presumed consent

14 results back to index

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

In Georgia, for example, routine removal increased the number of corneal transplants from twenty-five in 1978 to more than one thousand in 1984.3 The widespread practice of routine removal of kidneys would undoubtedly prevent thousands of premature deaths, but many people would object to a law that allows government to take parts of people’s bodies when they have not agreed, in advance, to the taking. Such an approach violates a generally accepted principle, which is that within broad limits, individuals should be able to decide what is to be done with and to their bodies. Presumed Consent A policy that can pass libertarian muster by our standards is called presumed consent. Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate, and they could do so easily.

…

We want to underline the word easily, because the harder it is to register your unwillingness to participate, the less libertarian the policy becomes. Recall that libertarian paternalists want to impose low costs, and if possible no costs, on those who go their own way. Although presumed consent is, in a sense, the opposite of explicit consent, there is a key similarity: under both regimes, those who don’t hold the default preference will have to register in order to opt out. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that both explicit consent and presumed consent could be implemented with “one-click” technology. Specifically, imagine that the state could successfully contact every citizen (and the parents of minors) by email, asking them to register.

…

Surprisingly, almost as many people (79 percent) agreed to be donors in the neutral condition. Although nearly all states in the United States use a version of explicit consent, many countries in Europe have adopted presumed consent laws (though the cost of opting out varies, and always involves more than a click). Johnson and Goldstein have analyzed the effects of such laws by comparing countries with presumed consent to those with explicit consent. The effect on consent rates is enormous. To get a sense of the power of the default rule, consider the difference in consent rates between two similar countries, Austria and Germany.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

However, some countries in Europe, such as Spain, have adopted an opt-out strategy that is called “presumed consent.” You are presumed to give your permission to have your organs harvested unless you explicitly take the option to opt out and put your name on a list of “non-donors.” The findings of Johnson and Goldstein’s paper showed how powerful default options can be. In countries where the default is to be a donor, almost no one opts out, but in countries with an opt-in policy, often less than half of the population opts in! Here, we thought, was a simple policy prescription: switch to presumed consent. But then we dug deeper. It turns out that most countries with presumed consent do not implement the policy strictly.

…

What is worse is that family members in countries with this regime may have no idea what the donor’s wishes were, since most people simply do nothing. That someone failed to fill out a form opting out of being a donor is not a strong indication of his actual beliefs. We came to the conclusion that presumed consent was not, in fact, the best policy. Instead we liked a variant that had recently been adopted by the state of Illinois and is also used in other U.S. states. When people renew their driver’s license, they are asked whether they wish to be an organ donor. Simply asking people and immediately recording their choices makes it easy to sign up.† In Alaska and Montana, this approach has achieved donation rates exceeding 80%.

…

., 186–87 overconfidence, 6, 52, 124, 355 and high trading volume in finance markets, 217–18 in NFL draft, 280, 295 overreaction: in financial markets, 219–20, 222–24, 225–29 generalized, 223–24 to sense of humor, 218, 219, 223 value stocks and, 225–29 Oxford Handbook of Behavioral Economics and the Law, 269 Palm and 3Com, 244–49, 246, 250, 348 paradigms, 167–68, 169–70 Pareto, Vilfredo, 93 parking tickets, 260 passions, 7, 88, 103 paternalism, 269, 322 dislike of term, 324 libertarian, 322, 323–25 path dependence, 298–300 “pay as you earn” system, 335 payment depreciation, 67 Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombing of, 232 P/E effect, 219–20, 222–23, 233, 235 pensions, 9, 198, 241, 320, 357–58 permanent income hypothesis, 95 Peter Principle, 293 pharmaceutical companies, 189–90 Pigou, Arthur, 88, 90 plane tickets, 138 planner-doer model, 104–10 Plott, Charlie, 40, 41, 48, 49, 148, 149, 177, 181 poker, 80, 81–82, 99 poor, 58n Posner, Richard, 259–61, 266 Post, Thierry, 296 poverty, decision making and, 371 Power, Samantha, 330 “Power of Suggestion, The” (Madrian and Shea), 315 practice, 50 predictable errors, 23–24 preferences: change in, 102–3 revealed, 86 well-defined, 48–49 pregnancy, teenage, 342 Prelec, Drazen, 179 Prescott, Edward, 191, 192 present bias (hyperbolic discounting), 91–92, 110, 227n and NFL draft, 280, 287 savings and, 314 presumed consent, in organ donations, 328–29 price controls, 363 price/earnings ratio (P/E), 219–20, 222–23, 233, 235 prices: buying vs. selling, 17, 18–19, 20, 21 rationality of, 206, 222, 230–33, 231, 237, 251–52 variability of stock, 230–33, 231, 367 price-to-rental ratios, 252 principal-agent model, 105–9, 291 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 143–44, 145, 301–5, 302 “Problem of Social Cost, The” (Coase), 263–64 profit maximization, 27, 30 promotional pricing strategy, 62n prompted choice (in organ donation), 327–29 prospect theory, 25–28, 295, 353 acceptance of, 38–39 and “as if” critique of behavioral economics, 46 and consumer choice, 55 and equity premium puzzle, 198 expected utility theory vs., 29 surveys used in experiments of, 38 psychological accounting, see mental accounting “Psychology and Economics Conference Handbook,” 163 “Psychology and Savings Policies” (Thaler), 310–13 Ptolemaic astronomy, 169–70 public goods, 144–45 Public Goods Game, 144–46 Punishment Game, 141–43, 146 Pythagorean theorem, 25–27 qualified default investment alternatives, 316 quantitative analysis, 293 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 197, 201 quasi-hyperbolic discounting, 91–92 quilt, 57, 59, 61, 65 Rabin, Matthew, 110, 181–83, 353 paternalism and, 323 racetracks, 80–81, 174–75 Radiolab, 305 randomized control trials (RCTs), 8, 338–43, 344, 371 in education, 353–54 Random Walk Down Walk Street, A (Malkiel), 242 rational expectations, 98, 191 in macroeconomics, 209 rational forecasts, 230–31 rationality: bounded, 23–24, 29, 162 Chicago debate on, 159–63, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 READY4K!

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

ORGAN TRANSPLANTS: The first successful long-term kidney transplant was performed at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston by Joseph Murray in December 1954, as related in Nicholas Tilney, Transplant: From Myth to Reality (Yale University Press, 2003). / 111 “Donorcyclists”: see Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Brian Moore, “Donorcycles: Do Motorcycle Helmet Laws Reduce Organ Donations?” Michigan State University working paper, 2009. / 111 “Presumed consent” laws in Europe: see Alberto Abadie and Sebastien Gay, “The Impact of Presumed Consent Legislation on Cadaveric Organ Donation: A Cross Country Study,” Journal of Health Economics 25, no. 4 (July 2006). / 112 The Iranian kidney program is described in Ahad J. Ghods and Shekoufeh Savaj, “Iranian Model of Paid and Regulated Living-Unrelated Kidney Donation,” Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 1 (October 2006); and Benjamin E.

…

In the United States, the rate of traffic fatalities was declining, which was great news for drivers but bad news for patients awaiting a lifesaving kidney. (At least motorcycle deaths kept up, thanks in part to many state laws allowing motorcyclists—or, as transplant surgeons call them, “donorcyclists”—to ride without helmets.) In Europe, some countries passed laws of “presumed consent” rather than requesting that a person donate his organs in the event of an accident, the state assumed the right to harvest his organs unless he or his family specifically opted out. But even so, there were never enough kidneys to go around. Fortunately, cadavers aren’t the only source of organs.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

This idea has profound implications when it comes to something like organ donation. Spain, France, Norway, Israel, and many other countries have “opt-out” (or presumed consent) laws when it comes to organ donation. You are an organ donor unless you indicate otherwise, which you are free to do. (In contrast, the United States has an “opt-in” system, meaning that you are not an organ donor unless you sign up to be one.) Inertia matters, even when it comes to something as serious as organ donation. Economists have found that presumed consent laws have a significant positive effect on organ donation, controlling for relevant country characteristics such as religion and health expenditures.

…

Economists have found that presumed consent laws have a significant positive effect on organ donation, controlling for relevant country characteristics such as religion and health expenditures. Spain has the highest rate of cadaveric organ donations in the world—50 percent higher than the United States.14 True libertarians (as opposed to the paternalistic kind) reject presumed consent laws, because they imply that the government “owns” your internal organs until you make some effort to get them back. Good government matters. The more sophisticated our economy becomes, the more sophisticated our government institutions need to be. The Internet is a perfect example. The private sector is the engine of growth for the web economy, but it is the government that roots out fraud, makes on-line transactions legally binding, sorts out property rights (such as domain names), settles disputes, and deals with issues that we have not even thought about yet.

…

Barry Bearak, “In India, the Wheels of Justice Hardly Move,” New York Times, June 1, 2000. 12. Thomas L. Friedman, “I Love D.C.,” New York Times, November 7, 2000, p. A29. 13. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 14. Giacomo Balbinotto Neto, Ana Katarina Campelo, and Everton Nunes da Silva, “The Impact of Presumed Consent Law on Organ Donation: An Empirical Analysis from Quantile Regression for Longitudinal Data,” Berkeley Program in Law & Economics, Paper 050107–2 (2007). CHAPTER 4. GOVERNMENT AND THE ECONOMY II 1. John Markoff, “CIA Tries Foray into Capitalism,” New York Times, September 29, 1999. 2.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

Curiously, one of Prime Minister Brown’s smartest new political aids, Greg Beales, had worked on the original PMSU paper on behaviour change. In the new No. 10, Greg held responsibility for health. It’s no coincidence, then, that one early move of the Brown administration was to float the idea of changing the defaults on organ donation to ‘presumed consent’ – where people would opt out of being donors, rather than opt in. But even this was not quite the right fight for that time or issue. There was a public and professional backlash against the idea, and the last whisper of the old PMSU paper was silenced for now, in Britain at least.19 On the other side of the Atlantic, behavioural approaches to policy were about to get a major boost.

…

We all agreed that an early objective would be to try out some of the most prominent and best-evidenced ideas from the wider literature, and from the US in particular. These could provide some early quick wins, and help to establish the approach. For example, we suspected that a version of a successful ‘promoted choice’ approach to organ donation in Illinois could work well in the UK without needing to go for the ‘presumed consent’ method that had been proposed by the previous Brown government and abandoned in the face of public opposition. If it worked, it would be a nice illustration of the Coalition’s different approach, and of course would hopefully save a few lives. Other criteria for early priorities were that: the issue was a PM or DPM priority; the intervention was likely to be revenue-producing or saving (given the pressures on budgets); and the intervention was amenable to systematic testing and trialling, with good management data in place that we could use for measurement.

…

Both were later merged to form the PM’s Strategy Unit, which lasted until it was shut down by the 2010 Coalition Government of Cameron and Clegg in early 2011. 18 Cialdini, R. B. (2003). ‘Crafting normative messages to protect the environment’. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(4), 105–109. 19 Interestingly, the Welsh Government did continue to pursue the idea of presumed consent. Organ donation was also on the list of early topics for BIT in 2010, though with a subtly different solution in mind. Chapter 2: Nudging Goes Mainstream 1 In my view Richard Thaler’s work is sufficiently outstanding and impactful in its own right to merit the Nobel Prize in economics, a view I know to be shared by many others.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

If you are like most people, you answered yes to the first question. But the response to the second question depends a great deal on which country you live in. For instance, take neighboring countries Germany and Austria. Only 12 percent of Germans have explicitly consented to donate their organs, while virtually 100 percent of Austrians have offered presumed consent. (See figure 4–3.) The difference? In Germany, you must opt in to become a donor. In Austria, you must opt out to avoid being a donor. The consent gap has less to do with attitudes about donating than it does with default options. The difference translates into saved lives; the actual rate of organ donation is notably higher in opt-out countries.16 The donor statistics point to our second mistake: the perception that people decide what is best for them independent of how the choice is framed.

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

As the efficient young man turned to leave, I said, ‘Please tell Professor Cranston that I don’t want any blood transfusion.’ Then, tempting fate, I added, ‘If I suffer a fatal stroke during surgery I’m happy to be an organ donor.’ Altruistic to the end, but he didn’t hear me so the gesture was wasted. With the introduction of ‘presumed’ consent in contrast to voluntary donation, I’ve since reconsidered that. It’s a throwback to the body-snatching era. I was still reading in my white theatre gown when Oliver Dyar the anaesthetist walked in. I had known Oliver for twenty years or more as one of the intensive care consultants who looked after my patients.

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

Sane men do not lose control and begin masturbating in front of everybody at the party; they remain aware of right and wrong, of embarrassment and propriety, even when intoxicated. Respect for women’s bodies, whether they be asleep, or naked or drugged, should be learned like toilet training. It has to be taught. It’s too dangerous to presume consent is obvious and that anyone who gets it wrong is a bad person. This needs deep thought and conversations. And alcohol is a very complicating factor. There is a point of drunkenness where people are considered unable to give consent to various things, including sexual contact. There are multitudes of warnings aimed at young women, shouting about the dangers of being wasted and vulnerable, while there is virtually nothing aimed at educating young men.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

thymos (spiritedness) time, concept of Tocqueville, Alexis de totalitarianism, collapse of transgenic crops Tribe, Laurence Trivers, Robert Tsien, Joe Turing test Turkey Tuskegee syphilis scandal twin studies typical, meaning of word tyranny failure of of the majority unborn presumed consent of rights of United Kingdom United Nations United States attitude toward regulation attitude toward technology demographic trends in family breakdown in international influence of, re regulation natural right as foundation of political system, effect on regulation principles of regulatory policy and practice U.S.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But there was no opt-out form included, so people wishing to do so had to go to a website, find a form to download, print it, sign it, send it as a letter to their general practitioner (GP) and hope it would be acted upon. Bureaucratic hurdles were deliberately raised, increasing the cost of opting out and giving a bias to ‘presumed consent’. Those least likely to opt out are the uneducated, the poor and the ‘digitally excluded’, mostly elderly without access to online facilities. As of 2010, 63 per cent of all those over the age of 65 in the United Kingdom lived in a household without internet access. There is government pressure, led by its ‘digital inclusion champion’, for more people to have access.

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

How will they then afford a ticket to my show? The NHS is under pressure to withdraw pornography from patients who need to give sperm samples. I think it’s a terrible idea to remove pornography from hospitals. It’s pretty much the only reason I visited Dad after his bypass operation. Wales is to introduce presumed consent for organ donation. This should greatly improve patient survival rates … as doctors there offer still-beating hearts as gifts to call upon the healing powers of their many gods. And a hospital in Cardiff gave its elderly patients tambourines and maracas to summon medical help. Not sure that’ll work.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

“Under mandated choice, as much as 75% of the U.S. adult population would become committed potential organ donors” (Aron Spital, “Mandated Choice for Organ Donation: Time to Give It a Try,” Annals of Internal Medicine, vol. 125 [ July 1996], pp. 66–69). “We surveyed members of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) in conjunction with the Foundation for the Advancement of Cardiac Therapies FACT). METHODS/RESULTS: We asked for opinions about how to improve organ donation. Of 739 respondents, 75% supported presumed consent” (M. C. Oz et al., “How to improve organ donation: results of the ISHLT/FACT poll,” Heart Lung Transplant, vol. 22, no. 4 [April 2003], pp. 389–410). 47. Rousseau used this phrase in his 1762 Social Contract, and it has led many liberals focused on private liberty alone to conclude that Rousseau was either incoherent or a dangerous protototalitarian thinker of the kind George Orwell would eventually skewer.

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain, Alexis Averbuck

Airbnb, banking crisis, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, post-work, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, undersea cable

In 1996, neuroscience expert Dr Kári Stefánsson recognised that this genealogical material could be combined with Iceland’s unusually homogenous population to produce something unique – a country-sized genetic laboratory. In 1998 the Icelandic government controversially voted to allow the creation of a single database, by presumed consent, containing all Icelanders’ genealogical, genetic and medical records. Even more controversially, the government allowed Kári’s biotech startup company deCODE Genetics to create this database, and access it for its biomedical research, using the database to trace inheritable diseases and pinpoint the genes that cause them.

Lonely Planet Iceland by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, banking crisis, capital controls, car-free, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, DeepMind, European colonialism, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, presumed consent, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

In 1996, neuroscience expert Dr Kári Stefánsson recognised that this genealogical material could be combined with Iceland’s unusually homogenous population to produce something unique – a country-sized genetic laboratory. In 1998 the Icelandic government controversially voted to allow the creation of a single database, by presumed consent, containing all Icelanders’ genealogical, genetic and medical records. Even more controversially, the government allowed Kári’s biotech startup company Decode Genetics to create this database, and access it for its biomedical research, using the database to trace inheritable diseases and pinpoint the genes that cause them.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But the requirement that all future generations must consent adds nothing to the moral force of Allhoff’s arguments since already all rational agents would consent to such enhancements. So again, safe genetic interventions that improve a prospective child’s health, cognition, and so forth would be morally permissible because we can presume consent from the individuals who benefit from the enhancements. Many opponents of human genetic engineering are either conscious or unconscious genetic determinists. They fear that biotechnological knowledge and practice will somehow undermine human freedom. In a sense, these genetic determinists believe that somehow human freedom resides in the gaps of our knowledge of our genetic makeup.