Lewis Bollard: belief

Transcript context

…How did we end up in this position? When people think about animal welfare, they think PETA, they think of protesters who are encouraging individuals to give up meat consumption? At the same time, these charities, which are so effective at corporate or policy changes, are just so neglected. How did this end up being the landscape of animal welfare activism and funding? It's a puzzle. It seems so obvious that you can have far larger-scale change at the level of governmental change and corporate change. Instead, we get fixated about whether someone is completely vegan or vegetarian. I think what happened is that when people started learning about this issue initially, it was just a few people and they felt totally powerless to achieve larger-scale change. They understandably focused on themselves. Then it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started to become an end in itself, where it was about personal purity as much as about the impact you're having on the issue. It's much easier to measure your own personal purity than it is to measure your total impact on reforming factory farming. It just became this kind of inward focus. The good news is, that has changed tremendously in the last decade. The movement has gone from being one that was obsessed with personal purity, obsessed with dietary choices, to one that is much more obsessed with impact. This is why I really wanted to do this episode. I think people will be aware that there's a general problem here, but the actual politics, the actual economics, the actual state of the technology landscape here… there might be interventions which are stupendously effective, which we overlook just because people are not aware of what's actually happening in this space. On that point, to use an analogy from global health and poverty. The Against Malaria Foundation estimates that it saved on the order of 180,000 lives, which is a lot. But then you compare it to China liberalizing, which brought a billion people out of poverty. That's just a many, many orders of magnitude bigger impact. In animal welfare, do you have some big take about what the “China-liberalizing” equivalent in this space is?…

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