When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Vassar got there first.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.