Patient: Doc, my economy has been experiencing aches here in this mid-coastal region. I’m wondering whether it might have something to do with my auto sector.
Economist: Hmm, let me peek over here at your auto sales and mid-coastal interest rates. Have you noticed any symptoms? Any depression or lack of consumer confidence or shortness of Q4 growth or anything like that?
Patient: Yeah, I suppose. I’m hoping maybe you can write me a prescription for some stimulus.
Economist: {Sigh} Senator, you know that stimulus is loaded with potentially dangerous side effects. It can cause severe swelling in the political sector, chronic economic fatigue, suicidal thoughts as the result of newspeople who won’t stop using the word “stimulus,” and if you’re not careful, you could become dependent.
Patient: This auto sector’s not going to heal itself, Doc.
Economist: Um, yes it will.
Patient: {Pause. Awkward eye contact}
Economist: Fine. Here’s your damn prescription now please go away and don’t come back until next week.
Economist: Hmm, let me peek over here at your auto sales and mid-coastal interest rates. Have you noticed any symptoms? Any depression or lack of consumer confidence or shortness of Q4 growth or anything like that?
Patient: Yeah, I suppose. I’m hoping maybe you can write me a prescription for some stimulus.
Economist: {Sigh} Senator, you know that stimulus is loaded with potentially dangerous side effects. It can cause severe swelling in the political sector, chronic economic fatigue, suicidal thoughts as the result of newspeople who won’t stop using the word “stimulus,” and if you’re not careful, you could become dependent.
Patient: This auto sector’s not going to heal itself, Doc.
Economist: Um, yes it will.
Patient: {Pause. Awkward eye contact}
Economist: Fine. Here’s your damn prescription now please go away and don’t come back until next week.
If medical doctors behaved like economists:
Patient: Doc, I’m having some chest pains and shortness of breath. Lately it’s been hard to even do the normal things like brush my teeth or take the dog for a walk. I’m desperate here. What can I do?
Medical doctor: This stuff is too freaking complicated. Anyone who thinks they can top-down control this stuff is either institutionally delusional or Paul Krugman. Bodies actually work remarkably efficiently on their own, and any attempts to tamper or interfere with their normal processes are likely to result in some very unexpected and very undesirable consequences. You’re better off letting your body heal itself.
Patient: Um, so then what did I come see you for?
Medical doctor: Philosophy?
Medical doctor: This stuff is too freaking complicated. Anyone who thinks they can top-down control this stuff is either institutionally delusional or Paul Krugman. Bodies actually work remarkably efficiently on their own, and any attempts to tamper or interfere with their normal processes are likely to result in some very unexpected and very undesirable consequences. You’re better off letting your body heal itself.
Patient: Um, so then what did I come see you for?
Medical doctor: Philosophy?
Those two little thingies saved you from having to endure my hand waving about the similarities and differences between economists and medical doctors. But now I have some questions for the class:
- Why aren’t medical doctors and economists treated in a more similar way, and/or why don’t they behave in a more similar way?
- Should medical doctors be more philosophical? Should economists be more tacticiany?
- Should politicians wanting to change economic policy have to get “prescriptions” from certified economists?
- What are the economic equivalents of “eating right” and “exercise”? (Diversity? Well-enforced property rights?)
- Why are there so many laissez-fair economists and so few laissez-faire medical doctors (i.e., doctors who say “just give it some rest,” let your body heal itself)?
- Is the human body any less complicated or interactiony than an economy? Are the side effects of medical treatment any more knowable or predictable (or any less perverse) than economic “treatments”?
- Is the medical profession the most dangerously, frighteningly overconfident bunch of primates currently operating?
Okay, the last question revealed my hand. I am as skeptical of medical doctors’ ability to solve my body’s ailments as I am of Paul Krugman’s ability to solve our economy’s. Medical doctors, like economists, have normal homo sapien brains that are perfectly incapable of making anything more than a blind dart toss at how a treatment will pinball through a mindbending series of interaction effects, i.e., what it will end up doing to us.
I have avoided the doctor’s office for years, not because I have an adolescent sense of invincibility but because I have a Hayekian sense of humility that we goofy humans don’t know what the eff we’re doing. And there’s some evidence for that:
In the late 1970s, most of 5,816 non-elderly adults from six U.S. cities were randomly assigned for three to five years to one of two situations. Either they had free health care, or they had to pay a substantial fraction (ranging from 25 to 95 percent) of their health care costs. … What did they find? The bottom line: no significant difference in general health was seen between those with more health care and those with less.
In fact, those who had more health care generally had worse outcomes (controlling for other factors), meaning that medical doctors are probably hurting at least as much as they are helping.
Although I can sit behind my keyboard and tout my laissez-faire medical philosophy all day, my greater confidence in bodies than doctors, I know that as soon as I notice a grim change in freckle coloration, I am going to scurry to the white coats like a child without his night light. Death will do that to you.
