Blood and Thunder
Abstract
The subtitle of this extraordinarily interesting book gives a fair indication of its ambitions.Most of it is a detailed comparison of two alternative ways of organizing the collection and allocation of human blood for transfusion and similar purposes.On this level, it appears to beand probably is-a devastating and unanswerable indictment of the American system as inferior to the British in efficiency, morality, and attractiveness.From this secure beachhead, Professor Titmuss launches a broad attack on the market as a mechanism for the mobilization and allocation of scarce resources, and, even more generally, on the whole economizing mode of thought which-as he might have said if he were a different sort of man-knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.On this broader front he scores some important points but is ultimately confused.I hope to show that what arouses Titmuss's anger and scorn is usually not, as he thinks, the use of economic reasoning but its misuse.There is a lesson here for everyone interested in social policy, because some economists do have a way of drifting into sharp propositions that cannot be fully supported even on narrowly economic grounds.But blood first, thunder afterward.I.In Great Britain, the collection and allocation of blood is entirely in the hands of the National Blood Transfusion Service as an integral part of the National Health Service.(The actual functioning is decentralized through Regional Transfusion Centres corresponding roughly to the Regional Hospital Boards.)Essentially all blood is collected from volun--
Cite this
Robert M.HG Solow, Richard M. Titmuss (1971). Blood and Thunder. The Yale Law Journal. https://doi.org/10.2307/795132
@article{mhg1971blood,
title = {Blood and Thunder},
author = {Solow, Robert M.HG and Titmuss, Richard M.},
year = {1971},
journal = {The Yale Law Journal},
doi = {10.2307/795132}
}Citations in this library
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.