Yeah, this is the problem with this argument (even though I largely agree with it) - we shouldn’t be encouraging people to defect!
Now, where I think this argument has more value is in encouraging the sorts of vegans one finds in places like Reddit to stop being so mean to non-vegans. Their diets aren’t helpful enough to justify alienating 3 people casually interested in animal rights for the sake of pressuring 1 person into veganism.
It would be surprising if the consistent purchasing decisions of ~79 M vegans was swamped by the effects of *checks notes* the weather at one farm.
Also, we can even physically see an effect: grocery stores which have not grown larger have devoted some space that had once been occupied by dismembered corpses to plant-based simulations thereof.
> But demand fluctuates constantly! Maybe 500 people stopped buying today, but tomorrow demand rises by 200. The firm doesn’t respond to each individual sale, it responds to aggregate trends. If you stop buying a chicken, but 999 other people do not, nothing happens. Mathematically, the probability that you specifically were the pivotal consumer who pushed demand below the threshold is not 1/1,000.
This isn't true. Generate a random number between 1 and 10,000 representing the current level of chicken inventory at some level. Then add another random number representing demand fluctuations, weather impacts, etc. The chance that the resulting number is divisible by 1000 is 1/1000 both before and after you add the random number.
Sticky prices and friction work both ways. It may mean that not buying chicken is less likely to impact the number of chickens produced, but the impact if it does is greater because it will take more demand to restore that level of production.
Collective action problems as moral licenses 🫣
Yeah, this is the problem with this argument (even though I largely agree with it) - we shouldn’t be encouraging people to defect!
Now, where I think this argument has more value is in encouraging the sorts of vegans one finds in places like Reddit to stop being so mean to non-vegans. Their diets aren’t helpful enough to justify alienating 3 people casually interested in animal rights for the sake of pressuring 1 person into veganism.
It would be surprising if the consistent purchasing decisions of ~79 M vegans was swamped by the effects of *checks notes* the weather at one farm.
Also, we can even physically see an effect: grocery stores which have not grown larger have devoted some space that had once been occupied by dismembered corpses to plant-based simulations thereof.
> But demand fluctuates constantly! Maybe 500 people stopped buying today, but tomorrow demand rises by 200. The firm doesn’t respond to each individual sale, it responds to aggregate trends. If you stop buying a chicken, but 999 other people do not, nothing happens. Mathematically, the probability that you specifically were the pivotal consumer who pushed demand below the threshold is not 1/1,000.
This isn't true. Generate a random number between 1 and 10,000 representing the current level of chicken inventory at some level. Then add another random number representing demand fluctuations, weather impacts, etc. The chance that the resulting number is divisible by 1000 is 1/1000 both before and after you add the random number.
Sticky prices and friction work both ways. It may mean that not buying chicken is less likely to impact the number of chickens produced, but the impact if it does is greater because it will take more demand to restore that level of production.