Check out this fun Freakonomics podcast featuring economists Steve Horwitz and Glen Whitman as well as yours truly, and while you’re at it, why not check out the Economics of the Undead blog too?
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prior probability 
Reblogged this on prior probability and commented:
We are reblogging our link to the Freakonomics podcast on the Economics of the Undead. Some of the comments (particularly the comments by S Fowler and Davo) have really been bugging us for some time. Fowler, for example, notes that “Vampires ‘procreate’ via their bite,” while Davo writes: “[Enrique Guerra-Pujol] makes a critical error: in most vampire lore, they are a different (more advanced) species. Asking vampires to buy human blood is like asking humans to buy a ham hock off of a pig.”
The latter comment is easier to dismiss, since markets are generally win-win, the social status or innate biology of buyers and sellers really doesn’t matter. People (including ultra-advanced and snooty vampires) will engage in trade when it is mutually beneficial to do so.
Fowler’s comment, by contrast, implies that all vampires are rapists. After all, if vampires “procreate via their bite”, and if such bites are non-consensual, then what Fowler is really saying is that a vampire bite is analogous to rape. This can’t be right based on the various fictional portrayals of vampires I have seen. But even if Fowler’s analysis is correct, then my argument in favor of human-vampire markets is all the more stronger. In fact, assuming that some humans would like to become vampires (recall the first part of the Freakonomics podcast with Steven Levitt), perhaps vampires could actually charge us for the privilege of being bitten, for turning us into vampires!