July 2009 Archives
It's illegal in this country to buy or sell organs for transplant. This is an unjust law made and enforced by people who desperately need neither organs nor money. It condemns kidney-disease sufferers to death and potential organ donors to poverty. It's a law that I will unhesitatingly break if one of my children needs a kidney, and I hope you will have the decency to do the same if a member of your family is in a similar situation.
The AP story I linked to above discusses some of the ills that supposedly flow from a market in organs. It quotes a medical ethicist at my own alma mater arguing that it's better for people to die than buy organs:
"There is a black market, almost exclusively in kidneys," Caplan said. "All international medical groups and governments ought to condemn any marketing in body parts. It's simply too exploitative of the poor and vulnerable. The quality of the organs is questionable. People lie to get the money. The middle men are irresponsible and often criminals. They don't care about the people who sell."Yet it seems to me that all these supposed problems (none of which deterred the defendant's alleged kidney-patient clients) are the result of the ridiculous prohibition on organ sales. The middle men, for example, are only criminals because of the stupid law, just as sellers of bourbon were during Prohibition. The lying is also related to the ban. A legal, regulated and transparent market could solve the problems of exploitation and organ quality. The huge buy/sell price spread apparent in Mr. Rosenbaum's alleged operation would collapse if the risk, subterfuge and bribery were taken out of the trade.
The sanctimony of those who condemn these transactions strikes me as outrageous. If someone has the right to abort her own fetus, why does she not have the right to sell her own kidney? By what authority does the state tell me I cannot save myself or my family members by paying money I earned to a willing seller of a surplus item? In fact, why wouldn't a system of national health insurance include a provision for organ purchases? These transactions should not just be legal for the rich but subsidized for the poor, all in a carefully designed and closely regulated marketplace serving buyers, sellers and even medical ethicists. It's a shame that even one more person has to die before this law is changed.
UPDATE: From the July 27 Wall Street Journal:
More than 80,000 Americans now wait for a kidney, according the United Network for Organ Sharing. Thirteen of them die daily; the rest languish for years on dialysis. The number of donors last year was lower than in 2005, despite decades of work to encourage people to sign donor cards and donate to loved ones.
A new study tells you what you already suspected, particularly if you are short.
...taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.If you want to read way more about all this, there is a pretty good book out on the whole subject. You can read a review before you buy it (I can't vouch for the writer). Or, if you're short, you can put your money toward a pair of elevator shoes.
Hat tip to marginalrevolution...
Why should we hate the employer-financed system? Let us count the ways:
It makes it difficult or sometimes even impossible for people to change jobs, not only damping economic efficiency but reducing the competition for labor and, therefore, reducing wages. Without alternative health coverage, there is "strong evidence for job lock," wrote two economists, Jonathan Gruber and Brigitte C. Madrian, in a National Bureau of Economic Research study released this year.
It suppresses the creation of new businesses because, for many potential entrepreneurs, quitting a job means forgoing health insurance, a risk too big to take.
It handicaps traditional industries like autos and steel, whose medical burden for retirees is staggering. The estimated lifetime expense for today's steel retirees alone is $14 billion. In the auto industry, General Motors alone provides coverage to nearly one-half of 1 percent of the American people; One analyst, Gary Lapidus of Goldman Sachs , calls Detroit's Big Three "H.M.O.'s with wheels."
It unfairly excludes the unemployed, the self-employed and low-skilled workers. And it can shortchange single people, whose employers effectively pay higher wages to workers with families when providing dependent coverage.
On top of everything else, our employer-based system seriously obscures who is paying what, making cost controls difficult.
A remarkably prescient story in the Economist laid it all out four years ago. Here is how the article began:
Pretty good call, huh? Aside from that, I'd like to see a coherent account of how all this happened. I'm sure there is one out there, although I realize this is the sort of thing that will keep economists and historians busy for decades to come. They're still debating the great crash of 1929, after all.NEVER before have real house prices risen so fast, for so long, in so many countries. Property markets have been frothing from America, Britain and Australia to France, Spain and China. Rising property prices helped to prop up the world economy after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. What if the housing boom now turns to bust?
According to estimates by The Economist, the total value of residential property in developed economies rose by more than $30 trillion over the past five years, to over $70 trillion, an increase equivalent to 100% of those countries' combined GDPs. Not only does this dwarf any previous house-price boom, it is larger than the global stockmarket bubble in the late 1990s (an increase over five years of 80% of GDP) or America's stockmarket bubble in the late 1920s (55% of GDP). In other words, it looks like the biggest bubble in history.
The article supports a regulatory distinction between hedgers--those actually engaged in a given business, such as oil or pork bellies, who use commodities markets to insure against risks in the marketplace--and those who merely place bets, an action that provides important liquidity for hedgers and their industries but which, taken to extremes, could severely distort pricing. With respect to agricultural products, the government enforces position limits only on the bettors--the speculators. Barron's suggests it might just as well do the same in oil, where commodity index funds appear to be a major force in driving up prices.
Of course I'm in favor of higher oil prices. I only wish we had the sense to pay them to ourselves in the form of higher energy taxes. That failing, I suppose we'll have to rely on commodities traders and OPEC nations to take our money instead.
If the United States had in recent years closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of better-performing nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. This represents 9 to 16 percent of GDP.Ok, those are small, homogenous countries and maybe don't offer a good comparison. But merely bringing black and Latino students up to the level of white ones in the U.S. would add 2 to 4 points to GDP. The economic consequences of our education failures dwarf the nation's current financial woes:
...the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.What a sad story at every level.
In my day the NYC schools had a large proportion of Jewish students in addition to what seemed to be a largely Jewish teaching corps. And closing the schools for religious holidays was a bad idea even then! It's still a bad idea, and I don't care whose religion is involved. I can't even understand why any religious leader would advocate less education for all in the parochial cause of a religious event. Instead of adding the Muslims--and thereby opening the door to the Confucians, the Zoroastrians and everyone else--the city council ought to admit that the current policy (holiday closings for some religions but not others) is untenable and just do away with the lot of them. (Individuals could of course stay home for a religious observance as needed.) Bad enough we have religion all around us; let's at least get it out of the schools. They need all the instructional days they can get, God knows.
Daniel Akst
