WASHINGTON, May 29 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering brief opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the first of two wrap-ups for May 29.
The Independent Institute
(II is an independent public policy research organization whose goal is to transcend the political and partisan interests that influence debate about public policy. II aims to redefine the debate over public issues, and foster new and effective directions for government reform, by adhering to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry, without regard to political or social biases.)
OAKLAND, Calif. -- The AMA's opposition to organ transplant markets: time for a change
by David L. Kaserman, Ph.D.
At its meeting in December, the American Medical Association debated a proposal that would allow trials in which explicit payments would be used to encourage an increased rate of organ donation from cadavers.
Unfortunately, that proposal was tabled. AMA members expect to revisit the proposal at their June meeting, however, and its prospects for passage there appear good. It is difficult to imagine another single policy this organization could adopt that would significantly improve the health of a greater number of patients.
As most people are now aware, there is in this country a severe and growing shortage of human organs available for transplantation. Every year, for at least the past 30 years, the number of patients needing an organ transplant -- such as a kidney, heart, or liver -- has consistently exceeded the number of organs supplied. As a result, more than 50,000 of these patients have died, and it is estimated that less than half of the almost 80,000 people currently on waiting lists will live to receive the needed transplants.
Troubling as those figures are, what is even more disturbing is that most of those deaths could have been avoided by adopting a more intelligent public policy for organ procurement. Specifically, the organ shortage is the direct consequence of a longstanding policy that proscribes any payment to families of recently deceased individuals. That is, our organ procurement policy, which was codified into law in 1984, requires that all organ donations (acquisitions) occur at a price of zero.
All others in the transplantation process -- surgeons, nurses, organ procurement officials, and so on -- are paid for their services. But the family of the donor, without whose consent a transplant operation cannot occur, must go uncompensated.
As anyone with basic economic literacy knows, a straightforward solution to any shortage is to allow price to rise to its equilibrium, market-clearing level. The organ shortage is no exception. It is the zero-price policy, and that policy alone, that is responsible for the organ shortage and its associated suffering and death.
Consequently, a simple policy change that eliminates the legal constraint on cadaver organ prices would lead to a substantial increase in the number of organs collected. Waiting lists would decline, waiting times would shorten, and many lives would be saved.
Interestingly, this proposal is not new. It has appeared in the literature on this subject since the 1960s and has gained increasing support since the 1980s. Opposition from the medical community, however, has prevented its adoption (and even, for a long time, its serious consideration).
Expressed ethical concerns have included possible economic coercion of low-income families to supply their organs and the so-called "commodification" of the human body. Certain economic issues have also been raised, such as a decline in the quality of organs acquired and the possible discouragement of purely altruistic donations.
The alleged grounds for such opposition -- both ethical and economic -- have been successfully rebutted on the basis of both theoretical and empirical considerations. Indeed, a survey of the relevant literature reveals that there is not one single argument in favor of the zero-price policy that has not been examined and rejected by those writing in this area.
The problem, of course, is that, with very few exceptions, the members of the AMA who ultimately will vote on the proposal to conduct trials on payments to organ donors have not read the literature on this subject. Therefore, they are not well-equipped to weigh the merits of the various conflicting arguments.
We can only hope that those who have not read the relevant studies will listen to those who have and that reason will, at last, prevail over uninformed emotion. Too many patients have died in the name of an atavistic policy whose sole "virtue" is that it denies payment to the families of potential organ donors.
(David Kaserman is a research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and the Torchmark Professor of Economics at Auburn University.)
The National Center for Policy Analysis
(The NCPA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research institute that seeks innovative private sector solutions to public policy problems.)
DALLAS, Tex.-- Scientists find more oil in the Earth
by Bruce Bartlett
On April 16, Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, published a startling report that old oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico were somehow being refilled. That is, new oil was being discovered in fields where it previously had not existed.
Scientists, led by Mahlon Kennicutt of Texas A&M University, speculate that the new oil is surging upward from deposits well below those currently in production. "Very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing was going on," he said.
Although it is not yet known whether this is a worldwide phenomenon or commercially important, the new discovery suggests that there may be far more oil and gas within the earth's core than previously thought.
Prof. Kennicutt is not the first to suggest that vast hydrocarbon deposits may lie well below those currently known. In 1995, the New York Times reported that geochemist Jean Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had also found evidence that oil was moving upward into reservoirs from somewhere far deeper.
With growing improvements in technology that are making possible oil drilling at greater and greater depths, it may soon be economically feasible to explore and produce oil from these deep deposits.
The existence of oil much farther below the surface than it was previously thought to exist raises new questions about the origins of oil and natural gas. It has commonly been thought that they are the decayed remains of long dead plants and animals. However, as hydrocarbons are found at extreme depths, this explanation becomes increasingly implausible.
Astronomer Thomas Gold of Cornell University has long been dissatisfied with the dead dinosaur theory of oil's origins. He argues that oil and gas are in fact the remains of methane left over from the earth's origin. Methane, he points out, is one of the most common molecules in the universe. When the stars and planets were formed eons ago, it was one of the central building blocks from which they were made.
If Mr. Gold's theory is true, then it makes sense that we would continue to find hydrocarbons everywhere within the earth's core and not just at the surface, where plants and animals exist. Thus the new research is at least consistent with Mr. Gold's theory, even if it still remains to be proven.
The new scientific evidence that energy supplies may be vastly greater than previously imagined is only the latest blow to the doomsayers. Such people have been around for 200 years preaching that mankind has reached the limit to growth because we have found all the oil there is to be found. For at least a century, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey has consistently reported that America had only about 10 years worth of oil left.
In defense of the Geological Survey, it was referring only to proven reserves. These are fields that have been explored and where estimates have been made regarding their size and production potential. But of course exploration is a continuing process, so that new reserves are discovered all the time.
Economist Julian Simon long ago made the point that the size of proven reserves cannot be divorced from the price of oil. At current price levels, only about 40 percent of oil can be extracted from existing fields; the remaining 60 percent, which is known to exist, cannot be produced economically and is therefore not included in proven reserve estimates. However, higher prices and advanced technology can easily make it profitable to expand production in existing fields.
Higher prices also encourage exploration into areas that geologists strongly suspect to have oil, but where drilling costs are too high at present. Only a small portion of the earth's surface has ever been explored for oil and there is no reason to believe that there are not many large deposits yet to be discovered.
If oil were really becoming more scarce, we would expect to see prices rising over time. But in fact, the real price of oil, adjusted for inflation, has been remarkably stable at around $15 per barrel. Temporary price spikes by OPEC have not proved sustainable because they brought forth new supplies, encouraged substitution of oil for coal or gas, and stimulated conservation by consumers and businesses.
In short, even if the new scientific evidence about oil is wrong, one can still say that the world will never run out of it. Higher prices will always bring new supplies to market. As Bjorn Lomberg points out in his new book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," $40 per barrel oil will immediately increase world reserves from a 40 years supply to 250 years because vast known oil shale deposits will become economically viable.
Of all the things we have to worry about in this day and age, running out of oil should not be one of them.
(Bruce Bartlett is a senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis.)
Reason Public Policy Institute
LOS ANGELES -- What about civil liberties? The flipside of the 9/11 warnings.
By Jesse Walker
President Bush says that we shouldn't be "second-guessing" his decisions before September 11, when it now appears he had warning that some sort of attack was going to occur. Fine. How about his decisions after the attacks? The administration's explanation for why it was unable to prevent the hijackings is believable, in its broad outlines if not in every particular detail. But if nothing else, the new revelations undercut the rationale for the surveillance powers the government has gathered to itself since last September.
Long before last week, it was clear that America's intelligence agencies received scattered signals of the coming attacks. Many of us argued in the months after September 11 that our vulnerability stemmed less from limits on the government's ability to spy than from the intelligence bureaucracy's failure to connect that data into a coherent portrait of the threat.
Now we know how strong those signals were, and just how terrible the bureaucrats' failure was. So what have our intelligence agencies done since September 11?
On one hand, they asked for, and received, a host of new powers in an anti-terror bill, including the right to engage in secret searches, warrantless Internet surveillance, warrantless access to phone records, and a requirement that retailers report "suspicious" customer transactions to the Treasury.
Civil libertarians warned that powers like these could be abused -- and, indeed, had been abused at many times in American history. Nonetheless, the USA PATRIOT Act passed overwhelmingly, with some legislators voting for it without even reading it. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) told Insight magazine that he was unable to get his hands on a copy of the bill before it passed. "Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it," he said, "but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote."
Meanwhile, has there been an overhaul of the intelligence system? We're told that improvements have been made; and, hopefully, that's true. But we haven't even seen any heads roll: if anyone resigned or was fired over their inability to foresee and prevent the attacks, it happened far from the public eye.
More to the point: We haven't had a public investigation of what went wrong and how it could be fixed, by Congress or, better, by an independent commission not beholden either to present officeholders or to their more partisan-minded critics.
Instead, the feds have been running for cover, failing to release pertinent information and, now that this data has nonetheless seen daylight, smearing anyone who asks the obvious follow-up questions as -- in Dick Cheney's words -- "thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in time of war."
Not surprisingly, the vice president also opposes appointing an independent commission to investigate the August 6 warning that warned terrorists were planning to hijack planes, saying, "Most of what we need to talk about here should not be talked about in open hearings."
So instead of a radically revamped intelligence establishment, we get the same people in their same posts trying to connect the dots and prevent the next terrorist attack. Only now they'll have a lot more dots to sort through -- most of them irrelevant.
The atrocities of September 11 were not a surveillance failure. They were an analysis failure. Now that we understand that, can't we reconsider the new incursions into our privacy that our leaders stampeded blindly into law?
(Jesse Walker is an associate editor of Reason magazine.)
