Assignment
1: Greed
Due in your
discussion section the week of September 15.
(Excerpted from Instructor's Manual Test Bank
to accompany Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards, Understanding
Capitalism. Competition, Command, and Change in the U.S. Economy,
second edition, by Mehrene Larudee).
A. Write down your answers to the Utopia Survey.
B. Pick one of the following "situations"
and write an approximately one-page response to the following two
questions: Do you approve or disapprove? Should this transaction
be prohibited?
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- 1. A very complicated medical procedure has been
discovered which cures cancer in patients who would
otherwise almost certainly die. Staff shortages make it
impossible to treat all those who would benefit, and the
hospital has established a policy that the procedure will
be made available on a first-come, first-serve basis. A
wealthy patient who is last on the waiting list offers to
pay a million dollars and all future medical expenses to
a poor patient on the top of the list; in return, the two
will exchange places and the well-to-do patient will get
the treatment while the other almost certainly will not
get it. If the poor patient dies (which is very likely)
the money will be inherited by her children. The poor
patient voluntarily agrees to the transaction.
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- 2. Tired of making choices all the time, a person decides
to sell himself to another person, receiving a large sum
of money and promising to obey the new owner, who
promises not to mistreat the slave.
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- 3. Having considered alternative jobs (their wages,
working conditions, availability, etc.), a woman selects
prostitution as her occupation, taking all possible
measures to safeguard her own health and that of her
sexual partners.
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- 4. You are waiting in line to buy tickets to a movie that
is just about sold out. Someone from the back of the line
approaches the person in front of you and offers to pay
her $25 to exchange places in line.
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- 5. A politically apathetic person who never votes agrees
to vote for a particular candidate in return for a sum of
money.
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- 6. Wealthy parents who give birth to a child with a minor
birth defect sell their child to another wealthy but
childless family and buy a "perfect" newborn
child from a family badly in need of cash.