In real life we have choices more like “is it worth spending $ 1 000 000 to save this person’s life? or should we instead let the person die and use the money to save lives of other ten people?”.
No, that’s not the problem. In real life, the choice is, “Do we spend one million dollars on a welfare state (or labor laws, whatever) that can keep people alive longer and with more dignity, in the hope of eventually abolishing human-scale scarcity, or do we allocate one million dollars to an institutional investor’s mutual-fund portfolio?” You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
No serious economist actually believes that. In fact, they wouldn’t even make the claim that the economy is designed to save human lives; it would be downright silly. They would point out two things:
1) If we use wealth-accumulation as an approximation of human value, the mutual-fund portfolio could, in some sense, be said to be more valuable than the human lives, in the sense that those human lives generate little value for other humans. Of course, socialists and anarchists can argue with capitalists over whether wealth-accumulation under a neoliberal capitalist economy is a good approximation of human value or not. (I side with the socialists in saying most definitely no.)
2) Real economies rarely or never actually hit Pareto-optimal equilibria, they merely oscillate around them, and in fact sometimes even rarely oscillate near them because the assumptions behind efficient-market theories are so far from real-world conditions. (There was once a paper published, IIRC, under the title *Markets are Efficient If and Only If P=NP”.)
Given these two facts, we should most probably not consider “The Economy shouldn’t be allowed to kill people” as an applause light, but instead as an ethical charge to find the deadweight losses of human lives and remove them. We can argue about zero-sum tradeoffs when we’re actually faced with one, but when instead faced with a case where a clear positive-sum move exists, we should take it.
You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
Actually, I don’t. And it’s not even necessary for the argument. Even if we nationalized all the investment funds and hanged all the evil capitalists, someone would still die because there would not be enough money to cure them.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis. Unless we have already solved the problem of Friendly Singularity. We can, and should, look for the ways to minimize this number. It’s not going to be zero, anyway. Even if we had a world-wide government of incorruptible angels with mandatory cryonics right now.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
That means that your country wasn’t ruled well. On the other hand if you live in a country like Germany you do have access to all medicine that”s proven to work in clinical trials.
When it comes to drugs the expensive part is research, marketing and other things that aren”t about the production costs of the actual drug.
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis.
Yes, but that doesn’t refute the case-by-case ummm… case, that we’re looking at a deadweight loss of human life in this particular instance. If you don’t hold that the economy is Pareto-optimal, then there are improvements we can feasibly make without suddenly causing shortages of medicine.
No, that’s not the problem. In real life, the choice is, “Do we spend one million dollars on a welfare state (or labor laws, whatever) that can keep people alive longer and with more dignity, in the hope of eventually abolishing human-scale scarcity, or do we allocate one million dollars to an institutional investor’s mutual-fund portfolio?” You are making the extremely false assumption that our economy is already Pareto-optimal with respect to saving human lives.
No serious economist actually believes that. In fact, they wouldn’t even make the claim that the economy is designed to save human lives; it would be downright silly. They would point out two things:
1) If we use wealth-accumulation as an approximation of human value, the mutual-fund portfolio could, in some sense, be said to be more valuable than the human lives, in the sense that those human lives generate little value for other humans. Of course, socialists and anarchists can argue with capitalists over whether wealth-accumulation under a neoliberal capitalist economy is a good approximation of human value or not. (I side with the socialists in saying most definitely no.)
2) Real economies rarely or never actually hit Pareto-optimal equilibria, they merely oscillate around them, and in fact sometimes even rarely oscillate near them because the assumptions behind efficient-market theories are so far from real-world conditions. (There was once a paper published, IIRC, under the title *Markets are Efficient If and Only If P=NP”.)
Given these two facts, we should most probably not consider “The Economy shouldn’t be allowed to kill people” as an applause light, but instead as an ethical charge to find the deadweight losses of human lives and remove them. We can argue about zero-sum tradeoffs when we’re actually faced with one, but when instead faced with a case where a clear positive-sum move exists, we should take it.
Actually, I don’t. And it’s not even necessary for the argument. Even if we nationalized all the investment funds and hanged all the evil capitalists, someone would still die because there would not be enough money to cure them.
(How could I possibly know? My country was like this. And the people here lived on average shorter than our evil neighbors. The medicine was completely free of charge, you just couldn’t get it, because there was not enough made.)
Back to the original topic, an analysis that concludes that some people will die either way, is simply a realistic analysis. Unless we have already solved the problem of Friendly Singularity. We can, and should, look for the ways to minimize this number. It’s not going to be zero, anyway. Even if we had a world-wide government of incorruptible angels with mandatory cryonics right now.
That means that your country wasn’t ruled well. On the other hand if you live in a country like Germany you do have access to all medicine that”s proven to work in clinical trials.
When it comes to drugs the expensive part is research, marketing and other things that aren”t about the production costs of the actual drug.
Yes, but that doesn’t refute the case-by-case ummm… case, that we’re looking at a deadweight loss of human life in this particular instance. If you don’t hold that the economy is Pareto-optimal, then there are improvements we can feasibly make without suddenly causing shortages of medicine.