Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [50]
The message couldn’t have been much clearer: human beings indeed seemed to be hardwired for altruism. Not only was this conclusion uplifting—at the very least, it seemed to indicate that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors were nothing but a nasty anomaly—but it rocked the very foundation of traditional economics. “Over the past decade,” Foundations of Human Sociality claimed, “research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus.”
Non-economists could be forgiven if they felt like crowing with satisfaction. Homo economicus, that hyper-rational, self-interested creature that dismal scientists had embraced since the beginning of time, was dead (if he ever really existed). Hallelujah!
If this new paradigm—Homo altruisticus?—was bad news for traditional economists, it looked good to nearly everyone else. The philanthropy and disaster-relief sectors in particular had reason to cheer. But there were far broader implications. Anyone from a high government official down to a parent hoping to raise civic-minded children had to gain inspiration from the Dictator findings—for if people are innately altruistic, then society should be able to rely on its altruism to solve even the most vexing problems.
Consider the case of organ transplantation. The first successful kidney transplant was performed in 1954. To the layperson, it looked rather like a miracle: someone who would surely have died of kidney failure could now live on by having a replacement organ plunked inside him.
Where did this new kidney come from? The most convenient source was a fresh cadaver, the victim of an automobile accident perhaps or some other type of death that left behind healthy organs. The fact that one person’s death saved the life of another only heightened the sense of the miraculous.
But over time, transplantation became a victim of its own success. The normal supply of cadavers couldn’t keep up with the demand for organs. In the United States, the rate of traffic fatalities was declining, which was great news for drivers but bad news for patients awaiting a lifesaving kidney. (At least motorcycle deaths kept up, thanks in part to many state laws allowing motorcyclists—or, as transplant surgeons call them, “donorcyclists”—to ride without helmets.) In Europe, some countries passed laws of “presumed consent” rather than requesting that a person donate his organs in the event of an accident, the state assumed the right to harvest his organs unless he or his family specifically opted out. But even so, there were never enough kidneys to go around.
Fortunately, cadavers aren’t the only source of organs. We are born with two kidneys but need only one to live—the second kidney is a happy evolutionary artifact—which means that a living donor can surrender one kidney to save someone’s life and still carry on a normal life himself. Talk about altruism!
Stories abounded of one spouse giving a kidney to the other, a brother coming through for his sister, a grown woman for her aging parent, even kidneys donated between long-ago playground friends. But what if you were dying and didn’t have a friend or relative willing to give you a kidney?
One country, Iran, was so worried about the kidney shortage that it enacted a program many other nations would consider barbaric. It sounded like the kind of idea some economist might have dreamed up, drunk on his belief in Homo economicus: the Iranian government would pay people to give up a kidney, roughly $1,200, with an additional sum paid by the kidney recipient.
In the United States, meanwhile, during a 1983 congressional hearing, an enterprising doctor named Barry Jacobs described his own pay-for-organs plan. His company, International