What do you think?
Rate this book
Tragic Choices
A general theoretical account of how societies cope with decisions which they regard as tragic.
- GenresNonfiction
254 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1978
5 people are currently reading
174 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 4, 2010
Although the sentence structures in this book are sometimes cumbersome, its overall organization and content are excellent. Therefore, it's worth working through the initial difficulties. It covers the difficulties of making "tragic" choices--those fraught with emotional turmoil because of conflicts over deeply held values. It examines them through "first order" choices and "second order" choices. The first order are the ones that decide how much of a scarce resource to make available. The second order are the ones that decide which individuals get the scarce resources. It looks at markets, political approaches, lotteries, and customary approaches. All of them can be modified and are expected to change as social tolerance for different tragedies change.
March 5, 2017
This was a dense, academic text filled with sentences such as "The factual contours of the particular problem of child rights more than anything else explain the dominance of the complex and curious combination of custom, unorganized moral suasion and ad hoc market incentives which determine the pattern of childbearing in the United States today."
However, buried within the academic prose is a thorough enumeration of the trade offs inherent in using market and various non-market mechanisms to allocate tragic resources. This is useful outside of the tragic context because in many corporate contexts the internal decisions are made by non-market mechanisms.
However, buried within the academic prose is a thorough enumeration of the trade offs inherent in using market and various non-market mechanisms to allocate tragic resources. This is useful outside of the tragic context because in many corporate contexts the internal decisions are made by non-market mechanisms.
November 12, 2020
Calabresi and Bobbitt were academics and this reads as easily as a PhD thesis. That is sarcasm, just in case any of you academics missed it. Taken with other books over the decades it is an interesting snapshot in the issues facing us in 1978. Several of the issues discussed include affirmative action, the draft for Vietnam, societies granting the right to have children (think of China's one child policy,) and organ transplants.
The study of economics is the study of improving lives and seeing that scarcity is turned into abundance. The concerns over affirmative action were ridiculous from the start. There has never been a finite about of educational capacity. NO white guy was ever told he couldn't go to college so a black kid could. That is just not how anything has ever worked. In fact, the very opposite is true now that fertility rates have for decades been below replacement. Nations are literally giving away free college to attract future residents. If there is an empty seat in a university in Oslo then they can just offer it to the world. Just agree to move to Norway. Maybe you'll get a good job and pay taxes for the next 40 years. Please, make kids in Norway while you're at it.
On the subject of having kids: on p 171 it is explained that for a decade the US had been suffering from falling birth rates and so immigration was becoming more important for growth. This was actually not new and as more countries modernize they are suffering from the same trend for the same reasons. China has now long ago abandoned the one child policy now folks are starting to figure out the extreme challenges with falling/aging populations. The idea held at the writing of this book, that we need to limit births, is long gone.
Obviously as the world pushes peace the entire debate about the draft (much of this book) goes away. Is an African American in Alabama less valuable than a white kid at M.I.T. attending grad school? Wars and drafts make for ugly questions.
Most interesting line of the book is of healthcare from that time. "The actual cases in which a rich person has survived because of better treatment are hard to identify; most of the time, the wealthier patient has simply spent more for treatment that has left him no better off (p. 126.)" In 1978 if you were told you had a bad heart that was pretty much it. Done. Now, decades later, ambulances can get to a car accident with enough time to harvest an organ. AND, we're better at putting those rescued organs in other patients, and they'll live. Now we have tragic questions. 1) Does society have the right to demand you will be an organ donor? 2) When we can't save everyone, but now we can save a few, who do we save? Of course I'm just adding these for Calabresi and Bobbitt. They didn't have to worry about such questions decades ago.
The study of economics is the study of improving lives and seeing that scarcity is turned into abundance. The concerns over affirmative action were ridiculous from the start. There has never been a finite about of educational capacity. NO white guy was ever told he couldn't go to college so a black kid could. That is just not how anything has ever worked. In fact, the very opposite is true now that fertility rates have for decades been below replacement. Nations are literally giving away free college to attract future residents. If there is an empty seat in a university in Oslo then they can just offer it to the world. Just agree to move to Norway. Maybe you'll get a good job and pay taxes for the next 40 years. Please, make kids in Norway while you're at it.
On the subject of having kids: on p 171 it is explained that for a decade the US had been suffering from falling birth rates and so immigration was becoming more important for growth. This was actually not new and as more countries modernize they are suffering from the same trend for the same reasons. China has now long ago abandoned the one child policy now folks are starting to figure out the extreme challenges with falling/aging populations. The idea held at the writing of this book, that we need to limit births, is long gone.
Obviously as the world pushes peace the entire debate about the draft (much of this book) goes away. Is an African American in Alabama less valuable than a white kid at M.I.T. attending grad school? Wars and drafts make for ugly questions.
Most interesting line of the book is of healthcare from that time. "The actual cases in which a rich person has survived because of better treatment are hard to identify; most of the time, the wealthier patient has simply spent more for treatment that has left him no better off (p. 126.)" In 1978 if you were told you had a bad heart that was pretty much it. Done. Now, decades later, ambulances can get to a car accident with enough time to harvest an organ. AND, we're better at putting those rescued organs in other patients, and they'll live. Now we have tragic questions. 1) Does society have the right to demand you will be an organ donor? 2) When we can't save everyone, but now we can save a few, who do we save? Of course I'm just adding these for Calabresi and Bobbitt. They didn't have to worry about such questions decades ago.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews