[Peace-discuss] What If Not Getting the October Flu Vaccine Is a “Satan Improvement”?

[Robert Naiman]

https://www.facebook.com/robert.naiman/posts/10159460978177656

What If Not Getting the October Flu Vaccine Is a “Satan Improvement”? What
If It’s Like Texting While Driving?

In undergraduate mainstream [neoclassical] Economics, the concept of
“Pareto improvement” is introduced. A change in the social allocation would
be a “Pareto improvement” if it would make at least one person better off,
while making nobody else worse off. A social allocation is “Pareto
efficient” - or, in a widely condoned act of moral and intellectual
sloppiness, merely “efficient” - if no Pareto improvement is possible, if
there is no possible change in the social allocation that would not make at
least one person worse off.

What would be an example of a Pareto improvement? On a clear night, letting
your Facebook friends know that there’s a lunar eclipse. They can ignore
the information if they don’t care or if they already had it. But if they
didn’t know, or if they knew and forgot, and if they want to see the lunar
eclipse, they can go to the window or walk outside. The pleasure of
watching the lunar eclipse is free. It is non-exhaustible and
non-excludable. Enjoying the lunar eclipse doesn’t use it up, there’s still
just as much lunar eclipse there for everybody else to enjoy. Enjoying the
lunar eclipse doesn’t interfere with anybody else enjoying it.

So a social allocation that isn’t Pareto efficient is pretty bogus. Why not
make some people better off, if you could do it without hurting anybody
else?

But the idea of Pareto efficiency is also morally quite limited, a pretty
low bar. Suppose the social allocation is that one person has everything,
and everybody else has nothing, and the one person who has everything cries
like a baby if you take a nickel away from them to help anybody else. Then
that allocation is “Pareto efficient,” even though most people are starving
to death. So in the world in which we live, the concept of “Pareto
efficiency” isn’t helping us improve things very much. Because a lot of the
things we need to do to improve society involve taking a nickel away from
the very rich to help everybody else.

Armed with the idea of “Pareto improvement,” some undergraduate in
Economics, name unknown, once coined the idea of a “Jesus improvement.” A
Jesus improvement makes everybody else better off, but one person much
worse off.

Armed with the idea of “Jesus improvement,” we can now introduce the idea
of a “Satan improvement.” A Satan improvement makes one person slightly
better off, while making everybody else worse off.

What would be an example of a “Satan improvement”? Texting while driving.
You’re driving on the interstate, you’re bored out of your mind. Your cell
phone goes ding: somebody texted you. You look around. There’s almost no
cars. Surely, you think to yourself, you could safely read the text and
find out what your friend said. That’s a Satan improvement. Here’s who will
derive zero benefit from you reading that text right now: other drivers.
Here’s who will pay increased cost of increased risk: other drivers. You
might be slightly better off, but all the other drivers will be worse off.
It’s a Satan improvement. That’s why, in many jurisdictions, it’s illegal.
The interstate isn’t like the lunar eclipse. To make the interstate work
for all the drivers, we need to share it responsibly.

Right now, when we encourage all Americans who can to get the annual flu
vaccine in October, they tend to answer our proposal solely in terms of
their perceived individual self-interest. Isn’t that odd? There are social
costs to not getting the annual flu vaccine in October. And apparently
those social costs just increased dramatically, because the CDC is warning
us that it is likely that there will be another, worse outbreak of covid-19
in the winter, at the same time as the annual flu outbreak. And if the
future were like the present, that would mean that people who can who don’t
get the annual flu vaccine in October would be killing more other Americans
than usual, because a key feature of the death toll from covid-19 is the
overloading of the health care system.

Wasn’t it just five seconds ago that we were “all in this together”?

Why isn’t this morally obvious? Why would anyone here who claims to be a
socially responsible person argue with me now? If you’re a sociopath, what
are you doing here, on my Facebook page?
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