Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense" and as being "so unusual and so valuable." One might wonder why something that makes so much sense and is so beautifully written etc. is "so unusual."
To me it seems less like economics and more like a way of getting oneself off the hook, morally speaking. If, when other people get sick and die, we can just call it "suicide," then it's their fault and we're off the hook.
My impression, though, is that people are dying all the time without wanting to do so, and Becker's argument seems pretty silly to me. To spell it out in a little more detail: Suppose a person is standing on the sidewalk and is run over by an out-of-control car. I don't see how you can call it suicidal of the pedestrian that the driver was not paying attention. Nor do I see it as suicidal if someone develops kidney cancer and dies, nor do I see it as suicidal if a kid is playing and falls out of a high window, or if someone in the Middle East is hit by a bomb while sitting in a school, etc. Beyond this, just as there used to be millions of people who smoked and died of cancer before people knew that smoking kills, I'm sure there are millions of people now doing something that they don't realize is dangerous.
To go even further in this direction, in what sense is it really true that "more resources" could be "invested in prolonging life." On the Freakonomics blog, one commenter commented that the people killed in the World Trade Center attacks were not suicidal (the actual suicide terrorists excepted, of course), but then other commenters replied that, yes, you could think of all the deaths as suicide because, if everybody stayed home, they wouldn't be killed in their office and not on a plane. Setting aside the fact that you can die at home also (recall the notorious frequency of deaths from falls), there's a big flaw--which I think an economist should've seen--in the "we can all stay at home, live in a bubble, and eliminate all risks" argument. If we all stayed at home, the economy would grind to a halt. We couldn't even eat, since I'm assuming the delivery people wouldn't be able to bring us food. (If they were to drive over, they'd risk death on the highway, right?) And, soon enough, we wouldn't have any resources left to "prolong life" or anything else.
Economists know about tradeoffs, right? Putting additional resources into "prolonging life" might not prolong life at all. (Recall that the U.S. puts more resources into prolonging life than other countries do, but, as Dubner points out, this doesn't necessarily translate into actual prolongation of life.)
Sure, "counterintuitive" is fine, but this seems to be going off the deep end. I'm not at all surprised that this sort of thinking is, as Dubner puts it, "so unusual." Perhaps my economist colleagues can clarify what's going on. This sort of thing gives the field of economics a bad name, no? I imagine that some of Becker's colleagues are not so thrilled with him labeling this sort of attitude as "the economic approach." The research I've seen by economists is typically much better than this.
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Poor analysis by Dubner and Becker, caloric restriction and intermittent fasting extend lifespan at very little cost.
It seems to me trade-offs is exactly the point Becker wanted to make with his "suicide"-quote. It is a very abrasive way of saying that by using money to buy a tv instead of using it to buy a home trainer, you are essentially making a choice to live less healthy (and thus shorter) given the resources you have. I can see that this way of thinking can be appealing, especially to people like Dubner who mistake a controversial statement for a useful one. I can especially see that someone like Dubner would think it some kind of "profound realization", while I'm more inclined to view it as a bit shallow given the complexity of the relation between "health" and "mortality", the two not being the same.
I like it's corollary though. It makes anyone not supporting socialized medicine complicit in the willfull reduction of the life span of those who cannot afford health care. We could call that "murder".
""suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life."
Both Dubner and Becker seem to be under the impression that 'suicide' means 'unnecessary death' or 'death you could have stopped'
That's both incorrect and insulting, as far as I understand it to commit suicidde is to *want* death. It doesnt matter how many resources you do or do not use. If someone falls off a bridge and is panicking too much to grab the rope you throw them they have not committed suicide. If they throw themselves off a bridge and then refuse the rope then they have. In both cases the situation, actions and resources are the same, but in one of them the death was wanted, in the other is wasn't.
It's not unusual, valuable, or morally ambiguous. It's just wrong. Wrong use of the word.
Uh, how is it suicide if you don't want to die?
I don't understand how people twist that into applying to any death, but then these people are economists.
This guy trivializes real suicides; people who are trapped in darkness and the only way out is down. Very different from the fact that life customarily ends in death and we cannot add orders of magnitude to that sequence, no matter what "resources" are available.
Hey Glen,
I guess the key qualifier to Becker's quote is "to some extent". By qualifying such, he can go out on a limb to claim that "all" deaths are (to some extent) suicides.
So what Becker is saying - and I'm not sure why Dubner is so fascinated with this - is that whenever you step on a plane, you are trading the value of flying wherever you are going for whatever the opportunity costs of not flying are, plus the small risk of dying by a plane crash. Everything is associated with a risk of dying, and any action taken that does not mitigate this risk as much as possible is a passive choice of accepting the risk...exactly BECAUSE there are always tradeoffs involved with each choice. So you can't really blame Becker for not considering trade-offs. They are at the heart of his statement.
That being said, I think it is important to understand also that Becker's claim to fame in economics stems from the fact that he applied economic theory to novel problems of human behavior that had previously been outside of the realms of economic analysis. But Becker is by no means known for the special quality or ingenuity of his analysis; most of which is highly oversimplified neo-classical stuff.
Whatever the case, the "suicide" statement also reminds me of something my highschool German teacher would always say: If you need to put it into parenthesis, 9 out of 10 times you're not using the correct word for what you are trying to say.
Andrew...hope you don't mind me calling you Glen :-)
That's what happens, when you attempt to multi-task (as I was, when writing the above comment)...:-)
Nonsense! Your pedestrian is a perfect idiot, a self-flagellating victim. If he had a brain cell, he'd have stayed indoora, and worn a crash suit at all times.