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Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT; founded homefair.com, one of the very first commercial websites, in 1994; separated from Homefair in January 2000 after it was sold to Homestore; is author of Under the Radar: Starting Your Internet Business without Venture Capital, and is an essayist. Send comments to us at econ@corante.com

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March 12, 2004

Biotech and Sports

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Posted by Arnold

I argue that we should not think of biotechnology solely in terms of sports metaphors.


sports are a peculiar facet of human experience. They are inevitably zero-sum in character. For every winner, there is a loser. Each tournament has only one champion. When an athlete breaks a world record, the previous record-holder's title is eclipsed.

...In fact, many social phenomena -- particularly those that are studied by economists -- are not zero-sum games. In those cases, zero-sum thinking turns out to be quite counterproductive in attempting to trace out systemic implications.

Another comment on bioethics and the President's council comes from Carl Zimmer.


When our ancestors stood upright and got big brains, Greene argues, these moral intuitions became more elaborate. They probably helped hominids survive, by preventing violence and deception from destroying small bands of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other to find food and raise children. But evolution is not a reliable guide for figuring out how to lead our lives today. Just because moral intuitions may be the product of natural selection doesn't mean they are right or wrong, any more than feathers or tails are right or wrong.

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