Zach Freitas-Groff

Supporters of welfare reform campaigns by animal advocacy organizations got a nice piece of evidence last month that deserves more attention than it's gotten in effective animal advocacy circles.  To cast things in sloppy strokes, a longstanding feud between "welfarists" and "abolitionists" has been over whether welfare reforms help or hurt animal agriculture. Abolitionists argue that reforms actually help the industry–if not, why would the industry adopt them? We'll probably never have a definite answer to this question, but economic analyses of one of the biggest animal welfare laws in U.S. history–California's Proposition 2–give reason for animal advocates to move toward the welfarist view. From the paper, " The Impact of Farm Animal Housing Restrictions on Egg Prices, Consumer Welfare, and Production in California ": Twenty months after implementation of the [animal welfare] laws, the number of egg-laying hens and total egg production...

Poland had a 60,000-person nationalist march Saturday, something that hits close to home for me since my family comes from the Poland/Ukraine border, and nearly all of my great-grandfather’s (who I knew) family was likely killed in Auschwitz. The march is terrifying, but I don't find it surprising based on my experience visiting Krakow a few years ago. I went to Krakow largely to visit Auschwitz but also, to a small degree, to see the region where my ancestors lived (even if they did not have a connection to Krakow itself). My visit to Auschwitz was highly commercial: people smiled for pictures by the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, and we of course exited through the gift shop. People on my tour were uncomfortable when I put rocks on memorial sites in keeping with Jewish tradition. When I returned from the tour and was walking around Krakow, I kept getting solicited by guides in golf carts, each one claiming to offer the best deal on a tour of Auschwitz and the Jewish quarter. T...

I've recently gotten into Amazon's The Man in the High Castle , based on the Philip K. Dick novel. The show depicts the 1960s in an alternate history in which Axis powers won World War II. The U.S. is divided into a German half, a Japanese half, and a no man's land in between. Resistance fighters work to undermine fascist rule while political tensions rise between the Japanese and Germans. It's terrifying, of course, but it's also gripping and inspiring. (Note that I am only on season 1, so don't expect this to depict the second season properly.) Beyond the obvious political intrigue, what I appreciate about the show is its blend of genres. It's part spy game (with double agents and all), part neo-noir detective story, part western, and part war flick. The pace moves steadily–it's the first show I find close so irresistible since Lost . More than anything, I appreciate the show for its depiction of a struggle for justice against all odds. Give it a...

The new news site "Positive News" is worth a read. I'm far from a starry-eyed optimist and was cheered by an MRI study in 2011 claiming (by a dubious definition) that optimism was a psychological disorder. That does not change the fact that contemporary news is overly focused on small, negative aspects of reality: shootings that kill a tiny number of people next to the numbers whose lives are being saved worldwide by the decline in poverty ; a Trump tweet that threatens democracy far less than  Supreme Court decisions elsewhere signal a rise in democracy. I don't do a good enough job myself of being positive, and I'm hoping this will help me improve on that score. Great recent features include: – The movement for joyful aging – 5 possible solutions to overpopulation – The new masculinity Oh, and on the positive news front  ISIS is crumbling –so much that it rarely gets mentioned in the news next to the likes of North Korea. Even if another...

Trump's election has been gravely concerning to me for a while now, and as a Bay Area resident the repeated clashes between antifas on the one hand and Milo and friends on the other hand are an additional alarm. As a believer in Enlightenment values who, perhaps conveniently, thinks that widespread belief in and consensus around those values leads to good things (such as economic prosperity and peace ), I'm disturbed by what seems like an assault on reason from all sides. On the right, there's the rise of nativism, and on the left, there's an identity-politics reaction that risks en abling the right. 12 This has me starting to worry that maybe democratic dysfunction could be an issue above all issues. This piece got me thinking recently, and this blog helped me sort through my thoughts. I tend to think of the most pressing issues in the world as those directly affecting various generally ignored or in some cases inherently disenfranchised groups, including non...

Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize yesterday for his work in developing behavioral economics. Thaler led the way in unraveling the traditional view in economics that humans are rational decision makers who  at least on average  will satisfy their goals if left to their own devices. In fact, humans systematically deviate from rationality in ways that give rise to policy prescriptions. I wrote my college thesis on Nudge , the book he co-authored with Cass Sunstein to collect these ideas, and I think behavioral economics is one of the greatest recent inventions. I think that  the implications of Thaler's and others' work in behavioral economics goes deeper than what he and others admit. Experiments show that humans systematically deviate from rationality by being present-biased, prone to temptation, unfocused, and inordinately susceptible to social influence. Thaler points out that these are all things that can systematically stop us from achieving our goals. They a...

The Center for Effective Altruism and effective altruists active in online spaces have for a while now been shifting away from a focus on poverty toward a focus on the far future and meta-level work (and if not that, animal advocacy). Interestingly, the rank and file of effective altruism does not seem to have made this shift  (or at least completed it). I generally agree with CEA and the online community on this. I think it's a shift with solid reasoning behind it. I think there's reason to pause, though, and appreciate some of what EA loses by making this shift. Much of what EA loses by making this shift has been discussed: things become very abstract in a way that may not be compelling to as many people, and there are concerns about an overly speculative cause . I believe there are other concerns to be had, though. In particular, there is an immense amount that EAs can learn from the global poverty space and apply to other spaces, and I see very few EAs doing that. The t...