But is Veganism ECONOMICALLY effective? (Consumer Choice & the Boycott as Activism)

you know a long time you were my channel
once said to me I think aisel is not as short in real life as he may seem on camera I really didn't get everybody was like how how short do you think I am with a shot like this this is exactly why I wonder I'm just kind of like I'm floating in a sea of nothingness I mean I filmed this stuff instead I could do it with the window in the background or something but it seems to me like there's no there's no context you know what you know what it might be it might because I use a really enormous cup these cups are huge this is maybe you think I'm tiny and this is a regular cific of Melissa could you bring me a regular-sized cup no rush but yeah that must be what it is people think I'm short because I drink out of out of a huge cup there you go mystery so I go yeah so I am I am about 6 foot 3 in American in American measurements yeah so with that question out of the way um this is a video that's actually above veganism for a change had a conversation over discord last night Isaac was there a K ask yourself much people talking to me and you know I realized that done a few different videos over the years talking about what I call the boycott mentality but almost all those videos there was some other thesis or purpose I was driving at and I wasn't answering the simple central question of the economic efficacy of veganism so I'm gonna start by answering the question why does this matter and then I'm gonna answer the question itself and then we're gonna move on to necessary implications because I realized in my discussion last night this is baffling and troubling for some vegans and for some people who are considering becoming veganism and above all I think it is troubling for people who are committed to veganism as a diet but have not yet committed to whether or not they want to be vegan activists or how activists they're gonna be which is a meaningful question in its own right ok so um why does this matter some people begin their engagement with veganism with the jejune assumption that a change in diet alone will save the lives of a large number of animals so they may feel that they personally are saving the lives of a certain number of animals they may tell their family look if all five of us become vegan then we will save the lives of so many animals per year they may even be so foolish that they donate money to a website a website that promises them if you donate five hundred dollars you're gonna save the lives of so many animals so there's some phony math out there and that math is appealing to I don't know your jehoon wishful thinking wanting to think you're directly saving life an animal by eating tofu and not eating turkey right and then at some point almost all vegans start to question how linear the mathematical relationship is here they look around them in society and they realize look if we have a country with 300 million people in it and only one person is vegan and everyone else eats meat the diet of that one person can't possibly have an impact on how many cows are actually being slaughtered how many pigs are being slaughtered etc etc and they start to think well if we have a society of 300 million people and there were only three thousand vegans in that society how much of an impact could the dietary and economic choices of those 3,000 people have could they really save the lives of even one cow of even one Pig could they even have an impact on the prices of these goods and services and they think at some point they start to doubt and start to wonder given the complexities of the free market and also given the type of intervention in the free market that the the government has the various forms of subsidy price controls assistance to have agriculture which is different in Europe than it is in North America it's different in the United States than it is in China but nevertheless all around the world you generally have a hybrid of free market forces and government intervention forces bailouts subsidies and subvention and controls of various kind which guarantee that farmers make money that offer for example two four the government to buy up food that nobody else wants to Byron wants to eat so on and so forth these things profoundly shape the way agriculture works given these complexities they start to doubt even if we have thirty thousand vegans in this country of 300 million people how can we actually imagine that the dietary choice alone that the boycott alone is saving the lives of animals and to give a simple example we all know if we have a movement of 30,000 people who refuse to drink beer we just hope said look forget it we're all gonna quit alcohol we're gonna stop drinking beer entirely do you really think that will directly cause the beer factories of the world in aggregate to produce fewer bottles of beer even if we have 30,000 people now of course there's also question is our impact enough that the beer company would even have a sale or with lower its prices because there's the flexibility of supply and demand and price going up and down and the price of beef the price of pork the price of these things does go up now so that's flexible and then there's also there are also these mechanisms of government support government bailout government price controls also that further skew the type of impact you can have directly and economically now sometimes these types of arguments are easier to make clear if you take the equation and flip it on its head if you present the equation in its inverse very obviously if we had a society of 300 million people and almost everybody is vegan if 99 percent of people are vegan or if there's only one person who eats meat if 99.99% of people are vegan then obviously each meal that's eaten by the one person in our society who eats meat requires killing an animal right because nobody else eats meat we are live in a hypothetical country whenever you see me meat obviously also if I and my family let's say I have a family of five people if we decide to double the amount of meat we eat every week if we decide to increase the enemy we must know that this corresponds to more animals being killed and it's very easy to see in aggregate if everyone in our society decides to double the amount of beef they eat I'm saying be for reason not meeting Jim specifically if everyone's society decides to double the amount of beef they eat it is obvious that the millions of people increasing their beef consumption must correspond to a doubling of the number of cows being killed you can't just have a response in terms of prices or government intervention or these other complicating factors it's true those things are enough to make you question whether or not your economic activism mere boycotts mere changes in consumption can really have those those kinds of outcomes but nevertheless we flip it on its head it's very clear there must be some relationship here and there must be some threshold there must be some tipping point there's some point at which so few people are buying beer that the beer factory says hey let's maybe reorganize and make so many bottles of beer and maybe we can use the same machinery and start making so many bottles of soda pop or orange juice or some other product or maybe some of the factories have to close down because people are drinking less and less bee earth emitted in the past there's going to be some kind of reorganization and reckoning with the reality of what supply demand must be but what that tipping point is at what stage you have enough of an impact through consumer choice and economic behavior alone is very difficult to say especially in a society this enormous so by the same token when I was living in a small poverty-stricken town in northern Laos I have mentioned this before but probably three or four years ago on this channel I lived in a town where a good income a good income was 15 US dollars per month one five US dollars per month in cash was a good household income and a wealthy family might have made thirty forty five dollars a view of income now there were extreme poverty was moderated by the fact that they could get a lot of their food for free so I knew people earning fifteen US dollars a month and they would go out fishing in a tiny Creek in a tiny River and they would walk they would wander in the forest and gather food that grew wild they were very tough poverty-stricken third world conditions but one of the reasons was possible to survive with so little cash income was that they did have sources of food that were not paying for and they also had sources of shelter that were free they were not paying rent of any kind most of these people surrounding me anyway and in these conditions that talent I'm thinking of they killed on most days the whole town together killed one pig per day and I remember I was once scoffing that if you woke up early enough in the morning you could see the rich people going to buy you know pieces of the one pig that had died that day now you know the reason one that's a funny memory for me was that that I then had to cash myself I had just referred to these as rich people but it's they were wealthy relative to the incredibly bleak standards of poverty so there are some circumstances now in that town of course I haven't been back probably if I went back today probably that same market in the morning they're probably killing ten pigs now with the increase in local affluence the emergence from communism the emergence from post-war poverty economic development they probably have more economic disparity they probably have more rich people and more poor people but there probably are more pigs being killed so in some circumstances those market mechanisms you can really see it you can really measure it but for most of us living in a highly populous a highly developed Western economy with millions of people participating it's very very easy to get discouraged with the boycott mentality with merely economic consumerist methods of vegan activism and if you feel this way don't deny it don't distract yourself from it you feel discouraged for a reason even though there is some abstract there's an equation on the chalkboard that tells you you're doing something good through this through this boycott you are correct to doubt that you are saving the life of even one animal when you go to the grocery store and choose to buy tofu rather than beef you are correct to worry that vegans being a tiny minority within the United States of America are barely having any impact on the prices of meat and if you want to study empirically what this looks like this is why before I mentioned the doubling of beef specifically over time in the United States of America or any large Western society when you look at the statistics for how many hogs are being killed how many cows and how many chickens of course there were more statistics for just those three examples keep it simple here you will see dramatic increases in decreases partly due to economic recessions partly due to Wars partly due to sudden aggregations of trade deals international trade treaties but most often the ones you can see in the chart are due to disease so in the newspapers there will be headlines saying that there is a deadly virus being spread through chicken for example there's a disease of some kind being spread through chicken meat and then all of a sudden the number of chickens being consumed declines and the number of cows being killed for meat can increase dramatically by the same token there's a scare about pork similar pattern and indeed at several points during my lifetime there have been major major health concerns about beef or the number of cows being eaten suddenly declines precipitously so one of them within my life was what was called creutzfeldt-jakob disease which is also known as mad cow disease mad cow disease is obviously a slang term so at different times whether it's to do economic forces for sudden fear of death people for completely non ethical reasons suddenly stop eating one type of meat and start eating another so you can see those dramatic changes in supply and demand the number of animals being slaughtered and sold that has happened there is an historical record of that and it is somewhat depressing to know that the impact vegans can have especially in a society like the United States of America is never going to aggregate to even be a tiny fraction of one of those case studies that you can look at in the staff now furthermore this this is the new part of the story there is right now a new political lobbying group organized by the YouTube channel vegan Batgirl so didn't want to clear the name of her YouTube channel is vegan Batgirl I'm not making a joke I'm not insulting her this isn't a nickname for her that's name of the YouTube channel so if you look up vegan Batgirl you'll see why she chose that appellation she is an activist who is trying to address the entanglement of the American government in the agricultural sector from a vegan perspective she is hoping to restore the natural mechanisms of supply and demand which are a concern especially with the demand for cow's milk for dairy because there's so much government enforcement in trying to regularize both the supply and the price of dairy products and she's correct in saying this does go back to the the Great Depression era there have been further legal reforms and new implements new instruments of government intervention invented since then series of stages but in any case the United States government is deeply entangled in agriculture and there is a question of how to disentangle taxpayers money from what could be a more free-market system that would be more responsive to changes in consumer demand but currently it is very unresponsive in the United States of America so that is one approach is try to lobby for political change that would make boycott and consumer centered activism more effective that's not my perspective I do I am very interested in what she's doing I'm watching what she's doing I wish you the best and I've several other vegan activists I know who have common ground with her I've directed them to her channel hey maybe you guys can work together maybe you can make something positive happen however when people ask me about this and they almost always are asking because they're despairing they're losing hope in vegan activism the main thing I remind them of is that the boycott element of veganism is not mutually exclusive with any other form of activism on the contrary the boycott element is morally prerequisite for the other forms of activism so my point is this if centuries ago several centuries ago if you were an anti-slavery activist you could not possibly be an anti-slavery activist while continuing to own slaves now this is a more dramatic example but it's not without historical precedent I do not think you could be an anti-slavery activist wearing a jacket wearing clothing made out of the skin made out of the human skin of a slave wearing leather of human origin to put it this way how could you possibly have any kind of ethical basis for active it's worse than hypocrisy there's a conflict of interest there that's profound and unsettling where anyone would say to you and when their right mind would city will look if you're gonna be an anti-slavery activist you can't be actively exploiting slaves yourself this is ridiculous you know you have to you had there's a first step here there's something prerequisite before you can get involved in this this movement what have you well and there are many other examples possible obviously in the same sense as a matter of one thing one resolution one degree of self discipline being prerequisite for the other I do not see how it is possible in 2018 to be an ecological activist whether the ecology you're interested in is water pollution or air pollution or climate change or saving the whales helping an endangered species solar-power there are so many wonderful forms of activism involving I do not see how you can advocate for those things in good conscience if you are not first a vegan in terms of your personal discipline your shopping the boycott your refusal to buy meat your physical dairy in terms of this dietary choice and so on and so forth so my point is even if we do not see the economic boycott element as sufficient in itself if you say you want to also engage in or above and beyond this you want to engage in other forms of activism advocacy organization lobbying government public education outreach etc or creative work you want to make a movie whether that's a documentary movie or even a fictional movie whatever you want to paint paintings you want to make you want to use music whatever the platform for activism outreach you want to engage in as a vegan and it may not even be veganism strictly defined it may be that you want to save the whales or do something too involved in ecology there may be some other angle who take you some other angle you you adopt nevertheless you have to recognize the boycott element as prerequisite for your own ethical standing for your own coherence in taking on those other duties so in closing I was going to say when I debated this or discuss this last night you know in real time with some other some other vegans some other aspiring vegan activists it closed with a mixed sense of optimism and hopelessness and the question was asked not to me was asked to the whole room well what if you're in the position of being very skeptical about how effective with the boycott element the economic element of veganism is and you have other you have other options you have other opportunities for activism other ways to make the world a better place and I said look I think if we're being honest with ourselves every single person in this room everybody in the discussion we all know that's the reality of our lives we know we could be doing humanitarian work in Syria we could be doing humanitarian work on a First Nations reservation like Etowah Piscotty we could be reaching out to and helping the poor and downtrodden or getting involved in a civil war or revolution alleviating starvation by handing out sex advice to serving people there's a finite but dizzying array of positive moral causes and positive opportunities to make the world a better place you could be funneling your energy into and I said to him I hope you are tempted by those opportunities but I have a double meaning there one I hope there are opportunities in your life like that to make something positive and - I hope you're the kind of person who feels tempted to step up and take on those responsibilities and and embrace an opportunity to make the world a better place said and I think all of us will at different phases of our life have to make the decision to put vegan activism on the back burner to make it a lower priority or no priority at all because we have some kind of wonderful opportunity to go to Syria and do humanitarian work maybe there's an earthquake in Haiti and you want to go to where the earthquake is and just think positive so on and so forth that is very true especially short-term there may be extraordinary opportunities you have to do good in this world however reciprocally you have to acknowledge the extraordinary thing about veganism is it something you can do right now without requiring cooperation form I don't want anyone else you don't need an organization you don't need a team you don't need a foundation you don't need anything else it's a responsibility it's I think to some extent also a moral duty it's something very meaningful and very positive that you can do day in and day out three meals a day once you get used to it it's as easy as washing your hands or brushing your teeth it becomes part of the rhythm of your daily life and it is prerequisite as a platform before you can take on those other perhaps higher perhaps lower perhaps more effective perhaps less effective those other forms of moral duty