Emmanuel Farhi 1978-2020

Emmanuel Farhi passed away last week, unexpectedly and tragically.  He was my colleague at Harvard, and we had recently sought to hire him at Stanford.  

Here's the Harvard Economics department memorial, which contains moving testimonials: 

In Memoriam: Emmanuel Farhi 1978-2020 

This has been a hard year at Harvard, with four deaths in the department in the last 12 months.

In Memoriam: Gary Chamberlain 1948-2020

In Memoriam: Alberto Alesina 1957-2020

In Memoriam: Martin L. Weitzman, 1942 - 2019

Bill Sandholm (1970-2020)

The evolutionary game theorist Bill Sandholm has left the game.

Here's the memoriam from the Game Theory Society:
In Memoriam: William H. Sandholm (1970-2020)

And here's the obit from the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he spent his career. It lists the cause of death as depression.
In Memoriam: William H. (Bill) Sandholm, leading evolutionary game theorist, cherished mentor and valued colleague

Here's his home page at the University of Wisconsin: Bill Sandholm's Home Page
Here's his Google Scholar page: William H. Sandholm

What values do we bequeath to our grandchildren? Alberto Alesina et al. on the generations following the Cultural Revolution in China

In what is perhaps the last paper he completed before his recent untimely death on May 23 from a heart attack, Alberto Alesina (1957-2020) and colleagues consider how effectively the Cultural Revolution in China in disrupting the old pattern of elites, and of how it looks today in the grandchildren's generation.

Persistence through Revolutions
Alberto F. Alesina, Marlon Seror, David Y. Yang, Yang You, Weihong Zeng
NBER Working Paper No. 27053, April 2020.

The Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s and Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 aimed to eradicate inequality in wealth and education, to shut off intergenerational transmission, and to eliminate cultural differences in the population. Using newly digitized archival data and linked contemporary household surveys and census, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the population economically and culturally in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Grandchildren of the pre-revolution elites earn 17 percent more than those from non-elite households. In addition, the grandchildren of pre-revolution elites differ in their cultural values: they are less averse to inequality, more individualistic, more pro-market, more pro-education, and more likely to see hard work as critical to success. Through intergenerational transmission, socioeconomic conditions and cultural traits thus survived one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population and to foster mobility.

Olly Williamson (1932-2020)

The great student of transaction costs, Oliver (Olly) Williamson, has died.

Here's the Berkeley obit:
Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson, pioneer of organizational economics, dies at 87

"His multidisciplinary approach to analyzing organizational structures was unconventional in economics at the time—he described it as a melding of soft social science with abstract economic theory. He looked not only at formal firm structure but at culture and social norms. Prof. Ernesto Dal Bó, the Phillips Girgich Professor of Business, called Williamson’s work “a fountain of vocation-shaping epiphanies.”

“After reading his work, we could no longer think of markets, organizations, and legal or political institutions in the same way. And so we didn’t,” Dal Bó said. “His insights are now part of the common sense of social scientists.”
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He won the Nobel prize in economics in 2009: here's his autobiographical statement on the Nobel site. I was struck by this paragraph:

"Although I would not come to appreciate this last until later, there was a major difference between engineering and economics with respect to hypothetical ideals. Thus whereas assumptions of weightlessness or perfect gas laws or frictionlessness etc. served the purpose of simplification in engineering, these assumptions would give way to realities (in the form of friction, resistance, turbulence, and the like) as engineering applications were attempted. In economics, however, assumptions of frictionlessness (of which the standard assumption of zero transaction costs was one) often went unquestioned or, even worse, were invoked asymmetrically. Thus whereas markets were subject to “failures” for which corrective public policy measures were prescribed, there was no corresponding provision for failures in the public sector. A more symmetrical approach would be to recognize that positive transaction costs were the economic counterpart of friction and that all forms of organization experience such costs – albeit in variable degree (depending on the attributes of the transaction to be organized). I credit my engineering background with giving me a receptive attitude toward transaction costs, to include an interest in pinning down and working out the organizational ramifications of such costs."

Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber (1965-2020), who founded "Gift of Life" kidney donor organization

Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber, who founded the Matnat Chaim ("Gift of Life") organization of kidney donors in Israel, has died of coronavirus. He was 55 years old.

YNet has the story:
הרב שהציל חיים נפטר מקורונה (Google Tranlate: The rabbi who saved lives died of corona)

Here's a story in English from Vos Iz Neias? (Yiddish: "What's New?")
Rabbi Yeshayahu Haber, Who Founded “Gift Of Life” For Kidney Donations, Passes Away From Coronavirus

and this from the Jerusalem Post:
'Gift of Life' founder Rabbi Haber passes away at age 55 due to COVID-19

"Haber's funeral will take place at 2 a.m. in Jerusalem. The public is asked not to come to the funeral procession."

GIFT OF Life: Matnat Chaim donors, 2016-2017.

Here are all my posts on Matnat Chaim, which recently recorded its 800th kidney donation.

John Horton Conway (1937-2020)

John Horton Conway, the  John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computation Mathematics, Emeritus, at Princeton, passed away on April 11, while suffering from corona virus Covid-19.

Readers of this blog likely know him for his theorem that, in Gale and Shapley's marriage model with strict preferences, the set of stable matchings is a lattice with respect to the partial order of the men's common preferences, or the women's, and that these two lattices are the dual of one another. This helped us understand the observation already made by Gale and Shapley that the set of stable matchings included a man-optimal stable matching that every man likes at least as much as any stable matching, and similarly  a woman-optimal stable matching that is  (weakly) preferred by all the women to any other stable matching (and that the best stable matching for the men is the worst for the women and vice versa).

He was a man of wide interests and many theorems. (When I met him once and told him that he was famous in the market design community for his lattice theorem about stable matching, he pretended not to know which theorem I meant.)

Here are some obituaries (which focus on some of his more widely famous accomplishments):

COVID-19 Kills Renowned Princeton Mathematician, 'Game Of Life' Inventor John Conway In 3 Days

""I am sorry to confirm the passing of my colleague John Conway. An incomparable mathematician, a pleasant neighbor, and an excellent coffee acquaintance," Wang tweeted.
...
"Conway's most notable contribution to his field may have been his invention of the Game of Life, leading to the popularization of cellular automaton."
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John Conway Dies From Coronavirus

"According to Princeton University Conway's proudest achievement was the invention of new system of numbers, the surreal numbers—a continuum of numbers that include not only real numbers but also the infinitesimal and the infinite numbers, noting:

"When he discovered them in 1970, the surreals had John wandering around in a white-hot daydream for weeks.

"His surreal numbers inspired a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth, which includes the line:

“Conway said to the numbers, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”

"He also invented a naming system for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation."

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And this, from Scott Aaronson:

John Horton Conway (1937-2020)
"His The Book of Numbers (coauthored with Richard Guy, who himself recently passed away at age 103) made a huge impression on me as a teenager. I worked through every page, gasping at gems like eπ√163 (“no, you can’t be serious…”), embarrassed to be learning so much from a “fun, popular” book but grateful that my ignorance of such basic matters was finally being remedied."

The year in passings

I noted a number of deaths this year (and memorials for earlier passings):

•  Michel Balinski (1933-2019)
•  Alan Krueger (1960-2019)
•  Dr. Oscar Salvatierra, Jr. (1935 - 2019)
•  Special issue of NRL in honor of Uri Rothblum, February 2019
•  Memorial service for Martin Shubik today at Yale
• In Memoriam: Martin Shubik
•  Xenotransplants, Baby Fae, and the complex pioneering efforts of Dr. Leonard Bailey, RIP
• Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)
• Marty Weitzman, 1942-2019
• Ed Green, 1948-2019
• Egon Balas, 1922-2019
•  Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

The Lancet recalls the life and work of Sadako Ogata, born 16 September 1927; died 22 October 2019.

Sadako Ogata
"Sadako Ogata began to transform UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, almost as soon as she became UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1991. At the time, the Gulf War had displaced more than a million Iraqi Kurds and thousands were blocked from crossing into Turkey. They were in desperate need just inside the Iraqi border. Ogata quickly sought to expand UNHCR's rules to allow it to provide aid not only to refugees but also to people displaced within their own country. “Most of the senior leaders in UNHCR were against providing assistance to those Kurdish refugees because they were inside Iraq”, said Izumi Nakamitsu, who was based in Turkey at the time for UNHCR and accompanied Ogata on her first mission as High Commissioner to visit the displaced Kurds. “The refugee law says that you're not a refugee until you cross the border and senior officials advised her against providing protection and assistance. But she instinctively felt this was wrong”, said Nakamitsu, who is now a UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Ogata's insistence that UNHCR provide aid to people who are internally displaced is one of her lasting legacies."
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And from the Guardian:

Sadako Ogata obituary
Independent-minded head of the UN agency for refugees, who expanded its role to help millions more displaced people

Egon Balas, 1922-2019

I only now learned that Egon Balas passed away in March, at the age of 96.  

I last saw him in 2017, full of energy at an IFORS conference in Quebec City. We became friends in Pittsburgh, where he was the leader of the OR community at CMU.

He came to operations research in the second half of his life, after an incredibly dramatic first half.  Here's a link to his CMU obituary:

March 19, 2019, Remembering Egon Balas

"His early life included two imprisonments—one for joining the communist party to oppose the Nazis during World War II and the second by the communist party after the war in a Stalinist purge. He later became one of the world’s foremost experts in mathematical optimization after joining Carnegie Mellon in 1967."

Here's the WSJ obituary:

Egon Balas, Jailed and Tortured in Romania, Found Salvation in Math

After losing his faith in Marxism, academic discovered a genius for devising algorithms and solving business problems

And here's the obit from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Obituary: Egon Balas | WW II freedom fighter became ‘legendary scholar’ at CMU

Ed Green, 1948-2019

Ran Shorrer at Penn State passes on the news that his colleague Ed Green died Saturday morning after a long fight with cancer. Ed and I were colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1980s.  He was a scholar's scholar and a gentle man.

Perhaps his most famous paper is Green and Porter (1984), which outlined how cartels could effectively coordinate on high prices even when they could only imperfectly monitor one another, by engaging in price wars when defection was suspected:

ECONOMETRICA: JAN 1984, VOLUME 52, ISSUE 1

Noncooperative Collusion under Imperfect Price Information

https://doi.org/0012-9682(198401)52:1<87:ncuipi>2.0.CO;2-6
p. 87-100

Edward J. Green, Robert H. Porter

Recent work in game theory has shown that, in principle, it may be possible for firms in an industry to form a self-policing cartel to maximize their joint profits. This paper examines the nature of cartel self-enforcement in the presence of demand uncertainty. A model of a noncooperatively supported cartel is presented, and the aspects of industry structure which would make such a cartel viable are discussed.


Ed also has a series of papers with his wife, Ruilin Zhou.
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Update: here's an obituary.
Obituary of Edward James Green, 71
10/28/2019

In Memoriam: Martin Shubik

Ben Mattison and Kerry DeDomenico at Yale have sent around an email pointing to some brief remembrances of Martin Shubik from his friends, that was distributed at his memorial service.

In memoriam: Martin Shubik

 It's short, read the whole thing and think of Martin. 

I would have loved to read what Lloyd Shapley would have said about Martin, but I was delighted to read, in Pradeep Dubey's loving account, what Martin once said about Lloyd, after beating him in a game of Go: “No matter what happens in the game, Lloyd always wins the analysis.”

If you're in a hurry, here's what Bob Aumann had to say about Martin's professional contribution:

"I think the most important thing that can be said about Martin scientifically is that he is simply the father of the application of game theory to modern economic theory—an immensely important contribution. Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s book is called “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” and indeed they must be credited with the fundamental idea of studying economics with Game Theory tools; but their approach—Stable Sets—never really caught on. It was Martin who made the highly successful connection of the Core with the Competitive Equilibria, and this is what got started the ball rolling."
Robert Aumann
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Some earlier posts:

Thursday, December 20, 2012 Martin Shubik

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Marty Weitzman, 1942-2019

For many years, Marty and I both had offices on the third floor of the Littauer building at Harvard.  I didn't know him well, but he was a big thinker,  who thought unflinchingly about the tail-end dangers of climate change.

His obit in the NY Times suggests that he was despondent about the future.

Martin Weitzman, Virtuoso Climate Change Economist, Dies at 77
A pathfinder in environmental economics who insisted on factoring in the worst-case scenarios of global warming

"In “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” (2015), Professor Weitzman and his co-author, Gernot Wagner, an economist at New York University, wrote: “One thing we know for sure is that a greater than 10 percent chance of the earth’s eventual warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit or more — the end of the human adventure on this planet as we now know it — is too high. And that’s the path the planet is on at the moment.”

“Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad,” the authors concluded. “Most everything we don’t know tells us it’s probably much worse.”

"His analysis of the economics of climate change became known as the Dismal Theorem."

*************
Update: here's the Washington Post's obit:


Martin Weitzman, environmental economist who emphasized uncertainty, dies at 77

Mark Kleiman (1951-2019)

From the NY Times:
Mark Kleiman, Who Fought to Lift Ban on Marijuana, Dies at 68
"Kelly Kleiman, his sister and only immediate survivor, said the cause was lymphoma and complications of a kidney transplant he received from her in April.
...
"Beginning in the mid-1980s, Professor Kleiman was best known for what was then a cry in the wilderness: a thesis that wars on drugs waged on the basis of enforcement had failed; that alcohol does more harm than cannabis; and that the cost of banning marijuana altogether outweighed any of the benefits of prohibition. At the same time, he warned that complete legalization remained a high-risk gamble."

From Reason magazine

RIP Mark Kleiman, Who Brought Rigor, Dispassion, and Candor to a Frequently Overheated Drug Policy Debate
The widely quoted and consulted academic died yesterday at the age of 68.
JACOB SULLUM | 7.22.2019 12:50 PM

"Back in 1989, Mark Kleiman published a book, Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control, that exemplified his calm, methodical, just-the-facts approach to drug policy. Kleiman argued that federal efforts to curtail cannabis consumption were ineffective and diverted resources from programs that had a better public safety payoff. Three years later, in Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, he came out in favor of legalizing marijuana, arguing that the costs of prohibition outweighed its benefits. At a time when three-quarters of Americans still supported marijuana prohibition, Kleiman's position was striking, especially coming from a widely quoted and consulted academic who had the ear of policy makers."
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From The Intercept:
Remembering Mark Kleiman, a Relentlessly Thoughtful Scholar of Drug Policy, by Maia Szalavitz

"As an opponent of drug war dogma, he was willing to explore alternative approaches to punishment, rather than argue for it to be abolished entirely. That’s a sharp departure from much of the left, which has often been content to firmly oppose the moral stain that is mass incarceration without seriously grappling with what alternative policies might look like. At its best, Kleiman’s work and teachings made people on all sides think much more deeply about their positions, regardless of where they ultimately came down.

"Kleiman supported going after drug dealers, but selectively targeting only the most violent and disruptive, to avoid, essentially, creating evolutionary pressure in markets that would favor the most ruthless and cause the most harm."
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From the National Review:

Mark Kleiman Was the Nation’s Greatest Thinker on Drug Policy

By GABRIEL ROSSMAN

"As expressed in its most programmatic form in Against Excess, Kleiman applied rigorous economic logic, but with the curious inversion that the markets he studied have severe externalities and ruin the lives of their most devoted consumers. Market failure and high transaction costs are policy successes when the commodity is poison, and so good policy means encouraging bad market design. For instance, Kleiman favored a noncommercial approach to marijuana decriminalization precisely because he expected nonprofit or state-operated dispensaries to be less efficient than for-profit firms, and in particular less likely to grow the user base through advertising and make intense use more convenient. The billboards advertising dispensaries, and even marijuana delivery, that saturate Los Angeles are exactly what Kleiman thought sensible decriminalization should avoid.

"But just as good market design has to be careful, so does deliberately bad market design. A major argument in Against Excess is that if you make selling drugs risky by locking up drug dealers (or encouraging them to shoot each other over territory), you build in a risk premium to the price, which draws in suppliers who don’t mind risk. The better approach is to create a deadweight loss so you don’t encourage more supply. For illegal drugs, make it a time-consuming hassle to score. For legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol, impose stiff excise taxes. In both cases the consumer faces costs that do not benefit, and therefore encourage, sellers. These costs might not discourage addicts in the short run, but long-run demand is relatively “elastic”: Increased costs from hassle or taxes can discourage potential users from starting and encourage existing addicts to quit.

"A curious consequence of Kleiman’s logic is that he consistently preferred an emphasis on retail markets rather than high-level distributors or source-country trafficking. His reasoning was that street prices substantially reflect retail markup. In the United States and most European countries, retail markup is about half of the purity-adjusted street price for cocaine and heroin, and the domestic wholesale price itself is about five to ten times higher than the wholesale price in source countries. Source-country interdiction efforts do increase wholesale prices, but this has little effect on retail prices and destabilizes countries. For instance, if you have read Killing Pablo or seen Narcos, you know about the escalation of the dirty war against the Medellin cartel by American intelligence and the Colombian National Police in the early 1990s, but this bloodbath had only a trivial and short-lived impact on retail cocaine prices in the United States, which is still cheaper than it was in the crack era."

Xenotransplants, Baby Fae, and the complex pioneering efforts of Dr. Leonard Bailey, RIP

The recent death of Dr. Leonard Bailey (who performed the first successful heart transplant to an infant) reminded me of how so many ultimately successful stories in organ transplantation begin with rather wild shots in the dark, involving patients who have little to lose.

Here's the NY Times obituary:

Dr. Leonard Bailey, Who Gave a Baby a Baboon’s Heart, Dies at 76
By Denise Grady, May 22, 2019

"Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, who elicited both admiration and outrage by transplanting the heart of a baboon into a dying infant in 1984, died on May 12 at his home in Redlands, Calif. He was 76.
...
"Although Dr. Bailey went on to pioneer human heart transplants for infants, and to build a renowned center for children’s cardiac surgery at Loma Linda University in Southern California, he remained best known to the public as the doctor behind the wrenching story of the infant known as Baby Fae.

...
"“I knew she was going to die, and I had to try,” Ms. Beauclair [Baby Fae's mom] said in a telephone interview. “If I hadn’t tried, I always would have wondered, could we have saved her?
...
"The operation took place on Oct. 26, 1984. At first, Stephanie seemed to thrive. During a news conference at the hospital, Dr. Bailey was ebullient, describing her as a “beautiful, healthy baby” whose transplanted heart was doing “everything it should.”

"Baby Fae made headlines around the world. The public was enchanted by her. But reactions to the surgery ranged from awe to horror.
...
"Animal rights groups said killing the baboon was immoral and held demonstrations outside the hospital and Dr. Bailey’s home. He and the hospital received threats.

“This wasn’t a wild whim,” Dr. Roger Hadley, dean of Loma Linda University School of Medicine, said in an interview. “He had worked for years on doing cross-species transplants in animals. We had a whole lab of animals who had somebody else’s heart.”

"Dr. Hadley added that the hospital at Loma Linda is faith-based — the hospital and the university are run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church — and said that all its ethicists and theologians had thought that the transplant was the right thing to do.

“We stood by him here,” he said.
...
"Stephanie’s initial rally after the surgery did not last. Rejection and organ failure set in, and she died on Nov. 15, 1984. She had survived for 21 days.

"Her case helped focus concern on the plight of babies born with fatal heart defects, and the desperate need for organs. The next year, Dr. Bailey performed the first successful heart transplant in an infant, from a human donor. He went on to perform 375 more over the course of his career, as well as other types of pediatric heart surgery. He continued operating until 2017.

"Because of growing ethical concerns about experimenting on primates, research on using them as a source of organ transplants has mostly been abandoned. But efforts are underway to genetically alter pigs to make their organs compatible with humans."

Memorial service for Martin Shubik today at Yale

I'm in New Orleans today, which I think Martin would have enjoyed, but if you are in New Haven, here's the Yale announcement:

Memorial service for economist Martin Shubik to be held March 30

"A service honoring the life of the late economist Martin Shubik will be held on Saturday, March 30 at 11:30 a.m., at the Graduate Club at 155 Elm St.  

Shubik, who died on Aug. 22 at the age of 92, was the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics at the Yale School of Management. He had been on the Yale faculty since 1963, specializing in game theory, defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions.

Memories and photographs of Shubik can be posted here for display at the memorial service.

Donations in Shubik’s memory may be made to the Inclusion Body Myositis Registry at Yale. "

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Here is a brief July 2018 "Apologia" that Martin apparently wrote shortly before  his death in August:

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA: THE VANISHING OF THE WHITE WHALE IN THE MISTS
Martin Shubik, July 2018

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Here is my earlier post:

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Special issue of NRL in honor of Uri Rothblum, February 2019

Occasionally an Operations journal can bring memories flooding back: here's a special issue in honor of my old friend Uri Rothblum, who passed away in 2012. (We met in 1971, when we entered the Ph.D. program in Operations Research at Stanford.)

 The Journal Naval Research Logistics 
Volume 66, Issue 1, Special Issue:Uriel Rothblum, Pages: 1-102, February 2019

Here is the introduction, and the first paper, coauthored by Uri...

Introduction

• Michael Katehakis

• Pages: 3
 
• First Published: 26 December 2018

• Full text
 
• PDF
 
• Request permissions

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Free Access

Constant risk aversion in stochastic contests with exponential completion times

• Pelin G. Canbolat
 
• Uriel G. Rothblum

• Pages: 4-14
 
• First Published: 24 January 2017

• Abstract
 
• Full text
 
• PDF
 
• References
 
• Request permissions
• ***************************

The previous issue was in honor of Pete Veinott, Uri's Ph.D. advisor:
Volume 65, Issue 8 Special Issue:Pete Veinott 

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Here are other posts of mine remembering Uri.

The journal used to be called the Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, and I published three papers there from 1977 to 1982.

Dr. Oscar Salvatierra, Jr. (1935 - 2019)

Here's the Stanford obituary of the pioneering kidney transplant surgeon:

Pioneering pediatric kidney transplant surgeon Oscar Salvatierra dies at 83
Oscar Salvatierra founded Stanford’s pediatric kidney transplant program, helped write the national legislation that regulates organ transplants, and conducted research in kidney transplantation.

"Oscar Salvatierra Jr., MD, professor emeritus of surgery and of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a leader in the effort to enact national legislation regulating organ donation, died March 16 at his home in Menlo Park, California.  He was 83.

...

"A pediatric kidney transplant surgeon, Salvatierra was the physician most involved in the development and passage of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, the legislation that established a nationwide network to enable the fair and equitable allocation of donor organs to patients across the country.

"The law, on which Salvatierra collaborated with then-Congressman Al Gore, also banned buying and selling donor organs. It has served as a model for laws regulating organ transplantation around the world.
...
"Salvatierra developed methods that enabled small children to be successfully transplanted with adult-sized kidneys, making it possible for many children to receive kidneys donated by adult donors, including their relatives. He also pioneered an immune-suppression protocol for pediatric kidney transplant recipients that avoided steroid medications, which have harmful side effects in children, such as severe growth suppression."

Alan Krueger (1960-2019)

I was shaken today by the news of Alan Krueger's death:

Alan B. Krueger, Economic Aide to Clinton and Obama, Is Dead at 58

He was a leading light in the study of labor markets (from the effects of minimum wage, to the micro and macro returns of education).  He was also a leading policy architect, not least in his service as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.  (I interacted with him briefly when he was in that role, on matters concerning transplantation policy.)
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I'm reminded that many Americans of my generation encountered the poem Richard Corey as part of the elementary school curriculum.

Michel Balinski (1933-2019)

Michel Balinski, perhaps best known for his work on the design of voting systems*, has passed away.
Here's the announcement:

"INFORMS is saddened to share the passing of Michel Balinski, a long-time INFORMS member and a major figure in operations research, mathematics, economics, and political science. Balinski is best known for bringing O.R. methodology to bear on the electoral process, for which he is recognized as the inventor of several fair voting and representation systems. We invite you to share remembrances, photos, and other thoughts on this post, and to learn more about Michel Balinski's incredible career and contributions to the field. His full biography is available under INFORMS History of O.R. and Excellence on INFORMS.org."

*See e.g.
Fair Representation: Meeting the Ideal of One Man, One Vote  
By Michel L. Balinski, H. Peyton Young

The year in passings

Another year has passed, and I noted the passing in 2018 of several economists whose work has been important to market design.

Thursday, August 30, 2018 James Mirrlees 1936-2018

Thursday, August 23, 2018 Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Wednesday, May 30, 2018 Martine Quinzii, RIP

 It appears that I didn't make such a post last year, and so let's remember also these distinguished economists:

Thursday, May 4, 2017 William J. Baumol (1922-2017)

Monday, April 3, 2017 Julio Rotemberg (1953-2017)

Tuesday, February 21, 2017 Ken Arrow (1921-2017)

Sunday, January 29, 2017 Yuji Ijiri (1935-2017)

Tuesday, January 3, 2017 Tony Atkinson (1944-2017)

I also noted the passing of a giant of transplantation,

Monday, March 6, 2017 Tom Starzl (1926-2017)

and of one of my great teachers when I was in college:

Wednesday, September 19, 2018 Masataka Mori, Sensei (1938-2018)