No, believe it or not this paper wasn’t written by Bryan Caplan or Robin Hanson. From the abstract:
In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone’s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at the bottom of the distribution of income specialize in surrogacy. In the short run, cloning reduces inequality. In the long run, it creates a perfectly egalitarian society where all workers have a top ability if fertility is uncorrelated with ability and if the distribution of ability among sexually produced children is the same as among their parents. In such a society, cloning has disappeared….
Unlike the normal, unpredictable, process of genetic heredity, cloners will be able to guarantee that their clones will be high-ability by cloning high-ability individuals. This paper looks at whether people will create clones for profit. Assuming that slavery will be continue to be illegal, the question is how could someone appropriate wealth from a clone they created? The authors offer three ways:
Negative bequest – this is when you borrow money in someone else’s name, e.g. adopt the baby clone and rack up debt in it’s name. Apparently, this is legal in Japan.
Informational retention – here you withhold information from the clone about where they came from, and who their “model” was unless they pay for it. A problem with this is that the clone has to wait until he’s older to pay for this (since child clones don’t have money, obviously) in which case you may have ruined a lot of potential, as they could have been investing in particular talents throughout childhood. For instance, the clone who learns on his 18th birthday that his model was Mozart, but he’s neglected to learn piano.
Gene ownership – if genetic codes are patentable in the future, then you could sell a clone his genome which contains information that could help them stay healthy or improve their labor market earnings.
Education – top tier schools could form a consortium to clone high-talented individuals to increase the demand for their products, and since top tier schools are not easily replicable this will drive up prices and increase rents.
The first one seems worst to me, since clones have no choice but to pay rents. Given the desirability of having these high-ability clones as citizens, I assume that some countries would pass laws to serve as sanctuaries from this type of debt.
I am curious as to what Bryan Caplan, who has previously argued for his right to clone, would say about whether these things methods of clone wealth appropriation should be legal?
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Sunday ~ August 22nd, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Ted
Negative bequest seems more like identity fraud. I don’t even know what you mean by “legal” in Japan – we don’t have human clones so what do you mean? Are you saying they can do this to their children?
Information retention I guess could work, but what if they simply don’t care? Plus, if you are cloning a famous individual it would be easy for them to find out. Also, on your Mozart example, you’ve implicitly made the assumption that genes determine everything. Wouldn’t these same genes make it so he would be interested in music at a young age?
The gene ownership idea falls through since the clone could simply get a genome analysis done himself. I’m assuming that in a future where we can perfectly clone humans that genome analysis will probably come in little kits at the pharmacy for $120, kind of like pharmacy paternity tests. Why would they pay their clone overlord who is basically trying to extort money from them if they could get it done easily elsewhere? I guess you could presume that the patent prevents this, but you can’t own a piece of someone’s body. That would be a violation of everything we believe in – it’s basically slavery, so I’m assuming if future society has the slightest amount of morality we will agree you can’t own someone’s body and thus you couldn’t prevent them from getting a genome analysis done.
The education idea doesn’t work either if cloning is widespread. Since everyone could clone high-quality individuals, everyone could produce a high-quality staff, administrator, and professors and so high-quality schools would actually be easily replicable.
Only the last one isn’t massively unethical. Replace the first of the three sentences with “child” in place of clone and you’ll get a very uncomfortable moral dilemma. The first one is just criminal fraud as far as I’m concerned. The 2nd one is like only telling an orphan who their parents are if they are willing to pay up, which I hope we all agree is horrible. On the third – that’s just slavery. You shouldn’t be allowed to use a patent to prevent someone from their own body, so they should be able to get the genetic test done themselves. Again, if you prevent them access to their own body – that is basically slavery as you are claiming ownership over it. The fourth is the only one I find ethically allowable.
Also, this whole discussion works under the inherent assumption that genetics somehow determine the outcome of a high-skilled individual with complete disregard to the environment. I see no evidence that just because you clone what appears to be a high-skilled individual that the clone will necessarily come out high-skilled (though it probably increases their probability). And don’t cite me those silly studies about how genes supposedly determine everything. You can tear those down in 5 minutes. All of those studies assume for no reason whatsoever in their statistical model that genes and environment are completely additively separatable in outcomes (e.g. they assume Outcome = Genes + Environment) and do not interact in any way whatsoever. There is no a prior reason why this should be true and find it quite likely that genes and environment interact to produce an outcome in a complex way. In those studies if you allow them to interact (e.g. the model would look more like Outcome = Genes * Environment) then the studies become meaningless dribble.
Sunday ~ August 22nd, 2010 at 7:37 pm
jazzbumpa
Methinks your time would have been better spent treading FRIDAY.
Cheers!
JzB
Sunday ~ August 22nd, 2010 at 7:41 pm
jazzbumpa
Ted -
You can tear those down in 5 minutes. All of those studies assume for no reason whatsoever in their statistical model . . .
Ditto, most of economics, alas. Except for the statistical part. they don’t even have that.
Cheers!
Sunday ~ August 22nd, 2010 at 9:04 pm
RickRussellTX
“cloners will be able to guarantee that their clones will be high-ability by cloning high-ability individuals”
That is disputable. Is there a strong and purely genetic correlation between achievement and genetics?
Keeping in mind that “achievement” consists of substantial components of ability, desire, motivation, learned skills and experience, etc. as well as other hereditary but non-genetic traits like prenatal environment (which is considered a strong candidate as a hereditary cause of homosexuality among otherwise genetically similar siblings, for example).
Somebody wrote a science fiction story back in the early 90s which posited cloning of various famous, high-ability individuals from eras past. The only thing which seemed mostly replicable in the clones was athletic ability. Many attempts were made to clone famous intellectuals, only to find that they were non-achievers in their original fields, or had no overlapping interests at all. A clone of Einstein turned out to be a decent painter who liked to play chess.
Tuesday ~ August 31st, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Will Human Cloning Cause a Financial Crisis? - The Curious Capitalist - TIME.com
[...] decade old paper on the economic effects of human cloning by a French economics professor has been getting some attention. The paper argues that rather than an army of low-level cloned workers or fighters as is predicted [...]