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Showing posts from November, 2017

Compulsory Organ Donations

More than a Nudge Robert Thaler, the soon to be winner of this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, wrote about how organ donation rates can change significantly when the question is asked differently to potential donors . In a nutshell, he differentiates the opt-in and the opt-out method, where the opt-out method gets more people to become donors, because the default choice is to be a donor. But he goes on to mention that the presumed-content law may be upsetting to some people, and that the Illinois system, which "makes one's wishes to be a donor legally binding . . . is a winning combination." Here, Thaler, in his strict adherence to libertarian paternalism, fails to consider a morally and economically superior policy: the policy of mandatory donations. It is not hard to see that mandatory donations are economically superior. To see why mandatory donations are morally superior, one need only consider the trolley problem. Here is the thought exp