by Matt Barr

Markets in everything?

A Tyler Cowen post from a couple days ago had me thinking. He excerpts from Wired:

"To offset the cruelty of factory-farming, routine implants of smart microchips in the pleasure centers may be feasible," says David Pearce, associate editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. "Since there is no physiological tolerance to pure pleasure, factory-farmed animals could lead a lifetime of pure bliss instead of misery. Unnatural? Yes, but so is factory farming. Immoral? No, certainly not compared to the terrible suffering we inflict on factory-farmed animals today."

Economical? That's my question. Is there a market for beef that was happied up before it was slaughtered? Would you pay more? Undoubtedly, some people would, but enough to make this viable?

...absent a law? Which is what's more likely to happen. Would you favor happying up cows that are to be slaughtered, with the cost to be borne by farmers and producers and passed on to all beef consumers by force of law?

I don't have any idea what the beef production infrastructure is like but my intuition is that you wouldn't sell enough happy cows to be able to make that part of your business model, and I sure wouldn't want such a law. Maybe the "routine implants" are so inexpensive and non-resource intensive that none of this would be an issue.

Browse books from Amazon.com:
markets beef economics consumer genetic