Possible, conditional on your income. Assuming we need blood, unless your work creates an efficient blood replacement alternative, someone must donate blood. Less Wrong’s readership skews young with a lot of college students, who presumably have low income. If you’re reading this, you are probably someone who has a comparative advantage in donating blood rather than money.
Someone needs to donate blood. Someone needs to donate mosquito nets. But there are already enough people donating blood. We still need more mosquito nets.
Just because you have a comparative advantage in donating blood doesn’t mean it’s worth it. It just means that it’s not a bad idea by as many orders of magnitude.
It costs $130 to $150 for a pint of blood. You have about ten pints, so even if you needed to replace all of your blood, that would still only be $1,400 or so. If it was life-or-death, people would be willing to pay far more than that.
I don’t think it’s efficient. If you work for the amount of time you’d be spending giving blood and donate the money, you’d do much more good.
Possible, conditional on your income. Assuming we need blood, unless your work creates an efficient blood replacement alternative, someone must donate blood. Less Wrong’s readership skews young with a lot of college students, who presumably have low income. If you’re reading this, you are probably someone who has a comparative advantage in donating blood rather than money.
Someone needs to donate blood. Someone needs to donate mosquito nets. But there are already enough people donating blood. We still need more mosquito nets.
Just because you have a comparative advantage in donating blood doesn’t mean it’s worth it. It just means that it’s not a bad idea by as many orders of magnitude.
Citation?
It costs $130 to $150 for a pint of blood. You have about ten pints, so even if you needed to replace all of your blood, that would still only be $1,400 or so. If it was life-or-death, people would be willing to pay far more than that.