So Much Blood

Summary

In a recent post about trading stuff for money, I mentioned: Europe had a [blood plasma] shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% of all exports by value. The internet’s reaction was: “TWO PERCENT?” “TWO PERCENT OF U.S. EXPORTS ARE BLOOD!?” Well, I took that 2% number from a 2024 article in the Economist: Last year American blood-product exports accounted for 1.8% of the country’s total goods exports, up from just 0.5% a decade ago—and were worth $37bn. That makes blood the country’s ninth-largest goods export, ahead of coal and gold. All told, America now supplies 70% or so of the plasma used to make medicine. I figured the Economist was trustworthy on matters of economics. But note: That 1.8% number is for blood products, not just blood. It’s a percentage of goods exported, excluding services. It’s wrong. The article doesn’t explain how they arrived at 1.8%. And since the Economist speaks in the voice of God (without bylines), I can’t corner and harass the actual journalist. I’d have liked to reverse-engineer their calculations, but this was impossible since the world hasn’t yet caught on that they should always show lots of digits. So what’s the right number? In 2023, total US goods exports were $2,045 billion, almost exactly ⅔ of all exports, including services. How much of that involves blood? Well, the government keeps statistics on trade based on an insanely detailed classification scheme. All goods get some number. For example, dirigibles fall under HTS 8801.90.0000: Leg warmers fall under HTS 6406.99.1530: So what about blood? Well, HTS 3002 is the category for: Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera and other blood fractions and modified immunological products, whether or not obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products: The...