The Corpse Theorem

I’ve been meaning to say a couple of things about the UCLA cadaver-selling case. Jacob Sullum beat me to one of them: that part of the problem here is the legal ban on selling human body parts, which naturally just drives the market underground. Legalizing the trade would bring it aboveboard, reducing corruption while allowing heirs (including institutional heirs) to profit.

Let me take the argument a bit further. It’s clear now that the body parts illegally sold by Henry Reid, the director of UCLA’s Willed Body Program, were highly valuable. If it were possible to sell them on the legal market, UCLA would most likely have treated the bodies as assets that could either (a) be sold to increase the university’s endowment or (b) be used in the university’s medical programs. And any time the university chose option (b), the opportunity cost of the choice would have been the forgone market price of the body parts. That opportunity cost would have motivated UCLA to keep the body parts only when they were more valuable in UCLA’s programs than in alternative uses, such as corporate medical research. In other words, a legal market would have encouraged more efficient use of body parts.

Furthermore, the fact that UCLA could not legally sell the body parts, even when they had a high value elsewhere, assured the existence of a tempting opportunity for malfeasance – one that Reid capitalized on. Reid’s actions were deplorable, of course – not because he was selling body parts, but because he was selling body parts that didn’t belong to him. Still, he would have been less likely to act as he did if the black market incentive were not so great. UCLA’s authorities might also have taken greater interest in the fate of the donated bodies if those bodies had had legal monetary value.

One more observation: for people who are interested in helping their alma mater and advancing medical research, the body donors and their families are being strangely irrational about this. Consider the following passage from the CNN article:

In their lawsuit, family members said they had contracts signed by university officials, guaranteeing their loved ones' remains would "never" be sold. The plaintiffs also noted the practice violates California State law.

Shirley Williams, whose husband Richard died of a stroke two years ago, was assured by UCLA officials that her husband's remains would be used in medical research, cremated and returned to her. Instead, Williams, the lead plaintiff in the civil suit, fears his body parts were sold for profit.

Now, the donors can specify whatever conditions they want in their wills, so if they want to prohibit sale of their bodies, fine. But why impose such a silly condition? When people donate their cars to charity, they don’t generally stipulate that the car be added to the charity’s own fleet. It’s natural and expected that the car might (and probably will) be sold, so the charity can get the cash value instead. The same should go for a body. If your goal is to help UCLA’s medical program, why not let the medical program’s directors decide how best to use your donation? If they can use the body, great. But if they would get greater benefits from more centrifuges, for example, why not sell the body and use the proceeds to buy centrifuges?

And if the donors’ goal is not just to help UCLA but to advance medical research, I wonder what they think Johnson & Johnson’s doing with the bodies? By and large, it’s medical research. Even if the body ends up being used for auto safety research instead of medical research (or for some reason you think that non-profit medical research is better than for-profit medical research), it still maximizes the research value of the body to let the university sell it, because the university gets more cash to run its non-profit research program.

Here’s a more plausible argument for banning sale of the body in the will: If you want to make absolutely sure it is only UCLA’s medical program that benefits from your donation, an unmarketable body could be useful because it’s not fungible. If the body were sold, the university might allocate the proceeds to (say) the English literature program. A clause in the contract specifying that any funds from sale must go to the medical program wouldn’t prevent this, because the university could simply divert non-earmarked funds away from the medical program and into other programs. However, even this argument doesn’t quite work. If the medical program is receiving bodies, that means it is receiving assets that can substitute for funds – so the university may choose to allocate a smaller share of general funds to the medical program to compensate for the bodies’ value. Thus, if the university really wants to soak the medical program for the sake of other programs, it can almost always find a way to do so.

Bottom line: The sale of body parts should be legalized, and people donating their bodies to science should drop the no-sale clauses if they really want to maximize the value of their donations.

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No Folklore Monopolies

Tyler’s made a couple of recent posts on the topic of copyright protection for folklore. In his earlier post, he asked for arguments against it; in today’s post, he replies to the arguments.

My argument against copyright protection for folklore is that the folklore has already been produced, and therefore giving it protection would create no added incentive to produce creative works. Here’s Tyler’s response:

Folklore has already been produced. TC: Of course you could say the same for a good deal of music. Why treat folklore differently?

The difference is that the music in question was produced while copyright laws were in effect. The expected monopoly rents resulting from copyright may therefore have been part of the motivation for producing the music. Of course, revoking a given work's copyright would not cause it to blink out of existence. But a precedent for revoking copyrights would indicate to potential future creators that the expected rents won't be there, thereby reducing their incentive to create. The same cannot be said of folklore, because there was no copyright to begin with; thus, there is nothing to revoke.

This is very much the same issue raised by the "Mickey Mouse Extension" Acts. Disney lobbies for retroactive extension of the copyright period whenever Mickey Mouse's copyright is about to expire. But a retroactive extension does nothing (or almost nothing) to encourage more creative work; it only extends the monopoly. The granting of copyrights to existing folklore is just a radical form of retroactive extension, which creates monopoly rents without the corresponding gain from the encouragement of new work.

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Preemptive Legislative Strike

The House of Representatives just passed a bill to ban lawsuits against the food industry for making people fat. I oppose this bill on federalism grounds: the federal government has no business deciding this kind of matter, except with regard to the federal courts. (The law would apply to both state and federal courts.) In addition, given Congress’s talent for botching even the best ideas, I worry that the law might be drafted badly. The biggest danger is that too-broad wording could make it difficult to launch legitimate lawsuits for mislabeled or tainted food. As the friend who sent me the link said, “It’s always suspicious when Congress gets involved in deciding which lawsuits are okay and which ones aren’t; particularly when a member of Congress receives political contributions from cigarette or gun manufacturers, or, most likely in this case, the fast food industry.”

Still, at least Congress is on the right side of the substantive issue here. The McDonald’s-made-me-fat lawsuits are outrageous, and it’s pleasing to see Congress taking a stand in favor of personal responsibility and choice for once. Yeah, they’re assuredly getting campaign donations from Big Food corporations – but in this case, the corporations are right. (Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if they backed small changes in the wording that would protect them against more legitimate lawsuits.)

At the moment, the problem is not dire, and the legislation is premature. None of the fat lawsuits has succeeded – yet. So far, the courts have done the right thing. But if these lawsuits begin to win, legislation (federal or state, as necessary) will indeed be justified. Congress mucks with judicial precedent all the time to limit freedom and weaken personal responsibility. A movement, however small, in the other direction would be a welcome change.

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Random Observation

When you eat any chocolaty Girl Scout cookie right after brushing your teeth, it tastes like a Thin Mint.

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Does Abortion Decrease Abortion?

Alex links to a cool article by Donohue, Grogger, and Levitt, which claims that legalized abortion is responsible for the recent decline in unmarried teen childbearing. This is not as obvious as it sounds, because the drop in unmarried teen childbearing began about 16 years after Roe v. Wade. DG & L attribute the decrease to an abortion-induced drop in the number of teenagers who would be likely to get pregnant. In short, people aborted the fetuses that would have been most likely to get pregnant 13 to 19 years later. Here’s how DG & L put it:

While the link between the current availability of abortion and teen childbearing is straightforward (since abortion is an alternative to carrying a baby to term), the relationship we focus on is far more subtle: legalized abortion in the 1970s led to fewer babies being born under circumstances in which their parents were less willing or able to provide nurturing environments. When these cohorts grew up to be teenagers, their improved childhood environment had the benign effect of reducing the frequency with which they themselves became teen mothers.

Now here’s an interesting possibility: abortions in the 1970s may have had a downward impact on the number of abortions in the 1990s. DG & L’s results show that unmarried teen childbirths decreased in the 1990s as a result of earlier abortions. So far as I can tell (from skimming the article), they do not break down the different routes for the reduction in childbirths – some of the reduction would be from abortions, some from pregnancies that never occurred in the first place. Thus, earlier abortions presumably helped to reduce later abortions.

This is, of course, a partial offsetting effect, not a total effect. Looking at DG & L’s Figure 3, we see that the total number of abortions rose from 1973 to 1981 and then stabilized. But interestingly, the figures are not per capita (unless they’ve been population-adjusted without any note of that fact), which means there must have been a decline in abortions per capita since 1981. I’m not sure where that would put the latest per capita abortion figures relative to pre-1973, but I’m guessing the recent figures would still be higher. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating that abortion could actually produce its own offsetting effect.

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