Should There Be A Market for Kidneys?

Many of us would read the title and feel- Why Not? I had the same thought.

We all have friends and know very well that friendship is something which cannot be traded. If traded, the good itself (friendship) would lose its value. But that is not the case with kidneys, right? You trade kidneys, transplant them and they would work well. So, what is the issue in making a market for kidneys if both sellers and buyers are willing to trade. Won't it be helpful to that poor person who can live a good life by selling something she does not even need?

What needs to be focused here is whether this market is fair enough?

The adverse conditions of the poor might make them vulnerable to commercial traders who would spare them no bargaining power. Severe inequality can undermine voluntary nature of exchange.

Just the fact that buyers and sellers are ready to deal is not enough to make a market. Should university seats be sold? Should there be a market for babies? Or should votes be sold?

In some cases, the negative externalities might outweigh the benefits to buyers and sellers.

Selling kidneys would also lead to objectification of human bodies and we might start looking at humans as a collection of parts which could be sold for money.

Though debates still exist, my opinion stands against the existence of a kidney market.

What do you think?

-Sampada Bhiwania

Comments

The Debate on Economic Sanctions

Since the last century, the era of military wars appears to have come to an end, leading the global community on a quest to find alternative ways of conflict resolution and protecting international law. One of these ways is imposing economic sanctions on other countries. These are restrictions or outright ban on trade, currency flows or investments from the other country. But do economic sanctions achieve their objective? History tells us that arguably, the answer to this question is that they don't. Formerly imposed sanctions on countries like Iraq, Iran, North Korea and recently, Russia, indicate that these sanctions not only turn out to be inefficient in barring the sanctioned countries from violating international peace, but also prove detrimental to other countries who are dependent on the sanctioned countries for necessities like food supplies, oil, etc. For instance, the recent imposition of economic sanctions on Russia by the US in the light of the Ukrainian war caus...

THE IDEA OF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

In the previous article, we mentioned that Universal Basic Income has been proposed as one of the solutions to the paradox of welfare. Here, we explore what the idea is, its empirical feasibility and the possible hurdles in its implementation. Imagine that one fine morning, you get up and hear the news that the government would now transfer a certain amount of money, every month, in every citizen’s bank account, irrespective of one’s existing employment status, without it getting taxed. This is exactly what the Universal Basic Income would mean! By definition, the UBI is a financial support system that gives a certain minimum amount of money to everybody in the economy, which is needed for the fulfilment of one’s basic needs. However, there exists no consensus on what form this minimum basic income would take, or what amount is necessary for minimum subsistence. Nonetheless, this ambitious social policy is being increasingly viewed as an alternative to the existing system of welfare p...

The Not-So-Normal Story of Normality

Being students of economics, we have been made to study the Z table excessively throughout our statistics journey. Hence, before going off the Z table, we decided to explore more about the Z table itself. In other words, having learned its technical use in solving a wide variety of statistical problems, we now delve into the interesting history of the normal distribution, unarguably the most popular distribution in modern statistics. The distinctive characteristics of symmetricity and bell-shaped structure impart normality a wide range of real-life applications in physics, biology, finance, hydrology, etc. Abraham DeMoivre Interestingly, the major credit for the origin of the normal distribution, also called the Gaussian distribution, does not go to Carl Gauss, but rather to Abraham de Moivre, a mathematician and a contemporary of Isaac Newton. He used to plot the results of multiple binomial distribution simulations. Consequently, he discovered a pattern that resembled a be...

Off The Z Table

Search This Blog