Vox's Piece Against Bill Gates's Chicken Donation Misses A Major Externality
Economist Chris Blattman (a Principal Investigator where I work, Innovations for Poverty Action ) writes an on-point criticism of Bill Gates's push for donating chickens at Vox, but he misses a major cost. It's a cost that many of the forefathers of modern welfare economics, like Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill noted well ahead of their time. The cost is the lifelong suffering and complete obliteration of individuals - chickens - who possess all the morally relevant characteristics of economic agents for welfare economists to consider them. There are many reasons why economists ignore animal suffering when analyzing agriculture. One is likely simple speciesism . There's a deeper set of reasons that I think make economists ignore animal suffering, though, and they show how far modern economics has strayed from its roots in many ways. The reasons start with this: a refusal to make a "moral" judgment. The basic premise of modern welfare economics is that t