Coffee and civilization, at the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem

“Coffee – East and West” is the title of the new exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem." Here's the story from Haaretz:

How Coffee Revolutionized Jerusalem Social Life in the 16th Century  by Ronit Vered

"In the mid-16th century, complaints from residents of Jerusalem reached the palace of the sultan in Istanbul: As a result of the new custom of visiting coffeehouses, which was spreading among the city’s Muslim denizens, many of them were not praying five times a day, as prescribed by Islam.

...

"Those first cafés – others were opened around the same time in Gaza, Ramle, Nablus, Damascus and Aleppo – operated all day and all night, a sensational innovation in the pre-electricity age, when people usually went to bed early.

...

"The presence of the clients, some of whom would be seated in the street, attracted peddlers, who offered skewers of roasted meat, another nuisance and source of dirt. Tobacco was another new pleasure that the authorities and clerics tried to fight – again unsuccessfully – and the smoke of water pipes, sometimes mingled with the aroma of opium, became an inseparable part of the new coffeehouse experience. And because all the clients of these new institutions were men, for whom the public space, both religious and secular, was exclusively reserved in the Ottoman Empire – the coffeehouses were also accused of encouraging homosexuality and of generating an atmosphere liable to give rise to sexual harassment.

...

"“The story of this country is singular, because two coffee traditions coexisted here over time: Ottoman-Turkish-Arabian coffee that is cooked; and Western coffee, which is filtered and prepared by a variety of methods and in different utensils,” says Yahel Shefer, the exhibition’s co-curator (with Noa Berger), who spent the past five years studying the subject and collecting rare items associated with the material culture that sprang up side by side with the social etiquette that accompanies coffee consumption.

...

Coffee, she adds, “also gives rise to a unique institution dedicated to it, which becomes the most popular gathering place in the world. In Palestine, coffeehouses were established in the Ottoman-Arab tradition but also in the European-Western tradition, which was brought by the [German] Templers and by Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe. In the early 20th century, people in Zion Square in Jerusalem would drink Turkish-Arabian coffee in the morning, and in the afternoon hang out in the famous Café Europa.”

...

"The owners of the Jerusalem cafés opened by the mid-16th century were for the most part Muslims, though they were frequented by Jews and Christians as well. Jewish clerics joined their Muslim colleagues in expressing misgivings about the popular new beverage and the social institution that was springing up around it.

“The first Hebrew mention of a coffeehouse appears in Safed in the 1560s,” says Prof. Yaron Ben-Naeh from the department of Jewish history at the Hebrew University. “The Safed café is mentioned as having a dubious reputation, or in the words of the text, it was a place of ‘frivolous company.’ The religious arbiters of Judaism, like their Muslim counterparts, are undecided about whether it is permitted to drink coffee. Isaac Luria, the holy ‘Ari’ [“Lion,” his epithet], the greatest of the kabbalists, rules that drinking coffee is forbidden, but the believers simply ignore it. No one abides by the prohibitions.”

...

"Early evidence for the institutionalization of a local coffee culture is the existence of the coffee-sellers’ guild, which appears in the records of the Muslim court in Jerusalem in 1590."

Economics and Engineering (and market design): some history and prehistory, at Stanford and elsewhere

The  December 2020 issue of History of Political Economy is devoted to Economics and Engineering.

Here's an account of Stanford and Bob Wilson (among others), written before the most recent Nobel prize to Wilson and Milgrom.

A Century of Economics and Engineering at Stanford by Beatrice Cherrier and Aurélien Saïdi

History of Political Economy (2020) 52 (S1): 85–111.  https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8717936

"This article documents the disciplinary exchanges between economists and engineers at Stanford throughout the twentieth century. We outline the role of key scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Robert Wilson, as well as engineers turned administrators like Frederick Terman. We show that engineers drew upon economic theories of decision and allocation to improve practical industrial management decisions. Reciprocally, economists found in engineering the tools that they needed to rethink production and growth theory (including linear programming, optimal control theory, an epistemology of “application” that emphasized awareness to institutional details, trials and errors and experiments). By the 2000s, they had turned into economic engineers designing markets and other allocation mechanisms. These cross-disciplinary exchanges were mediated by Stanford’s own institutional culture, notably its use of joint appointments, the development of multidisciplinary “programs” for students, the ability to attract a variety of visitors every year, the entrepreneurial and contract-oriented vision of its administrators, and the close ties with the industrial milieu that came to be called the Silicon Valley.

..

"This article should not be read as a history of economics, engineering, or management science at Stanford and their idiosyncrasies.4  None of the research programs or institutional arrangements we describe were unique to Stanford. Rather, we document how some of the engineering and economics theories, tools, and epistemologies developed elsewhere were recombined in a specific institutional setting and entrepreneurial culture, and thus came to infuse the vision that some Stanford economists developed and spread in the last decades."

************

The pdf to the full article appears to be ungated, and will be especially rewarding to old Stanford hands, who will recognize a lot of names from Operations Research as well as from Econ.

************

And here's the introduction to the whole December special issue, by its editors:

Introduction: From “Economics as Engineering” to “Economics and Engineering”  by Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud

History of Political Economy (2020) 52 (S1): 10–27.  https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8717898

"Economists such as Alvin Roth and Esther Duflo have recently argued that economics in the late twentieth century has evolved from (social) science to engineering. On the other hand, historians such as Mary Morgan and Michel Armatte have argued that the transformation of economics into an engineering science has been a century-long development. Turning away from the “economics as engineering” analogy, our introduction suggests an alternative approach to account for the presumed transformation of economics into an engineering science. We encourage the development of a history of “economics and engineering,” which depicts how these two types of knowledge–and the communities who produce them–have interacted in various institutional and national contexts. Drawing on the contributions to this 2020 annual supplement of HOPE, we show how these narratives may help change the historiography of twentieth-century economics."

*************

As it happens, I had the privilege of discussing some of these papers  in Atlanta in  2019 at the ASSA meetings, in a session sponsored by  the History of Economics Society, and chaired by Pedro Garcia Duarte.

Another paper from that session that appears in this issue of HOPE is 

Engineering the “Statistical Control of Business”: Malcolm Rorty, Telephone Engineering, and American Economics, 1900–1930  by Thomas A. Stapleford

History of Political Economy (2020) 52 (S1): 59–84.  https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8717924

"Malcolm Rorty is best known to historians of economics as the primary organizer and founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This article situates Rorty’s interest in economics against the backdrop of his early career in telephone engineering at American Telephone & Telegraph. I argue that distinct structural features of telephone engineering in general, and AT&T in particular, created overlaps between the practices of engineering and economics, and also opened space for Rorty to craft a broader vision for the “statistical control of business” through quantitatively informed management."

Blood and plasma: a brief history, from 1628

With all my discussion of convalescent plasma for Covid-19 this week*, here's a historical perspective on the technology and changes in medical practice since the discovery of blood circulation in 1628 that allows blood and plasma to be used in medicine.


A history of blood transfusion: a confluence of science—in peace, in war, and in the laboratory
by Kevin R. Loughlin
Hektoen International, Volume 12, Issue 2 – Spring 2020.

"Since 1628 when William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood, there had been hope that blood transfusion would be possible.
...
"After Harvey’s discovery, transfusion attempts began. In 1665 Richard Lower kept dogs alive by transfusing blood from other dogs.2 In 1667 French physician Jean Denys transfused nine ounces of blood from the carotid artery of a lamb into the vein of a young man. He continued the practice until the third patient so treated, died.3 Denys was sued by the wife of the deceased patient, who presumably died from a hemolytic reaction, but was exonerated. However, the French Parliament, the Royal Society, and the Catholic Church subsequently issued a general prohibition against transfusions.4

"It would not be until 1818 when transfusions were seriously considered again. A British obstetrician, James Blundell, performed a human blood transfusion in the setting of a postpartum hemorrhage.5 However, the debate over transfusions continued over the remainder of the nineteenth century. In 1849 C.H.F. Routh reviewed all the published transfusions to date and remarked in the Medical Times that of the 48 recorded cases, 18 had a fatal outcome and concluded that the mortality rate was unacceptably high.5 The next major advance in transfusion therapy would wait until the turn of the century.

"Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian physician and immunologist. While working at the University of Vienna, he became interested in blood serum work, specifically the factors that led to hemagglutination of red blood cells. This resulted in two landmark publications in 1900 and 1901 that described the evidence of blood groups that he named A, B, and C.6,7 These would later be modified to A, B, and O. Two years later, two of his colleagues, Alfred Von Decastelo and Adriano Sturli, would add a fourth blood type, AB.8,9 Landsteiner would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his elucidation of the blood groups.

... in 1912, Doctor Roger Lee demonstrated that O blood could be given to a person of any blood type (universal donor) and that a person with AB blood could receive blood from any blood group (universal recipient).
...
"As blood transfusions became more widespread in medical practice, the concept of establishing blood banks became attractive. In the 1930s Bernard Fantus at Cook County Hospital20 and Carl W. Walter at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital started blood banks. In Boston, Walter’s efforts were viewed with such skepticism and disdain that his facility was relegated to a basement room at Harvard because some trustees thought the storage and use of blood was “immoral and unethical.”21 Fifteen years later he invented the plastic blood bag, which greatly facilitated transfusion therapy.21
...
"In 1940 Edwin Cohn developed ethanol fractionation, the process of breaking down plasma into component products. Albumin, gamma globulin, and fibrinogen were isolated to become available for clinical use.

"In 1944 dried plasma became available for the treatment of combat injuries. Component transfusion therapy became more widely used as the war progressed. The Red Cross concluded its World War II blood program in 1945 after 13 million pints had been collected.11

"In 1961 platelet concentrates became recognized for reducing mortality from hemorrhage in cancer patients. In 1964 plasmapheresis was introduced as a means of collecting plasma for fractionation. In 1971 Hepatitis B surface antigen (HbsAg) testing of donated blood began and in 1992 testing of donor blood for HIV-1 and HIV-2 antibodies commenced.
*************

*here's a recap of my earlier coronavirus posts relating to plasma this week:

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Cascades of convalescent plasma for Covid-19, and chains of exchanges, by Kominers, Pathak, Sönmez, and Ünver

Monday, May 18, 2020

Plasma and plasma products (such as antibodies) are a big business (and the U.S. dominates the international market)

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Convalescent plasma collection and distribution

School choice, centralized and decentralized, in Japan, a century ago, by Tanaka, Narita and Moriguchi

I heard Yusuke Narita present this remarkable paper comparing centralized and decentralized school matching at a recent seminar at Stanford.  It uses a  data set involving both outcomes and rules (rules are data!) of a school choice system for elite schools in Japan from the turn of the last century

Meritocracy and Its Discontent: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms
 TANAKA, Mari  NARITA, Yusuke  MORIGUCHI, Chiaki

Abstract: "We study the impacts of changing school admissions systems in higher education. To do so, we take advantage of the world’s first known implementation of nationally centralized admissions and its subsequent reversals in early twentieth-century Japan. This centralization was designed to make admissions more meritocratic, but we find that meritocracy came at the cost of threatening equal regional access to higher education and career advancement. Specifically, in the short run, the meritocratic centralization led students to make more inter-regional and risk-taking applications. As high ability students were located disproportionately in urban areas, however, increased regional mobility caused urban applicants to supplant rural applicants from higher education. Moreover, these impacts were persistent: four decades later, compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system continued to increase the number of urban-born elites (e.g., top income earners) relative to rural-born ones.

" Our empirical setting is the first known transition from decentralized to nationally centralized school admissions. At the end of the 19th century, to modernize its higher education system, the Japanese government set up elite national schools (high schools or colleges) that served as an exclusive entry point to the most prestigious tertiary education (Yoshino, 2001a,b; Takeuchi, 2011). These schools later produced many of the most influential members of the society, including several Prime Ministers, Nobel Laureates, and founders of global companies like Toyota. Acceptance into these schools was merit-based, using annual entrance examinations. Initially, the government let each school run its own exam and admissions based on exam scores, similar to many of today’s decentralized K-12 and college admissions. The schools typically held exams on the same day so that each applicant could apply for only one school. Similar restrictions on the number of applications exist today in the college admission systems of Italy, Japan, Nigeria, and the UK.

"At the turn of the 20th century, the government introduced a centralized system in order to improve the quality of incoming students. In the new system, applicants were allowed to rank multiple schools in the order of their preference and take a single unified exam.1 Given their preferences and exam scores, each applicant is assigned to a school (or none if unsuccessful) based on a computational algorithm. The algorithm was a mix of the so called Immediate Acceptance (Boston) algorithm and Deferred Acceptance algorithm with a meritocracy principle imposed upfront. To the best of our knowledge, this instance is the first recorded, nation-wide use of any matching algorithm. Furthermore, for reasons detailed below, the government later re-decentralized and re-centralized the system several times, producing multiple natural experiments for studying the consequences of the different systems."

History job market conference interviews are history

Inside Higher Ed has the story on the history job market (which they conflate with the AEA's recent decision to try to eliminate interviews in hotel rooms):

Killing the Conference Interview
American Historical Association ends annual meeting interviews and American Economic Association ends single hotel room interviews.
By Colleen Flaherty

"It's official: the American Historical Association will stop supporting first-round job interviews at its annual meeting.

"The group floated the idea this spring, citing a decline in registered departmental searches -- from 270 for the 2005 conference to 20 this year -- and a desire to take the meeting in new directions.

"After hearing overwhelming positive feedback from members, the AHA Council voted to end the 70-year-old tradition."

*************

I'm not intimately familiar with the History job market, but for economists, I think the tradition of interviewing at the January meetings has had a good effect on the job market, helping to coordinate timings, reduce costs, and provide a thick early part of the market.  I hope that we won't be starting on the road to moving interviews elsewhere and (particularly) at earlier and more diffuse times.

Clearinghouses for IOU's in the 13th through 18th centuries: by Borner and Hatfield

Here's a market design/economic history paper about early financial clearinghouses, forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy:

The Design of Debt Clearing Markets: Clearinghouse Mechanisms in Pre-Industrial Europe
Lars Borner, and John William Hatfield

Abstract
We examine the evolution of the decentralized clearinghouse mechanisms that were
in use throughout Europe from the 13th century to the 18th century; in particular,
we explore the clearing of non- or limited-tradable debts like bills of exchange. We
construct a theoretical model of these clearinghouse mechanisms and show that the
specific decentralized multilateral clearing algorithms known as rescontre, skontrieren
or virement des parties, used by merchants in this period, were efficient in specific historical
contexts. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of both the emergence
and evolution of these mechanisms during late medieval and early modern fairs and
their robustness during the 17th and 18th centuries.

The first successful heart-lung transplantation

Bruce Reitz recalls first successful heart-lung transplant: 

The surgeon who led the team that performed the first successful heart-lung transplant 35 years ago discusses his recollections of the patient and the operation.

"On March 9, 1981, just minutes past midnight, Mary Gohlke, a 45-year-old Arizona woman dying of primary pulmonary hypertension, was wheeled into a Stanford Hospital operating room for a heart-lung transplant surgery that would become a medical milestone.

...

"Lung transplants were technically feasible, but no human lung transplant patient had survived more than 23 days. The only antirejection drugs then approved for use interfered with the healing of the surgical wounds where new lungs connected to the patient’s airway. After Gohlke read a newspaper story about the successful heart-lung transplants Stanford cardiothoracic surgeon Bruce Reitz, MD, had done on rhesus monkeys, she telephoned him. Reitz took the call. She asked him how many heart-lung transplants he planned to do that year on humans. He said 10. She told him she’d like to be the tenth so she “could see how the rest of them turn out,” and Reitz responded with a chuckle.

"The holdup, however, was the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It had approved a better antirejection drug, cyclosporin A, for heart-transplant patients, but not for other transplant patients.  Stanford had asked the FDA to approve cyclosporin A for heart-lung transplant patients, too — and then waited and waited. Gohlke, increasingly desperate, asked her former boss, the executive editor of the Mesa Tribune, to help. He made calls to then-U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Arizona, and about an hour later the FDA approved the drug for use in heart-lung transplantation at all qualified hospitals. Gohlke received her new heart and lungs — becoming the first patient in the world to undergo a successful heart-lung transplant — and lived for five years with her new organs."

Some histories of organ transplantation

I can't vouch for any of these...most are un-refereed internet pages...some starting with events reported from quite long ago, regarding skin and bones, for example.

From organdonor.gov: Timeline of Historical Events Significant Milestones in Organ Donation and Transplantation

http://www.organtransplants.org/understanding/history/


http://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/learn/about-transplantation/history/

http://www.donatelifeny.org/all-about-transplantation/organ-transplant-history/

https://www.unos.org/transplantation/history/

http://www.mtf.org/news_history_of_transplantation.html


Here's a journal article, whose history begins with kidneys...
Organ transplantation: historical perspective and current practice

C. J. E. Watson1,* and J. H. Dark, 

Br. J. Anaesth. (2012) 108 (suppl 1): i29-i42.

doi: 10.1093/bja/aer384 

"A brief history of transplantation
Kidney transplantation
Since Jaboulay and Carrel developed the techniques
required to perform vascular anastomoses at the turn of
the last century, there has been a desire to treat organ
failure by transplantation. Jaboulay was the first to
attempt this in 1906, treating two patients with renal
failure by transplanting a goat kidney into one and a pig
kidney into the other; in both cases, he joined the renal
vessels to the brachial vessels.1 Both transplants failed
and both patients died. At that time, there was no alternative
to death if renal failure developed, and it would be
another 38 yr before the first haemodialysis machine was
invented. The first use of a human kidney for transplantation
followed in 1936 when Yu Yu Voronoy, a Ukrainian
surgeon working in Kiev, performed the first in a series of
six transplants to treat patients dying from acute renal
failure secondary to mercury poisoning, ingested by its
victims in an attempt to commit suicide. All the transplants
failed, in large part because of a failure to appreciate the
deleterious effect of warm ischaemia; the first kidney was
retrieved 6 h after the donor died.
One limitation to transplantation then, as now, was the
lack of suitable donor organs. The initial pioneers had used
animal organs or organs from long deceased humans. In
the 1950s, there came a realization of the need to avoid
excessive ischaemic injury and kidneys from live donors
began to be used. Some of these were from the relatives of
the recipient; others were unrelated patients having a good
kidney removed for other reasons. The surgical technique
also needed refinement; while a kidney based on the thigh
or arm vessels might be technically straightforward, and possibly
adequate for the short-term treatment of acute renal
failure, it was not a realistic solution for the long term.
That solution came from France in 1951 and involved
placing the kidney extraperitoneally in an iliac fossa, where
the external iliac vessels are easy to access and the
bladder is close by for anastomosis to the donor ureter;
this is the technique still used today.
Having overcome the technical issues of vascular anastomosis
and placement of the kidney, there remained the
problem of the immune response. Medawar’s work during
and after the Second World War studying the rejection of
skin grafts had demonstrated the potency of the immune
system.2 At that time, attempts to control the immune
system using irradiation had proved either ineffectual or
lethal. The first successful transplant therefore came about
by avoiding an immune response altogether, which Joseph
Murray’s team achieved by performing a kidney transplant
between identical twins.3 There then followed a series of
identical twin transplants around the world, with the first in
the UK being performed in Edinburgh by Woodruff and
colleagues4 in 1960."

History of Experimental Economics -- Andrej Svorenčik

History is happening fast...now featuring "the last third of the 20th century."

The Experimental Turn in Economics: A History of Experimental Economics

Andrej Svorenčík 

University of Mannheim - Department of Economics
Abstract:       The emergence of experimental economics in the last third of the 20th century revisited the long-standing belief that economics is a non-experimental discipline. The history of this new practice reveals this went further than simply introducing the experimental method to economics. Its history shows individual economists and research communities above all redefining the relationship between economic theory and rigorous data. Replicable data that were specifically created to satisfy conditions set by theory in controlled environments could not be avoided by economists or explained away as irrelevant to economic theory. The reconceptualization of the relationship between economic theory and rigorous experimental data culminated at the end of the 1980s in what I call the experimental turn, after which the experimental method became accepted in the wider economics community.

Ribald 4th of July: memories of July 1970

The title of this post comes from a typo in an article about the 4th of July celebrations that have been conducted since 1912 at Rebild National Park in Denmark, after the land for the park was donated by Danish-Americans. Here's the story that gets the name right:
"Every July 4 since 1912, except for the two world wars, large crowds have gathered in the heather-covered hills of Rebild in Jutland, Denmark to celebrate US Independence Day.
The site of the celebration is the beautiful Rebild National Park (20 kilometers south of Aalborg), presented to the Danish nation by Danish-Americans in 1912. "

This reminds me that in July of 1970 I was in Fredericia Denmark, briefly employed by the J.P. Schmidt cigarfabrik (sold in 1982 to the Scandinavian Tobacco Group). I wasn't rolling cigars, but programming computers, or rather a computer, an IBM 360 model 20, that used a language called Report Program Generator (RPG) that apparently has descendents still in use today. (To compile, a giant stack of punchcards had to be turned upside down to be placed on the card reader...I know that some of you don't know what punchcards were...)

On July 1, 1970, the second Vietnam War draft lottery was conducted back in the United States, to determine the draft order of men born in my year. This was long before the internet, and so I waited a day for the International Herald Tribune to report on the story, but they only reported the first number chosen, and the last. I called the American consulate in Copenhagen to try to find out my lottery number, but they didn't have the whole list either (I got the impression they thought that most Americans living in Denmark at the time may have already decided not to respond to the draft...). I had to wait for a letter from my parents to arrive, telling me that I had a number that might have made me an infantryman had I been a year older, but that with the war winding down left me free to remain a student.

Two days after July 4 I heard cannon (or maybe fireworks) on the old town wall, and came in to work to hear that this was an annual celebration of the Danish victory in The Battle of Fredericia 6th of July 1849, in which the Danes had beaten back a German siege of the fortified town. I recall my colleagues told me that it had been celebrated each year since, "except when we are occupied by the Germans."

Let's all celebrate independence with a boisterous (if not ribald) 4th of July.