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> Good thing America's lethal injection poison the whole body and render it completely unusable even if they wanted to donate.

Are you really sure you want to defend the Chinese system and criticize the American system on utilitarian grounds? Let's run through the general structure.

Only a fraction of the Chinese executions result in organ donations; some will fail, of course, and only a fraction of those donations result in the equivalent of a life, 30 years at the most optimistic the article says. Given the ages involved (younger men being executed for their organs' use in older men), we can expect each execution to save significantly less than one life on a lifespan/QALY basis.

The value of each execution would not be significantly better in the US and the same logic applies.

Wikipedia lists rates of Chinese execution at 5000-10000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Peop...) a year during the 2000s; the estimate is difficult as it is a state secret. It is not in the US, so we have more solid numbers in the 30-50 range for the 2000s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...).

Keeping in mind the previous logic, this indicates the number of lives saved by organ donations from all US executions would be under 30-50.

Now, let's compare that with the Chinese system. At 5000 executions a year, the profit and other perverse incentives in place would need to result in only 1% of prisoners being unjustly executed for the benefits of American organ donation to be completely eliminated.

And actually, remembering the point about QALYs, for every person unjustly executed for their organs, they represent a net decrease in welfare. We all know how many the US incorrectly executes, and that's with the state benefitting not at all from the execution and wasting a tremendous amount of money going through appeals and a strong civil society and many groups opposed to execution like the Innocence Project.

There is no reason to think China does not have a significantly worse false execution rate even before we add in the perverse incentives of organ harvesting.




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