Why they might drum me out of the Economists’ Corp

What I find ironic about this case is that it is an exception to the general rule in the U.S. which is that even those terminally ill and near death are not denied expensive end-of-life care for funding reasons. And this case is going to make exceptions that much less likely in the future because the publicity for Baylor medical center has been terrible.

On the other hand, my understanding is that government-run systems are more likely to fail to provide care for reasons of cost. For example, I believe that it’s still the case (or was until recently) that many in the UK have very poor access kidney dialysis treatments under the NHS.

This ventilator case is being interpreted as evidence of the harshness of the U.S. system and yet there are good reasons to believe that a government run system would unappolgetically “just decide how much a particular life is worth” and establish rules where denial of expensive, end-of-life care to late-stage terminal patients would be routinely denied. Or, as with the NHS, the treatment might not be forbidden but unavailable to many due to lack of resources, so late-stage terminal patients might be denied access to ventilators because there weren’t enough to go around and their condition made them last in line.

There is a broad consensus that the U.S. ‘wastes’ too much money on expensive end of life care, but ending that ‘waste’ means things like not just stopping ventilator treatment for terminal patients after a month but not providing a ventilator *at all* in such cases.

Qudryggia, if there is perfect information, then expected value equals value, there are neither wages nor insurance, and you know both the existence of God and whether or not Alex has any pull with God.

I never liked Alex’s reply anyway, since Christianity has an explicit prohibition in the Bible on buying or selling salvation, and I presume other religions with a notion of heaven would have something similar. Of course, one could interpret that to ban Pascal’s Wager, too.

Tyler,

Ex ante, you were clearly going to be drummed out of the Economist’s Corps.
However, ex post, I think you will be kept in…

Re: Tyler’s point that altruistic people value life less, I think that altruistic people value other people’s lives more, not that they value their own lives less.

Qundryggia, I like your point about S&P puts a lot. But, if I care about the “million tiny risks”, I don’t want to assume the exchange guaranteeing the puts will survive a 1929-style crash.

Timothy, technically indulgences didn’t buy salvation, only a decrease of your time in purgatory, which we can think of as a period of finite but negative utility preceding the infinite utility of heaven. I wonder if the idea of purgatory itself came about as a medieval Catholic solution to the difficulty of analyzing infinite utilities — you can’t credibly threaten infinite punishment for minor infractions.

Which brings us back to the point — death is a pretty harsh punishment for not insuring yourself against such a small risk, which may not be insurable anyway.

Re: “There’s a away around the St. Petersburg Paradox by imposing a diminishing marginal utility of wealth and looking at the expected utility rather than the expected value.”

To really get around it you need a bounded utility function. Log (an unbounded function that goes to infnity the most “slowly”) can’t do it for reason qundryggia mentions.

Would anyone be able to give me some background or point me in the direction to find backcround information on the Dec. 2005 China export quota bidding process? I believe the situation is that 70% of the quotas are held by existing exporters. The remaing 30% go to a bid process.