The University of Arizona’s “news service”:http://uanews.org has done a little “press release”:http://uanews.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/UANews.woa/6/wa/goSBSArticle?ArticleID=9577 covering a “recent paper of mine”:http://uanews.org/pdfs/69304-healy.pdf about the social organization of cadaveric organ procurement in the United States. One way to think about the paper is in relation to ongoing debates about offering commercial incentives to donor families. These debates are conducted in individual-level terms — they are about appealing people’s to selfish rather than their altruistic impulses — and they rely on a straightforward contrast between giving and selling. By doing so these arguments (both for and against markets) miss the role of organizational infrastructure and logistical effort in donor procurement, and the wide range of variation in procurement rates associated with it.
{ 7 comments }
WillieStyle 08.27.04 at 8:30 pm
Kieran,
Seeing as you wrote an entire paper on the issue, perhaps you could answer a nagging question I’ve had for a while:
Why exactly are so many people oppossed to donating their organs. I’ve heard the “doctors won’t try to save my life” argument, but that can’t possibly be it, can it?
evan 08.27.04 at 10:37 pm
Hey, sorry to offer a comment irrelevant to the post, but if anyone at CT has a question they want me to fire at Dave Eggers (this said knowing that some of you are McSweeney fans), drop a comment over at WackyFun, or more specifically, here.
Kieran Healy 08.27.04 at 11:08 pm
Why exactly are so many people oppossed to donating their organs.
Survey data suggest that most people are actually supportive or strongly supportive of organ donation. Education is positively correlated with support for donation. Blacks are substantially less likely to be in favor of it.
Reasons for opposition to donation are not that well understood, though there is a social-psychological literature on this question. The reason you cite is quite common, I think (I’d have to check the data).
Transplant advocates have worked hard to convince people that donation is a good, morally worthwhile idea, and have built up a public vocabulary for talking about it (the ‘gift of life’ and so on).
Bear in mind, though the logistical dimension of procurement, and the particular, very difficult circumstances under which choices to donate are made make much more of a difference to observed rates of donation than genreral opinions on the matter expressed in surveys.
organ donor 08.28.04 at 12:12 am
http://www.whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=1227
arizona 08.28.04 at 12:28 am
http://slate.msn.com/id/2105751
Alex 08.30.04 at 12:19 am
Valued “private property” = my organs. Good genes. Good preventive methods used– for years. They’re not for free–nor should they be expected to be. Actually, worth at least a few million dollars in my view.
Everyone else in the disease business (until alternative complementary med. was even “allowed” an outright monopoly [of mainly authoritarian myopic butt-kissers in furtherance of acad. idiocy re a preference for others of smart and savvy view] and insurance business racketeers and lobbyists for self-interests.
Yes, I do value good health–unlike most in the yuppies and their spoiled guppies world.
JamesW 08.30.04 at 2:38 pm
I read somewhere a clever Darwinian theory that the early Christian policy of community support of widows and orphans gave the new movement an adaptive advantage against its Jewish and pagan rivals. These made the support of these groups the sole responsibility of relatives – a scheme which must have broken down frequently in the successive Jewish wars.
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