Knowing and Making

David Karp comments on the Hamilton city government's policy for swine flu vaccines ( also here ): I think part of the problem trying to figure out how to allocate vaccines is figuring out what our policy goal is. Is it to cut down on externalities? Giving preference for emergency workers and child care workers makes sense in that regard, because most people in society benefit from these people being healthy enough to work during a pandemic. Is it about fairness? If so, is it really fair that some people are considered more worthy of a vaccine than other people simply because of their age, how they caught the flu, or the type of work they do? Is it about using the vaccine available to cure as many people as possible? In that case, the fifth criteria -- giving the vaccine to those most likely to survive a particular strain -- seems like the best to use. Or should the criteria be economic efficiency: those who have the highest maximum willingness to pay for the vaccine get it? Actua...

This (2006) post from Worthwhile Canadian Initiatives, quoting the Globe and Mail, left me laughing and crying at the same time. It's hard to pick out a representative line, because the whole article is such a beautifully coherent farrago of idiocy. So I'll stick to quoting Stephen Gordon's reaction: the last paragraph defies parsing; the only reaction I can muster is slack-jawed horror [Note for clarity: it's the Globe and Mail I'm laughing at, not Worthwhile Canadian Initiatives!]