieve this outcome. Which solutions are technically correct but also the most impactful at scale from a behavior change perspective? Is a reduction in modern U.S. beef production or consumption the target behavior we should be trying to change compared to other options?

Paul Ferraro, Brandon McFadden, and Kent Messer take this head on using an auction experiment to measure 'plasticity' or the willingness of non-adopters to change behavior (Ferraro, et al., 2022).They find that targeting beef consumption might not be the most socially cost effective approach to mitigating climate change compared to other strategies for abatement (like carbon offsets or policies that encourage more technical innovations). They state:

 "Policy interventions are likely to provide the best return on investment when they target choices and behaviors for which abatement potential and plasticity are high enough to lead to meaningful reductions in GHG emissions....our estimates imply that it would cost at least $642 per tCO2e to reduce GHG emissions by inducing 50% of our study sample to eliminate beef consumption...currently the price to offset a tCO2e (based on existing markets for carbon offsets) is between $10 to $13." 

These costs are not only higher than market based estimates of the cost of carbon but also most estimates of the social cost of carbon as well even at the lower plasticity levels. They state: "in the U.S., a median estimate of the SCC is $48 per tCO2e."

The Fallacy of Disruption

The recommendations from Wired (and similar recommendations promoting cultured or alternative meats) may also suffer from what I am calling the fallacy of disruption. In his book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, Steffan Thomke discusses what drives many important innovations as high velocity incrementalism. Not huge disruptive leaps:

"Even though the business world glorifies disruptive ideas, most progress is achieved by implementing hundreds of thousands of minor improvements that can have a big cumulative effect."

When looking at total economic growth, economists have estimated that 77% of economic growth is driven by existing products not via creative destruction associated with new products (Garcia‐Macia et al., 2019). While creative destruction is a well recognized and essential process in our economy, it is important to recognize there is a lot of progress to be made through high velocity incrementalism.  

The suggestion from the article that alludes to making huge technological disruptive leaps (like cell cultured meat alternatives) or behavior changes (making significant dietary changes) just isn't consistent with what we know about behavioral economics and the economics of innovation. As the work from Ferraro et al. has recently shown, even small changes in beef reduction aren't as practical as we might think. 

Internalizing Climate Externalities via Technological Change and Innovation

Climate change problems are what economists refer to as externalities, which at a high level are unpriced negative consequences of our behavior that fall on third parties or future generations. One way externalities are internalized are through technological innovations, which as discussed above, can result from incremental changes to the way we produce and consume goods and services. We have witnessed this in the beef industry over the last few decades. Thanks to advances in economic development, technological change, innovations in management, marketing, and pricing value in the beef industry (for just a few examples see here, here, here, here, and here), we've seen gains in beef production and quality. Additionally, in 2007 compared to 1977 we were able to produce the same amount of beef using roughly 30% fewer cattle and 30% less land. This represents a huge impact on global warming potential when we consider the implications of this in the context of methane emissions and the biogenic carbon cycle. As previously discussed, :

"when you get in your car to go to your favorite restaurant, the associated methane and CO2 emissions that result represents new and long lasting emissions. For the most part the steak or burger on your plate doesn't directly add any new warming potential to the atmosphere that didn't already exist, nor has any steak or burger you may have eaten in the last 30 years based on this data."

Feed and and water usage were also down between 15-20% with a 16% lower carbon footprint (Capper, 2007). All of these factors have culminated in a healthier, more nutritious, higher quality product with a lower carbon footprint. As noted above, compared to other places in the world, the impact of technological innovation is many fold.

It is important to note that these innovations were market driven. They entailed voluntary behavior changes by both producers and consumers that led to higher quality, more nutritious, and more environmentally friendly beef. In addition to helping provide more clarity to consumers compared to existing labeling schemes, the new USDA labels will only help incentivize this innovative process by effectively putting a price on carbon, in absence of any new regulatory frameworks, subsidies, permits, or carbon taxes. 

The history of food innovation in the beef industry tells us this trend of voluntary and market driven advancement will continue. While in the life sciences, the 'high velocity' part of high velocity incrementalism is more challenging than designing a search engine or smartphone app, with the convergence of big data, AI, and genomics,  innovations are happening faster. Current trends in ESG reporting and concerns about scope 3 emissions, along with advances in block chain and other source verification technologies will only further catalyze future advances. We just don't have this kind of momentum behind drastic dietary fads related to huge reductions in beef consumption, going vegan, or alternative proteins. 

Related Reading

Rational Irrationality and Satter's Hierarchy of Food Needs http://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2018/10/rational-irrationality-and-satters.html  

The 'free-from' Nash equilibrium 

http://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-nash-equilibrium-strategy-for-free.html 

The Challenging Tradeoff of Weighing Biased Consumer Preferences Against Marketing Food with Integrity. http://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2017/12/allenge-tradeoff-of-weighing-biased.html  

GMOs and QR Codes: Consumers need more than a label they need a learning path. 

https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2016/08/gmos-is-just-any-label-enough.html 

Food Miles: https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2011/12/usda-research-food-miles-local-beef.html 

Food Desert Mirage https://ageconomist.blogspot.com/2020/01/dollar-stores-and-food-desertification.html 

References

HJ. L. Capper, The environmental impact of beef production in the United States: 1977 compared with 2007, Journal of Animal Science, Volume 89, Issue 12, December 2011, Pages 4249–4261, https://doi.org/10.2527/jas.2010-3784

Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. McFadden BR, Ferraro PJ, Messer KD (2022) Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. PLOS ONE 17(1): e0261372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261372

Daniel Garcia‐Macia & Chang‐Tai Hsieh & Peter J. Klenow, 2019. "How Destructive Is Innovation?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(5), pages 1507-1541, September.

Herrero, M., P. Havlík, H. Valin, A. Notenbaert, M.C. Rufino, P. K. Thornton, M. Blümmel, F. Weiss, D. Grace, and M. Obersteiner. 2013. Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 110: 20888-20893