Vouching Fights Pandemics

As I’ve pitched vouching as a general solution to both law and medicine, the looming coronavirus pandemic offers a good and challenging concrete test; how well could vouching handle that?

If you recall, under a law vouching system, each person is required to get a voucher who stands ready to cover them for any large legal liability, including fines as punishment for crimes. Under a medical vouching system, each person gets a voucher to pay for all their medical treatments, and also to pay large amounts to a third party when that person becomes disabled, in pain, or dead. Voucher-client contracts can specific physical punishments like torture or jail, co-liability with associates, and limits on freedoms, such as re travel, privacy, or risky behaviors. 

Regarding a looming pandemic, your voucher would know that it must pay for your medical treatment, your lost salary if you stop working, and large fines if you die or get hurt. So it would offer large premium discounts to gain powers to limit your travel and contacts, and to penetrate your privacy enough to see what contagion risks you might incur. And it would have good incentives to make risky medical choices expertly, such as if to try an experimental treatment, or to accept early deliberate exposure. 

When you live with others who you might infect, or who might infect you, you’d probably also be offered premium discounts to let the same voucher cover all of you together. But there would remain key externalities, i.e., risks of infecting or being infected by others who are not covered by the same voucher.

The straightforward legal remedy for such externalities is to let people sue others for infecting them. In the past this remedy has seemed inadequate for two reasons: 

1. It has often been expensive and hard to learn and prove who infected who, and

2. Ever since we stopped holding family members liable for each other, and selling debtors into slavery, most folks just can’t pay large legal debts.

The vouching system directly solves (2), as everyone has a voucher who can pay lots. And the key to (1) is ensuring that the right info is collected and saved.

First, consider some new rules that would limit people’s freedoms in some ways. Imagine people were required to keep an RFID tag (or visible QR code) on their person when not at home, and also to save a sample of their spit or skin once a week? Then phones could remember a history of the tags of people near that phone, and lawsuits could subpoena to get surveillance records of possible infection events, and to see if spit/skin samples on nearby dates contain a particular pathogen, and its genetic code if present. We might also adopt a gambled lawsuit system to make it easier to sue for small harms.

Together these changes could make it feasible to, when you discovered you had been infected, sue those who likely infected you. First, your voucher could collaborate with vouchers of others who were infected nearby in space and time, by a pathogen with a similar code. By combining their tag records and local surveillance records, this group of vouchers could collect a set of candidates of who might plausibly have infected you when and where. 

(Yes, collaboration gains from voucher groups might give vouchers more market power, but not too much, as this can work okay even when there are many competing voucher groups.)

You could then sue all these possible infectors via gambled lawsuits. For the winning lawsuits, your voucher could subpoena their split/skin to see if their pathogen codes match the code of the pathogen that infected you. When a match was found, a lawsuit could proceed, unless they settled out of court. Sharing verdict and settlement info with collaborating vouchers could make it easier for them to figure out who to sue.  

Okay, yes, there is the issue of who would agree to keep RFID tags and sufficient spit/skin samples, if this weren’t required by law. I’ve proposed that the amount awarded in a lawsuit be corrected for how the chances of catching someone varies with the freedoms they keep. Such chances would be estimated by prediction markets. The lower the estimated chance of catching a particular harm for a given set of freedoms, then the higher would be the award amount if they are caught. 

So if, given the choice, some people choose not to use RFID tags or keep spit/skin samples, they may be harder to catch, but they would pay more when they do. (Which is part of why most might choose less privacy.) As a result, clients and their vouchers will know that on average they will pay for the full cost of infecting others. Which could be huge amounts if they infect many others with deadly pathogens. Which would push vouchers to work to ensure that their clients take sufficient care to avoid that. 

And that’s my concept. During the early stages of a pandemic, a system of law/med vouchers would have incentives to try the sort of aggressive case tracing that public health professionals now try. And if such professionals existed, they could collaborate with vouchers. Once the pandemic escaped containment, this vouching system would encourage people to isolate themselves to avoid infecting others, and to avoid being infected. Their freedoms of travel and privacy would become more limited, more like the limits that an aggressive government might impose. 

But exceptions would be allowed when other costs loomed larger, just as economic efficiency demands. Compared to a centralized aggressive government, a voucher system could much more easily and flexibly take into account individual differences in inclinations, vulnerability, and preferences. The choice of freedoms would be made more practical and local, and less symbol.

With vouchers and lawsuits for infections working well to get people to internalize the infection externalities, pandemics might be limited and contained at nearly the level that a cost-benefit analysis would suggest. 

Added 07Mar: Early in a pandemic it is easier to trace who infected you, and it would make sense to let you sue someone who infected you not only for the damages you suffered, but also for the damages you had to pay others who you infected. This could create very large incentives to contain pandemics early.

Later in a pandemic people sued might reasonably argue that they should only have to pay for the harm from someone being infected earlier than they would otherwise have been, which might be no harm at all during a period before the peak when medical resources are becoming spread increasingly thin.

Added 10Mar: If later in an infection it becomes too hard to trace who infected who, even with the above reforms, then it might make sense to have more general crime-law-based rules limiting social contact. Vouching can also do well at enforcing such rules.

Added 20Apr: See my more flexible and general approach to requiring that info be collected and saved. Also, if cases are common where you can narrow an infection down to 1 of 5 sources, but can’t prove which one, it makes sense to make them each pay 20% of the damages. This way we don’t need to be >50% confident of each particular infection link.