We are re-blogging for our vampire friends our guest blog post below on the subject of “Vampiric medical technology.” Our post builds on our chapter (“Buy or Bite?“) in the book The Economics of the Undead in which we make the case for legal markets in blood sales between vampires and humans. In our blog post below, we extend this argument even further …
Guest Post by Enrique Guerra-Pujol
In Chapter 12 (“Buy or Bite?”) of The Economics of the Undead, I observed how most members of the vampire race resort to coercion, compulsion, and confiscation to procure fresh supplies of blood — an essential staple of the vampire diet — and I posed the following fundamental question: “Are vampires ‘bad’? Are they inherently evil or unethical creatures?”
My main argument in “Buy or Bite?” is that vampires are not necessarily bad, that without a legal market for the purchase and sale of blood, vampires have no other choice but to steal their supplies of blood through fraud and force. I thus proposed the creation of legalized “blood markets” to allow us humans to transfer our property rights in our blood to vampires on a consensual and contractual basis.
The domain of my argument, however, was limited to the fictional world of vampires…
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prior probability 
This makes me laugh at the moment first when i read the title of the page..but it was an amazing post that worth reading it
Thanks! Jess Zimmerman’s beautiful essay “Young Blood” is also a good read. Her essay inspired me to write my “vampiric medical technology” post.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that blood already *is* a marketable commodity. People aren’t allowed to sell their own blood, but blood banks are allowed to sell *other* people’s blood. Blood banks have been known to get into bidding wars for the right to get at the blood of high school kids. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-08-30/news/os-blood-schools-compete-20100830_1_blood-banks-community-blood-centers-fbc
You may also be interested in this podcast from NPR Radiolab, which is where I first learned about the “blood market”: http://www.radiolab.org/story/308403-blood/
In it they discuss how some blood banks do arbitrage with donated blood – Florida blood banks buy blood from Iowa and then turn around and sell it at a premium to New York blood banks.
Thanks for these informative pointers, which highlight a fundamentally unfair asymmetry: one set of non-market rules for individual blood donors, and another set of pro-market rules for blood banks. We are definitely going to update our priors!