The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [83]
Discomfort with transactions can take byzantine shapes. People seem comfortable with paying for sperm, for instance, but get all queasy about eggs. A high-quality egg donor, like a Harvard coed with good scores on her SAT college entrance exams, could net $35,000. Still, some critics have charged that paying for eggs devalues life by treating them as commodities. The guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine allow paying donors up to $10,000 only because donating is physically costly—requiring screenings and about fifty hours in hospital. Many donations agencies offer more. In the United Kingdom paying for eggs is illegal. Donors can only recover out-of-pocket costs plus “reasonable expenses” of up to £55.19 per day—to a maximum of £250—to cover their forgone earnings.
It makes a difference what the eggs will be used for. In California it is legal for a woman to sell her eggs for fertilization but not for research. If she wants to provide them for research, she must offer them for free. In New York, by contrast, the Empire State Stem Cell Board authorizes using state research funds to pay up to $10,000 to egg donors.
Many transactions that are perfectly normal in one part of the world or at one point in time are considered repugnant in another. Indentured servitude, once a common way for Europeans to buy passage to America, today is banned across the world. Usury, an old sin of the Catholic Church, is today called credit.
Dwarf tossing, which used to be an everyday bar sport, was banned in France in the 1990s despite opposition from a dwarf, who took his case all the way to the United Nations, accusing the French government of discriminating against him by denying his right to employment. The job, he said, “does not constitute an affront to human dignity since dignity consists in having a job.” He lost.
In Seoul, South Korea, a dish of dog stew costs around ten dollars—about twice as much as the beef equivalent. Yet when the country hosted the 1988 Olympics, the city government banned the popular dish lest it nauseate its foreign visitors. When Korea co-hosted the soccer World Cup in 2002 with Japan, the French actress and animal lover Brigitte Bardot tried to move the Korean government to ban the entire industry. “Cows are grown to be eaten, dogs are not,” she told an interviewer on Korean radio. “I accept that many people eat beef, but a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs.”
REVULSION HAS MEANINGFUL consequences. In 2009 there were about eighty thousand Americans on the official waiting list for a kidney transplant, almost five times as many as twenty years ago. But there are only about sixteen thousand transplants done each year. The waiting list keeps growing every year. In 2005, some ten Americans died each day while on the waiting list.
Allowing people to sell a kidney would increase the supply. Economists Gary Becker and Julio Jorge Elías calculated the price of an organ based on the value that government agencies put on Americans’ lives and health when they evaluate the benefits of public investments in their safety.
They plugged in certain estimates into the calculation: a 0.1 percent risk of dying during the operation and a 1 percent chance of suffering a nonfatal injury. They assumed such an injury would reduce a donor’s quality of life by 15 percent, which is a little worse than the deterioration of quality from blindness. They also assumed the median donor would make about $35,000 a year and would need four weeks in recovery. Plugging in the forgone wages and assuming the statistical value of life to be $5 million, they estimated that a donated kidney should go for about $15,200. At this price, allowing kidneys to be bought or sold would increase their supply by some 44