I've been vegan for 11 years, and to me the growth felt faster in the first 5 years than it did in the second. This could easily just be due to my changing life circumstances (first 5 years as a student and living with other vegans), but that's my personal anecdotal evidence. Recently it also seems like all the vegan restaurants have been closing in my city (Manchester, UK) although hopefully(?) that is more to do with the economic situation than with a decline in veganism.

The link you've shared on the proportion of the population identifying as vegan is encouraging, but I'm finding it hard to figure out the data source for their graph. I'm sure I saw some data shared by someone on the EA forum recently that suggested the growth of veganism had been stagnating recently, but not sure how to find that now!

This seems like a really important question though and I'd love to read an in-depth analysis of what the answer is likely to be.

This is a fascinating analysis, but if I understand it correctly, you are estimating the impact of fishing and agriculture on average wild animal wellbeing (which you estimate by its effect on the death rate), not total wellbeing, as the first sentence of your post states. Is that correct?

This seems important, as I don't think there are many who would defend the idea that average welfare is what matters in population ethics? So I'm not sure how important the considerations you point out are. The change in population size seems like it's going to be the much more important effect here.

It also doesn't seem obvious to me that we should be able to estimate the impact of fishing or agriculture on average welfare purely by its impact on the death rate. Aren't there lots of other ways they could impact wild animal welfare too (e.g. by changing the cause of death for wild-animals)?

I hope you are right, but is there evidence that veganism is growing exponentially?

Same content on bluesky, for those avoiding twitter now: https://bsky.app/profile/wdmacaskill.bsky.social/post/3lcdlb4lbdk2m 

I think this is a fascinating area, and the problems you've highlighted seem like important problems. I find it hard to believe it's a cause area EAs should focus on though.

As you explain, the clearest threat is the impact on cryptography, but it doesn't seem likely to me that that problem is neglected. There are huge incentives for governments and companies to solve that problem, and I think they are probably already doing lots of work on it..?

A question jumped out at me when reading these results. I should caveat this by emphasizing that I am very much not an expert in this kind of evaluation and this question may be naive.

Is there any seasonal effect on mortality in Malawi? If so, is it ok for the pre-intervention period to be 12-months while the post-intervention period is 18-months?

This is very helpful, thanks!

If you're correct in the linked analysis, this sounds like a really important limitation in ACE's methodology, and I'm very glad you've shared this!

In case anyone else has the same confusion as me when reading your summary: I think there is nothing wrong with calculating a charity's cost effectiveness by taking the weighted sum of the cost-effectiveness of all of their interventions (weighted by share of total funding that intervention receives). This should mathematically be the same as (Total Impact / Total cost), and so should indeed go up if their spending on a particular intervention goes down (while achieving the same impact).

The (claimed) cause of the problem is just that ACE's cost-effectiveness estimate does not go up by anywhere near as much as it should when the cost of an intervention is reduced, leading the cost-effectiveness of the charity as a whole to actually change in the wrong direction when doing the above weighted sum!

If this is true it sounds pretty bad. Would be interested to read a response from them.

Of course, the other thing that could be going on here, is that average cost-effectiveness is not the same as cost-effectiveness on the margin, which is presumably what ACE should care about. Though I don't see why an intervention representing a smaller share of a charity's expenditure should automatically mean that this is not where extra dollars would be allocated. The two things seem independent to me.

I would be very interested to read a summary of what Tyler Cowen means by all this!

I know it was left as an exercise for the reader, but if someone wants to do the work for me it would be appreciated :)

Makes sense, thank you for the reply and clarification!