August 27, 2004

Altruism as an Organizational Problem

Posted by Kieran

The University of Arizona’s news service has done a little press release covering a recent paper of mine 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.

Posted on August 27, 2004 07:00 PM UTC
Comments

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?

Posted by WillieStyle · August 27, 2004 08:30 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.

Posted by evan · August 27, 2004 10:37 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.

Posted by Kieran Healy · August 27, 2004 11:08 PM

http://www.whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=1227

Posted by organ donor · August 28, 2004 12:12 AM

http://slate.msn.com/id/2105751

Posted by arizona · August 28, 2004 12:28 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.

Posted by Alex · August 30, 2004 12:19 AM

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.

Posted by JamesW · August 30, 2004 02:38 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.