Kidney Blogging Cont'd
The Freakonomics team of Steve Levitt and Steve Dubner devoted their latest NYT Magazine column to a organ markets. They smartly contextualized the debate by drawing on Viviana Zelizer's research on how life insurance evolved from a "profanation" to a demonstration of familial devotion. "The wisdom of repugnance," to use Leon Kass's phrase, is not timeless.
It's a terrific column, combining scholarship and personal stories, but I can't help thinking that they're a bit too willing to treat Alvin Roth's clever but incredibly complex barter scheme as a viable second-best solution. I've also said nice things about it on my blog, but, seriously, it's ridiculous for people to have to go through such machinations just because uninvolved third parties don't like the idea of paying organ donors. This taboo beautifully illustrates what Zelizer calls the false idea of "hostile worlds," which assumes that commerce inevitably taints all personal relations. I wrote about Zelizer in my Boston Globe article on economic sociology.
For more background links, see the Freakonomics website.