Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants?
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Inflation