BRYAN CAPLAN
May 7, 2013
Keynesian Bets: What's Out There
May 6, 2013
Keynesian Bets Bleg
May 6, 2013
The Pyramid of Macroeconomic Insight and Virtue
May 2, 2013
A Natalist Provision
May 1, 2013
I Was a Teenage Misanthrope
DAVID HENDERSON
May 5, 2013
John Thacker on Vaccinations and the Sequester
May 3, 2013
Chef Rudy's Virtues Project
May 2, 2013
My take on Reinhart and Rogoff
May 1, 2013
Medicare Kills a Program
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Someone, might have been N N Taleb, observed that the essence of patriotism is, when filling lifeboats 'woman and children first'. The low cost solution from the perspective of the group. Something similar is afoot here.
moral hazard: what if we get used to older people doing dangerous jobs and develop social norm where older people are expected to do the most dangerous jobs. would that be efficient? maybe? will it be right? ...........
@Greg,
Yes and yes. If they volunteer, it’s likely efficient and it’s right. There’s an automatic check that limits moral hazard: the fact that they volunteer.
David, is there a way market prices can make this more quantitative? I.e. I'm thinking it shouldn't be up to individual workers to have to estimate the way taking such a job will impact their likelihood of getting cancer, etc. I'm thinking somehow insurance companies or something ought to get involved so that it's profitable to hire the older workers to do it but not the younger ones, but I'm not sure how to get off the ground with the thought experiment...
Hi,
I'll need to research this. I don't know of any reason why two workers would be exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation months after the accident.
But in any case, most 60+-year-old people simply aren't in good enough physical shape to be doing things are physically demanding for a 30 or 40-year-old. If it's a situation where spending 4 minutes gives twice the exposure of spending 2 minutes, sending in the older people can still get just as many people killed. (I'm assuming this is not "potentially lethal via cancer in 30 years.")
Authoritive source for Fukushima worker exposures
Go to the table on the final page. There's no way that anyone in May or June was exposed to "potentially deadly amounts of radiation"...by any conventional understanding of that phrase.
The answer isn't to have sacrificial lambs...even if they are volunteering. The answer is to have good radiation protection protocols. Which the Fukushima plant appears to have had, based on that table.
@Mark Bahner,
Thanks. I still like the spirit of their voluntarism, but you seem to be right about the facts.
@Robert Murphy,
Good question. I think there’s the old-fashioned way that I used when I decided to work in a nickel mine. Ask a lot of questions, scope out the most-likely bad things that can happen, and then make sure you don’t do those things.