Personal choices play a key role in advancing legislative change and facilitating effective enforcement.

Legislation and enforcement only played a partial role in reducing the rate of driving while intoxicated. DWI was still normal and socially acceptable for decades after we started banning it. We changed our attitudes, we stigmatized the behaviour, we created new norms, we invented the concept of the "designated driver". Millions of people had to be the first person in their bar to say "just a club soda, I'm driving", the first to say "don't you think you've had enough?", the first to take the keys out of their friend's pocket and call them a taxi.

It's absurd to think that we can solve the problem of antibiotic resistance just by personally giving up meat, but it's equally absurd to think that our own choices are irrelevant. Collective problems are just individual problems at scale; the solutions are also the aggregate of lots of small individual actions. Eat less meat, buy better meat, lobby grocers and restaurant chains to sell antibiotic-free meat, write to your representatives, inform your friends and family about the issue - it all helps to move us in the right direction.

I strongly disagree with the attribution of drunk driving reductions to the culture. The culture is a byproduct of how significant the punishment has become, which is what really led to the reduction.

Back in the 70s getting pulled over drunk was punished like running a red light (i.e. a nominal fine). The punishments were ratcheted up to now where a DUI results in a 10k fine in some states and an immediate license suspension. With life altering punishments for getting caught, drunk driving reduced significantly and the culture of determining a DD emerged so people could continue to get hammered.

The correlation just isn't there.

In the UK, the standard penalty for drink-driving has been the same since the early 70s - a 12 month driving ban and a modest fine for the first offence, a three year ban for a second offence and a possible prison sentence of up to 6 months for further repeat offences.

The penalties haven't changed in years, but the rate of drink driving has fallen drastically. What has changed is the culture. Persistent campaigning from both government and grassroots organisations has made drink driving completely unacceptable. Today, it would be considered perfectly reasonable - perhaps even admirable - to call the police on your own friend if you know that they're drink driving. There's now far less proactive enforcement of drink driving laws, because it's not a common enough offence to warrant random testing and the police expect to get tip-offs from the public. It's seen as a foolish and selfish thing to do, a marker of personal weakness, a sign that you're some kind of alcoholic.

That might be the case in the UK, but it's definitely not in the US. People didn't get serious about avoiding drinking and driving until the punishments got serious.

It still wouldn't be considered honorable here to turn in a friend for drunk driving (unless it was obscenely over the limit). It would be mainly considered a failure of friendship that you didn't confront them and instead called it in.

Even in rural Ireland there was a relatively recent backlash because they could keep driving home drunk down the side of the road with the hazard lights on.

Also, with a 12-month ban in the UK, they must not have been enforcing it much because it wouldn't take long to have most of the drunk drivers banned. So my suspicion is that enforcement increased as well. People rarely fall for propaganda alone when there is nothing that makes it concrete.

I don't know how you define "scale", but if you do define it to encompass externalities then I agree with you.

My point is that some types of problems are more amenable to personal activism (participation in wars come to mind) while other types of problems (shared-resources/commons) have different effective solutions (taxes, legislation, democracy et. al.)

It works very well for moderate changes. Look into the history of Boycotts and they have actually changed quite a bit about how several industries work.

Antibiotics is actually a fairly minor benefit to the meat industry, so it's a winning strategy assuming significant popular support.

Boycotting isn't individual choice, however; boycotts, when they work, usually work due to PR and reputational effects rather than market effects.

Boycotting works through the stubborn minority rule [1]. Sometimes even less than 1% of the total population can enforce their rule for the whole country. This works as long as the rest of population finds the rule does not bother them match.

[1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

Wait, wait, wait.

I thought it was universally acknowledged that boycotts, generally, don't work, because you can almost never find and coordinate enough people that care.

The case of Kosher wine from the link shows how about 0.3% of population forced almost all wines in US to be Kosher by boycotting non-kosher wines. The important thing is that the minority should be distributed across the whole population uniformly.

A call to action on a public forum might not mean much on it's own, but it's still advertising the idea.

Look at how popular organic, ethical and local food has become in the last few years. You have restaurant chains based on these ideas, supermarkets like Whole Foods, and food processors like Amy’s. This is because consumers are voting with their wallet. I like to think it’s been inspired in part by documentaries like Fast Food Nation, What The Health and Supersize Me, certainly that’s how I became a more conscious consumer.

Yes, but farmed salmon is making a killing. How many documentaries before you quit sushi?

Can you be a conscious consumer on all aspects of your consumption, can anyone?

I think we can all can be more responsible in our consumption. I’m vegetarian. I try to buy single-material products that I can recycle. I try to avoid companies that behave particularly egregiously; when Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestle I stopped patronizing them. I only purchase pasture raised eggs. I rarely drive, when I do drive it’s towards parks in rural areas. I’m not perfect, but the idea of a rational consumer optimizing for maximum consumption at the lowest price and inconvenience doesn’t hold true for many.

For a longer term the usage of "killing" here can be quite literal due to potential for disaster with antibiotics. In shorter terms I can clearly see how conscious consumption affects local shelves in supermarkets. Like 5-4 years ago in Norway I has to go a special health food store to bye vegan products. Now the cheapest supermarkets offers it and one can get a vegan burger at local Macdonalds.

This is because the industry knows we are prepared to pay a lot more for less if we believe it is ecological. Look at all chains with their own eco branding that has its own criteria of what eco produced means.

your analogy would work if parent comment would say “just eat meat carefully”.

overall it makes sense to reduce meat consumption, because if you look deeper in reasons for antibiotics use in meat industry, mainly it is used as a consequence of high demand for meat, to reduce risk of diseases in overpopulated farms, while feeding animals growth hormones and stuffing as much food as possible to ensure quick growth, so yeah, if people would reduce consumption, then supply would adjust accordingly, and then even organic meat producers would become viable option to meet demands.

I believe you're reading something else out of my analogy than what I tried to say; I was making a point about the effectiveness of the method, not the message as such.

Everybody agrees we should drive carefully, and everybody agrees we should not revert to pre-antibiotic treatment of infections. How did we address the former? Through moral admonition and personal prudence? (That was a rhetorical question)

One way we addressed the former was to put up signs that say "Drive Carefully", so apparently your dislike of that technique is not universal. It's called a "nudge", and it has significant (but limited) effect.

I'm not disputing that, but sometimes when we weigh our actions, significant (but limited) alternatives will not cut it, and if the effect is limited enough (and the problem severe enough), even deliberating on them will waste precious time to enact direct and (hopefully) effective action.

Woah, so even debating this issue is wasting precious time? I know this seems to be super-important to you, but for someone who complained about getting short shrift (in another comment), you might try using different language next time.

It's like solving traffic mortality by telling people not to drive.

Or otherwise "inconvenience yourself at will, to a degree you can afford or find comfortable, to address some issue you have heard about and believe you understand, on your own time."

10 points for griffindor.

No it's not, it's like educating people to drive only when it's necessary, taking more cars off the road.

no, it’s like telling people to stop driving cars at 100 miles per hour inside city. makes sense.

We do that, but with laws and signs and police and stuff. Not with stern admonition.

so if there would be a law restricting meat consumption then everything would be fine?

It's been done in the past. Church laws forbidding the eating of meat on certain days have been a thing. Of course, most people who have the means would choose to eat meat as often as possible, and so you get things like fish not being classed as meat (leaving aside other considerations like these sorts of restrictions acting as subsidies to merchant fishing fleets, with knock-on effects for early modern naval preparedness).

Or people just ignore stupid, unenforceable laws and net respect for the law as an absolute is decreased.

Which is enforced through regulation from governing bodies (i.e. Police).

  It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield

Wouldn't a better analogy here be to "solve traffic mortality" by considerably reducing your exposure to dangerous situations (as in, driving less)?

There's a demand for meat, hence an industry working to supply (and profit-off-of) it. Encouraging people to eat less meat is making a difference.

I dispute that encouraging people to eat less meat will make enough of a difference in this case to, well, make a difference. It's not wrong, it's just too much self-congratulatory blame-shifting with a moral message as the end itself.

These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.

Are you suggesting that the change is too slow/not drastic enough? Or perhaps that a change isn't taking place at-all in the first place, that it's all just hot air?

Indeed, we have to be confident that the mechanism of intervention will have the desired effect, and in time before we run out of antibiotic alternatives.

I say that anything less than that is worse than useless, because we're spending wasted effort (mindshare, attention) when time is, to the best of our knowledge, running out.

Now i don't know that personal activism and moral campaigning will be insufficient in this case, it just smells that way to me. It also has a certain fragrance of moral superiority and virtue signalling about it, which i guess triggers me, or something.

Is this a shared resource problem though?

The problem, as I see it, is one of a questionable food supply or at least a contamination issue, in which case, each person should decide what matters to them, and is how this particular problem is solved in the micro, which in aggregate, does lessen the macro aspect. I'm thinking of cases like cigarettes and alcohol.

However, where this falls apart is that consumers don't always have that info, and even if we slap warnings on things, it doesn't usually help unless there is a very clear line of causality and effect.

For instance, the prop 65 warnings[0], which are essentially useless.

Either way, I do think that individual choice is the first line of defense for issues like this.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(1...

The salmon that you eat is not harmful to you (probably less so with antibiotics). The multiresistent bacteria are harmful to everyone. Antibiotics are the shared resource, and the incentives are misaligned precisely because more antibiotics in livestock = cheaper and healthier (in a veterinarian sense) meat, but more resistant bacterial strains that can find a way into the populace.

>Is this a shared resource problem though?

The shared resources is the limited amount we can use an antibiotic before it becomes useless.

That's an interesting angle I hadn't considered. Thank you :)

I don’t have the first-hand source right now but according to Doing good better [1] a book by William McAskill on the topic of Effective Altruism, there is a strong correlation between individual choices and economic outcomes. For example, if you refrain from buying an egg you would normally buy, egg production is reduced by 0.7 eggs or something close to that number.

The logic of this being that you as an individual might have a small probability of affecting change but if you do that impact is rather big. So the first person not buying an egg doesn’t change the situation but the 50th person does lead to one pallet less being bought (and so on). If you attribute the effect across individuals you arrive at a reasonably high impact each individual choice has. The same argument goes for voting!

[1]: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/doing-good-better/

Except for the fact that meat consumption is a major resoirce drain on the planet as a whole. Just think about the amount of land, energy, water, medicine and time it takes to produce one kilogram of meat and contrast this with alternative protein sources such as vegatables and you will find that just by reducing ones meat consumption you can cut a big part of your impact on the planet.

Note that it wasn't proposed as a solution.

Are you saying that no one should do anything good, or encourage others to do anything good, unless it fully solves a problem? I suspect that's not the point you were trying to make, but it sure sounds like that if you read your words.

I did interpret it as a solution proposal in order to address a specific issue: The effectiveness of voluntary activism to address shared-resource problems(specifically).

Of course people should do good things, but in some cases this can lead to a false sense of security ("I'm doing the Right Thing and spreading the good word. Next issue, please!")

Where I live, we used to have signs inside the buses that read "Wait until the buss has left the station to cross the road". This was an effort to prevent accidents, but had no measurable effect other than to take the problem of the agenda for public transport officials.

With shared resource-problems, voluntary action can lead to a prisoners dilemma, where you can get ahead by _not_ doing the right thing, even though everyone is individually better off by doing the right thing.

Ah. Well, then I don't think we have anything to discuss; you're either introducing a non-sequitur, or you're shitting on someone who is taking personal responsibility for their actions.

And yes, a person who eats less meat eats less meat, which is another way to say that you're introducing a non-sequitur about something which is nothing like your bus example.

Hmm, I think you're giving me short shrift here. I'm not taking the piss on purpose at least, and (since you seem to hold personal responsibility dearly) I really feel it's important to raise the point of whether we are constructively addressing important issues or not.

I'm confused about the person who eats less meat non-sequitur. It feels like you're shoving me around a bit there.

The person who got short shrift is the person you initially replied to. They proposed individual virtue, and you used that as an excuse to raise a different point that you like talking about.

As for the bus thing, the people responsible for reducing deaths around buses are responsible for actually solving the problem. So I agree that they should not do ineffective things like they did in your story. Meanwhile, a person eating less meat is not responsible for making sure that overall meat consumption falls.

So there's no relationship between the two situations, and that's the non-sequitur. Sorry that I didn't get this point across effectively.

I'm afraid GP literally stated his proposal as related to the general situation (thread topic), and if not then his post would be a non-sequitur making my reply a non-non-sequitur or just a regular old sequitur.

And yes, I used his proposal of individual virtue as an "excuse" to raise a point about the role and reason of individual virtue in the topic at hand, it's called "having a discussion." Why should I leave virtuous people alone on the internet? Is he some kind of unassailable saint of meat-moderation who must be protected from non-sequiturs and sequiturs alike?

Whose toes are sore here?

The toes which are sore are those of "discussion".

The suggested action wouldn't actually do any noticeable good, though, because of market effects - price would fall, then consumption would rise again.

It's far more effective to lobby for regulation than rely on individual action to solve collective action problems.

Again, who here was proposing relying on individual action to solve collective action problems? No one.

Your economic argument is naive and pretty wrong, but I'm not going to debate it here because it's not relevant to this sub-thread.