A.I. helps re-identify anonymized data-- how it worked in the case of a censured judge

  Above the Law has the story of how the judge in question was successfully re-identified:

Judiciary Tried To Hide ‘Sex In Chambers’ Judge’s Name. ...  For all their efforts, both the Eleventh Circuit and Judicial Conference left a lot of clues.  By Joe Patrice  

"despite the severity of the allegations — an affair that raised serious blackmail risks, attending openly partisan events, and lying to investigators when caught — the Eleventh Circuit and the Judicial Conference both concealed the judge’s identity. They even adjusted the very minor sanction to allow the judge “to word the letters of apology vaguely so as to ensure that a letter could not be ‘used against [the Subject Judge] in some way.’” 

...

"The Eleventh Circuit thought it had been so clever in anonymizing its report. The reports don’t include a name or a district, and refer only to “Subject Judge” throughout. The reports even assiduously avoid identifying the judge by gender, proving that even conservative judges can figure out how pronouns work with minimal effort. And yet the reports failed to obscure a number of details that made working out the judge’s identity possible. 

 ...

Handing the reports into two different AI models and turning on all the “deep research” modes, the bots churned for several minutes comparing the reports to publicly available information. Both models delivered lengthy reports reaching the same conclusion. So how did these models do it? 

...

"the models instantly filtered out the entire state of Florida. The official reports are littered with references, in varying contexts, to the office of “District Attorney.” Florida uses “State Attorneys” for its local prosecutors. After that, the bots noted that the sanction barred the judge from ever serving as chief judge of their district — meaning the judge was not senior status and not currently the chief judge. The report indicates that investigators spoke with clerks dating back to 2020, disqualifying anyone elevated after that. Discussing the judge attending a DA’s primary victory party, the bot pointed out that the judge had claimed to know the candidate based on their time at the office, narrowing the scope to judges with state prosecutorial experience who overlapped with a sitting DA who won a primary. And had martinis at the victory party. The AI models decided that matched with Atlanta’s Fani Willis. [as the DA]

Once it narrowed the list down, the bot also searched the dockets of possible judges to match the claim in the reports that the high-ranking law enforcement officer did not materialize into a conflict because no cases involving that police department showed up on the judge’s docket.

For good measure, the bot went ahead and took a guess at the officer’s identity too.

In about 10 minutes of work, the AI unraveled all the work these judges put in to keep this confidential. With nothing but a couple of published court documents and the open web. In the time someone might brew a cup of coffee, the most basic possible workflow defeated the Eleventh Circuit’s entire anonymization strategy."

 

About a third of Americans live in states that will have Medical Aid in Dying, come September.

 The NYT has the story:

By September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in Dying
Despite widespread support in polls, the number of people who actually go through with the practice remains very small. By Paula Span

"On June 9, 2025, after the [NY State] Assembly approved the bill, Ms. Netherland was in the State Senate chamber, watching the aye votes mount, and seeing it pass. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an amended version in February; it is scheduled to take effect Aug. 5.

A similar law is slated to take effect in September in Illinois, which would become the 13th state (plus the District of Columbia) where medical aid in dying is legal.

“A breakthrough moment,” said Kevin Díaz, president of Compassion & Choices, which has spearheaded the long campaign for such laws. After almost 30 years — Oregon’s law, the first in the country, was enacted in 1997 — the addition of two populous states means that almost a third of Americans will live in one where medical aid in dying is legally available. “It shows that there’s broad support for this model,” Mr. Díaz said.

Polls consistently back that claim. A Pew Research Center survey last spring found that almost two-thirds of respondents didn’t consider the practice “morally wrong,” either because they thought it was acceptable or not a moral issue."

The American Society of Transplantation prepares to consider a pilot study of financial incentives for living organ donation

 As I prepare to speak later this month at the American Transplant Congress in Boston, I note that  the American Society of Transplantation (AST) has, among its Key Position Statements  one from late last year called A Roadmap for Removing Disincentives for Living Organ Donors 

As the title suggests, the statement focuses on removing financial disincentives for organ donation. 

But I'm struck by the last item on the list:

"Additional Steps
"In advocating for the elimination of disincentives to living donation, AST will examine, in parallel, the legal,ethical, and practical considerations involved in a pilot study of financial incentives for living organ donation."

  

Mary Childs, formerly of Planet Money, has a new podcast, called Mary in America (on which we talk about Moral Economics)

 Mary Childs, formerly of Planet Money, has a new podcast, called Mary in America.

I was the guest on her first interview: 

Organs, Sex Work, and Drugs: A Nobel Economist on Why Banning Things Can Backfire, Mary in America
 

"A Nobel Prize-winning economist makes the case that our moral objections to controversial markets are getting people killed. Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize in Economics for figuring out how to build markets that work. Now he's turned his attention to the markets we refuse to build, and why that refusal has consequences nobody wants to talk about. In this episode, Mary and Al dig into what he calls "repugnant transactions" — the deals that some people want to make and others think shouldn't be allowed. They get into why banning organ sales creates black markets where donors get operated on in apartments, why the same logic that ended Prohibition applies to the war on drugs, how surrogacy bans in Europe are turning babies into stateless people, and why it's easy to buy heroin but nearly impossible to hire a hit man. Al's argument isn't that everything should be for sale. It's that if you care about outcomes more than intentions, you have to confront what your bans are actually doing. Subscribe for new episodes every week. Chapters: 00:00 Friendship Isn't A Market 00:32 Meet Nobel Economist Al Roth 01:02 What Makes a Market "Repugnant"? 02:58 Should We Pay People for Kidneys? 08:31 Why Drugs Thrive But Hit Men Don't 15:58 Surrogacy, Politics, and Unintended Consequences 21:45 Why Prohibition Keeps Failing 25:19 Markets, Morality, and Reality 28:19 The Rise of Prediction Markets 34:30 What Money Can't Buy"

"How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets," interview by Nick Gillespie about Moral Economics

Nick Gillespie, from Reason Magazine,  interviews me about "How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets"

"Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth discusses the moral limits of markets, how bans create black markets, and why harm reduction often works better than prohibition."

"Today's guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.

They also explore Roth's work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work."

x 

French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’

 Is Swedish nicotine like French wine?

The FT has the story:

"French nicotine pouch ban is ‘attack on Swedish way of life’, minister says. Stockholm smoulders over France’s ‘absurd’ penalties of up to five years in prison for cigarette alternatives, by Mari Novik in Strasbourg and Sarah White in Paris

 "A Swedish minister has accused France of mounting “an attack on the Swedish way of living” with its ban on nicotine pouches, setting aflame a single market fight over how governments should regulate smoke-free alternatives to tobacco.

"France last month implemented one of Europe’s strictest bans on the pouches, a flavoured sachet that users tuck under their lip to release nicotine.

"France’s decree goes beyond other EU countries’ prohibitions by banning not just sales but import, possession and use of the pouches. A Swede carrying a tin of pouches legally bought at home could face French penalties of up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
 

“It is as if we would prohibit French baguettes or French wine in Sweden,” Swedish trade minister Benjamin Dousa told the FT. “It is absurd.”

#########

Earlier:

Tuesday, May 19, 2026  WHO reports on the global growth of nicotine pouches

Mark Granovetter and I discuss Moral Economics

 Speaking with the great sociologist Mark Granovetter gave me the opportunity to tell the joke "“Economists study how people make choices; sociologists study why people don’t have choices," since Moral Economics is about the controversial markets over which society struggles with which choices should be allowed and which should be banned.

 Stanford's Center for the History of Capitalism sponsored the conversation, and here it is on YouTube, but it's just a podcast, there's audio of our conversation, but no video. 

 

Here's an alternative photo from  Stanford's History of Capitalism program:

 

The Economist reviews Moral Economics

 It appears that even a week after book-publication week, I'm not finished with book news.

This week The Economist reviewed Moral Economics.  

Here's the short version, from the issue's overview in World in Brief.

"Alvin Roth investigates repugnant markets

"Would you like to buy a kidney? How about heroin? Or sex? Don’t worry: you haven’t wandered down the wrong alley—these and other morally questionable transactions are the subject of a new book by Alvin Roth, a Nobel-prize winning economist. Published in Britain on Thursday, “Moral Economics” looks at the murky world of “repugnant transactions”: deals in which buyers and sellers happily transact, but which onlookers would rather ban on moral grounds.

"For Mr Roth, moral economics is about trade-offs. Are the harms of allowing an activity greater than those of disallowing it? Policy, he argues, should weigh both. Two principles emerge. First, bans never fully work: motivated buyers and sellers find workarounds. Second, prohibition generally reduces the size of the market; it would be cheaper and easier to buy heroin if it was legal. It might also be safer. That leaves Mr Roth asking whether the restrictions or the market cause more harm. Here, too, the answer is that it depends." 

###########

And here's a link to the longer review, from the Free Exchange column. That column is unsigned, but others on the web have attributed it to Gavin Jackson, who did interview me about the book.  Here is the resulting review:

How should economists treat morality? 

 My review of the review is that it missed some of the nuances in my book, but many aspects of the big picture came through clearly:

"The picture that emerges from the book is of a deeply moral person, who believes in bodily autonomy, in not subordinating individual lives to a collective and in not accepting unnecessary deaths to spare some people from feeling squeamish." 

Neale Mahoney interviews me abut Moral Economics on Econ to Go

 Neale Mahoney interviews me on Econ to go (with a transcript of our half hour conversation).

 "Neale Mahoney: Markets are often treated like natural objects, things that simply exist. But economist Al Roth sees them differently. To him, markets are human inventions, systems we design, shape, and sometimes struggle to agree on. Because when money and morality collide, things can get complicated. Who should be allowed to buy and sell? What should they be allowed to transact? and what happens when people want to trade things that others find morally unacceptable.

Alvin Roth: I think that one of the things we need to do is experiment on what we're morally obliged to do and reflect on it in connection with what we're actually able to do. 

Neale Mahoney: I'm Neale Mahoney, Economist and Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. On this episode of "Econ To Go," I catch up with Stanford Economist and Nobel Laureate Al Roth over coffee on campus. We talk about what he calls moral economics, the study of markets where society struggles to agree on what should be bought and sold. From kidney exchange to commercial surrogacy, from prostitution laws to the surprising economics of matchmaking, Al shows us that markets don't just allocate goods. They also reflect our values. You've said that markets and marketplaces are human artifacts. They are not just features of the natural environment. Why is that a good starting place when we think about the study of economics?

Alvin Roth: Well, for a long time, economists sort of thought that markets were things that we just had to take as given. You know, we speak of economists thinking of people as price takers, but in fact, they also thought of us as market takers. There are these markets. But of course, markets are human artifacts. To a great extent they're collective human artifacts, but marketplaces are often artifacts of individual companies or designers, or small groups of participants who modify the marketplace to fit their needs over time, just in the way that Uber is a marketplace designed by the company Uber. But I think there's a good analogy, which is that languages are also human artifacts, and they're collective human artifacts. You and I can speak to each other in English because we both learned English in a conventional way, but there are lots of words in our English that weren't in the language 100 years ago, words like computer and internet and AI. So, we're constantly modifying the language to better suit our needs."

Here is the whole half hour interview on YouTube:

 

There's also a Stanford news story:

Sex, drugs & surrogacy: When morality and markets clash
Stanford’s Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for improving how markets work. In a new book, he introduces a new way of thinking about society’s most controversial transactions, from sex work to drugs to assisted dying.  byKrysten Crawford
 

WHO reports on the global growth of nicotine pouches

 The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a report written by Robert K. Jackler, Divya Ramamurthi and Cindy Chau (Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising), and Ranti Fayokun (Tobacco Free Initiative, Department of Health Determinants, Promotion and Prevention, WHO).

Exposing marketing tactics and strategies driving the global growth of nicotine pouches 

 

"Key messages of the report are:
• The global market for nicotine pouches is growing rapidly.
• Nicotine pouches can be highly addictive; furthermore, some have high concentrations of nicotine, and some increase the speed and intensity of nicotine delivery (e.g. “pearls technology”).
• Labelling of nicotine content is not standardized and can be confusing and misleading.
• Some nicotine pouch packaging mimics popular candy products and contain high nicotine levels. If they are ingested by children, they can pose a lethal risk.
• Nicotine pouches often contain various youth-appealing flavours (e.g. sweet, fruity, mint/menthol), such as Cherry Punch and Frosted Apple, and candy-like flavours (e.g. “bubble gum” and “gummy bears”), which are particularly attractive to children.
The flavours of numerous alcoholic drinks are also used, marketed as “After dark”.
• Nicotine pouches often promote high-intensity nicotine and flavours with slogans such as “nicotine like never before” and visual depictions of the user experiencing a cooling effect.

• Nicotine pouches are aggressively marketed and promoted to young people.
– They are heavily advertised on youth-frequented social and digital media platforms, including through influencers.
– They are frequently promoted with youthful themes, including fun times with friends, romance and sports.
– They are often promoted for “discreet” or stealthy use, making it difficult to detect by parents or teachers, and as a way of breaking the rules.
– Manufacturers of nicotine pouches commonly sponsor youth-oriented events, where nicotine pouches and branded merchandise are distributed by attractive, young “brand ambassadors”.
• Nicotine pouch advertisements often use the tobacco industry’s “playbook” for marketing conventional tobacco products, such as cigarettes, including:
– “lifestyle marketing” and “identity marketing”, the message sometimes portraying how a consumer wishes to be perceived by others;
– depictions of nicotine pouches as “modern” and “high-tech”; and
– portrayal of nicotine pouches as boosting energy when the user is tired and helping the user to relax when stressed. Marketers call this “elasticity of meaning”, depicting the product as something that works for everyone in any situation.
• Nicotine pouch manufacturers market and associate their brands with holidays (e.g. Christmas) and cultural symbols (e.g. patriotism) to evoke happy times and celebrations.
• Messaging in nicotine pouch advertisements can appear contradictory, expressing opposing views; however, this is carefully crafted and tailored to different target groups, such as:
– co-marketing of a nicotine pouch brand with promotion of a flagship cigarette (or other tobacco) brand, while also marketing of nicotine pouches and conveying anti-cigarette messaging (e.g. “goodbye smoke smell”).
• Nicotine pouches are marketed with unsubstantiated claims that they aid smoking cessation and/or in ways that undermine quit attempts.
• Nicotine pouches are often promoted as a product for “Anytime, Anywhere”, with images of places in which smoking is not allowed. This marketing tactic can encourage dual use, hinder cessation attempts and undermine regulations prohibiting smoking or use of other tobacco and related products in public places.
• There is insufficient national action, whereby nicotine pouches commonly fall through regulatory gaps and thus either un- or lightly regulated.
• WHO calls for a comprehensive approach to tobacco control, covering the full spectrum of tobacco and related products, including nicotine pouches, and closing regulatory loopholes. "

Kidneys and Moral Economics in the Financial Times

I spoke about economics with Keynes (Soumaya) in the FT:

Nobel laureate Al Roth and the economics of organ sales  
 "The economist Alvin Roth been talking about kidneys since at least 2003, noting time and again that kidneys are in short supply, waiting lists are growing longer, and people are dying as a result.
 

"So why is Roth — who appears on this week’s episode of the Economics Show podcast — still banging on about kidneys? Well, because all of those things are still getting worse."

Here is the podcast:

FT Podcast  The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Should economics have fewer taboos? With Alvin Roth.   The Nobel laureate on the lines society draws around what can be bought and sold  

and here is the transcript:

Transcript: Should economics have fewer taboos? With Alvin Roth
Soumaya Keynes speaks to Alvin Roth, Nobel laureate and author of ‘Moral Economics’

"    Soumaya Keynes
So we always start this show with a silly question. So, on a scale of one to 10, how relaxed are you about marketisation? So 10, you’re extremely relaxed about having transactions in literally anything, and maybe five is the average person.

Alvin Roth
So I’m probably a 7.5, maybe 7.52."
 
 

 

Moral Economics: video of the AEI book event (you can listen to me read from the book)

 You can watch the AEI book event (and hear me read the first paragraph of the book, and chat about it for about 20 minutes) followed by discussion by Alex Tabarrok, Judd Kessler and Nick Gillespie, and Q&A, all introduced an moderated by Sally Satel.

Here’s a picture taken by Peter Jaworski  

And here we are on Youtube (this was originally a live stream):

https://www.youtube.com/live/-TL4nlCpZEc 

 

The Organ Donation Dilemma: Ethics, Economics, and Life-Saving Solutions: Debate at Hopkins, today

Today's debate at Hopkins aims to focus on the proposed End Kidney Deaths Act.

 The Organ Donation Dilemma: Ethics, Economics, and Life-Saving Solutions
May 15, 2026 09:00 AM 
 

"With organ shortages claiming thousands of lives annually, this session explores whether carefully designed market mechanisms can increase donation rates while maintaining ethical standards and preventing exploitation.

Panelists:
-    Alexander Capron, USC Law/Bioethics  https://gould.usc.edu/faculty/profile/alexander-capron/ 

-    (TBC) Gabriel Danovitch, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, https://www.uclahealth.org/providers/gabriel-danovitch 

-    Kimberly Krawiec, UVA Law, https://www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/kdk4q/1181653 

-    Elaine Perlman, President, Coalition to Modify NOTA and Executive Director, Waitlist Zero https://elaineperlman.com/ 

Moderator: 
-    Mario Macis, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and HBHI https://mariomacis.net/index.html 

 

End Kidney Deaths Act summary /sites/default/files/2026-05/The%20End%20Kidney%20Deaths%20Act%20Summary.pdf

 

The list of 50+ supportive organizations, the legislative text, the podcast with Kim and Elaine and the Niskanen Center's economic analysis of the End Kidney Deaths Act 

Felix Salmon, at Bloomberg, reviews Moral Economics

  Felix Salmon, at Bloomberg, reviews Moral Economics, which starting today is now sold in stores (at least in the U.S.):

An Economist’s Case for Selling a Kidney.  In a new book, Nobel laureate Alvin Roth argues that decriminalizing taboo markets can save lives.  

He tells this story from the book:

"Roth gave a talk in 2017 at the Organ Donation Congress in Geneva about one such chain that started in 2015. A woman from the Philippines, known in the literature as FW, was willing to give up one of her kidneys to save the life of her husband, FM. The two flew to the US, where FM received a kidney from an altruistic donor in Georgia, and FW’s kidney was transplanted into a man in Minnesota. A friend of the Minnesota man, who had been willing to give up one of her kidneys to save his life, instead gave one to a man in Washington, whose father-in-law gave a kidney to a woman in Georgia, and so on. By the end of the year there had been 11 successful transplants, and the chain was still continuing.

" After his talk, Roth was confronted by a Spanish doctor who was deeply concerned about the potentially problematic implications of the economic inequality between the Philippines and the US. Roth pointed out that without the transplant, the patient would surely have died. Replied the Spanish nephrologist: “He should be dead!” Spain’s National Transplant Organization later denounced Roth as an organ trafficker.

"Roth tells this story in his most recent book, Moral Economics (Basic Venture, May 12), which, at least in part, is an attempt to apply the empiricism of economics to domains that are often resistant to such analysis. The opposition to the 2015 kidney chain, for instance, comes from nephrologists who have no problem with chains but who draw the line at international chains, or at least chains linking poor and rich countries."

######

Much of the objection to cross-border kidney exchange appears to be fading, some of it was based on the idea that countries should be self-sufficient in transplants.

See earlier posts:

Friday, January 9, 2026  WHO Says Countries Should Be Self-Sufficient In (Unremunerated) Organs And Blood by Krawiec and Roth (now open source)

 

Friday, September 11, 2020  Global Kidney Exchange supported by the European Society of Transplantation's committee on Ethical, Legal, and Psychosocial Aspects of Transplantation .

It’s time to carefully but urgently rethink payments to kidney donors. My op-ed in the Washington Post

 This morning the Washington Post published my op-ed online (which is scheduled to appear in the print edition on Sunday). 800 words is hardly enough to explain why I think what I do...I could write a whole book about that.

But here's the op-ed: 

Why paying people to donate kidneys is a good idea

With 90,000 patients waiting for a kidney, compensating living donors would save lives.

May 8, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

 

By Alvin E. Roth

Alvin E. Roth is an economics professor at Stanford University and co-recipient, with Lloyd Shapley, of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. This article was adapted from his new book, "Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work."

It’s time to carefully but urgently rethink payments to kidney donors.

There are approximately 130,000 new cases of kidney failure annually in the United States. It is disproportionately a disease of the poor, and is four times as likely to affect Black people as White people. Kidney failure costs Medicare alone more than $55 billion per year, mostly for dialysis. More than 500,000 people are presently on dialysis, about half of whom will die within five years of beginning treatment. The best treatment for kidney failure is transplantation, but in 2025 fewer than 30,000 people in the United States received kidney transplants. So most people who could benefit from a lifesaving transplant will die without one.

 About 90,000 people are registered on the national waiting list to receive a deceased-donor kidney, and many more would be, if there were enough transplants for all who need them. Thousands die each year while waiting, and thousands more are removed from the waiting list when they become too sick to undergo transplant surgery.

The law in the U.S. and most of the world says kidneys must be gifts; their price must be zero. So, any attempt to raise the supply of kidneys by compensating donors would have to overcome the almost worldwide repugnance for payment.

About three-quarters of kidneys transplanted in the U.S. come from deceased donors, and the rest come from living donors: Healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one. But sometimes potential donors can’t donate to the person they love, because kidneys have to be medically compatible with the recipient. It’s a challenge even within families. For example, often a mother can’t receive a kidney from her spouse or children because during pregnancy, her immune system developed antibodies to some of their proteins.

 

 For the last quarter-century, living-donor transplants have also been arranged through kidney exchange, in which each patient receives a compatible kidney from another patient’s intended donor. Some of these transplants take place in long chains initiated by a nondirected donor, who donates a kidney, anonymously, to anyone who needs one. That begins a chain of donations in which each recipient’s intended donor passes the gift forward. Kidney exchange has made possible thousands of additional transplants, without payments to donors.  

Nevertheless, kidneys for transplant remain in tragically short supply. So it is past time to consider amending the 1984 law that prohibits giving “valuable consideration” for a kidney for transplant.

This would have to be done with care, because there are good reasons that the phrase “payments for kidneys” arouses repugnance. We wouldn’t want inappropriate donors to be unduly influenced to give up a kidney. (This is something already considered when screening the thousands of people who donate one of their kidneys each year without payment.) Another concern is that we wouldn’t want to live in a world in which only rich people could get kidneys, by buying them from poor people.

In the United States, we might think about letting individual states experiment with different regulations. Or we could explore a national system in which only the federal government could buy kidneys — from carefully qualified donors, after a significant period devoted to medical and psychological screening, and having obtained carefully informed consent. Those kidneys could then be allocated without regard to patients’ income, much as we presently allocate deceased-donor kidneys, which are treated as a national resource. 

 

It would be financially feasible to pay donors quite generously without requiring recipients to pay anything at all. Donors could be paid entirely from the savings to the health care system by taking patients off dialysis.

There is a long history of thoughtful arguments in favor of allowing kidney donors to be legally paid or compensated in some way, with carefully considered precautions. These include a current proposal called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which would establish a limited pilot program for a tax credit to nondirected kidney donors.

To be clear, we should keep trying for big long-term goals, such as vastly reducing the incidence of kidney disease by preventing or curing diabetes, hypertension and other causes. We should keep trying to expand deceased donation (perhaps by offering funeral benefits in gratitude to the next of kin who allow it). We should keep exploring cures that don’t require transplants of human organs. But we can save many lives now by being more generous to living donors, and it makes sense to start experimenting with ways to do this legally, ethically and equitably."

############

And here's the picture they chose to accompany the op-ed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Halts Abortion Pill Access by Mail, Appeal to SCOTUS

 Is the state of Louisiana harmed if women living there can receive abortion pills by mail?

Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Halts Abortion Pill Access by Mail  The court order, in a lawsuit by the state of Louisiana, pauses a Food and Drug Administration regulation that greatly expanded access to the abortion pill mifepristone. 
By Pam Belluck

"A federal appeals court issued a ruling on Friday temporarily halting the ability of abortion providers to prescribe pills using telemedicine and send them to patients by mail, blocking what has become a major avenue for women seeking abortions in recent years.

"The order comes in a case in which the state of Louisiana is suing the Food and Drug Administration, seeking to sharply curtail access to the abortion pill mifepristone. In the order, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted Louisiana’s request for a temporary stay of the F.D.A.’s decision several years ago to remove a requirement that patients see a medical provider in person before the pills could be prescribed.

"The court order, citing Louisiana’s claims that making pills available by mail has allowed patients there to access the medication despite the state’s near-total abortion ban, said that “Louisiana has shown that it is irreparably harmed without a stay.”

"In April, a Federal District Court in Louisiana had declined to pause the availability of pills by mail, instead saying that the proceedings should be delayed until the F.D.A. completes a safety review of mifepristone that is underway and is expected to take until late this year."

#######

And here's the NYT on the appeal by pharma companies to the Supreme Court:

Supreme Court Asked to Restore Access to Abortion Pill by Mail  By Ann E. Marimow and Pam Belluck

 "Administration officials recently told The New York Times that the review would not be finished until the end of this year, a time frame that would fall after the midterm elections.

"The mifepristone case puts the Trump administration in a politically tricky position, given that many of President Trump’s supporters oppose abortion."

Moral Economics: a brief review in the Sunday Times ("fascinating and very different":)

 A column (on unemployment) in the Sunday Times by it's economics editor  David Smith, ends with a brief review of Moral Economics, as a postscript:

 PS
"A lot of economics books cross my desk, but a new one, by the Nobel prize-winning economist Alvin Roth, grabbed my attention. Called Moral Economics: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work, to be published soon by Basic Books, it is not a title designed to send it racing off the shelves.

However, it starts in an arresting way with a story I had not heard before of another celebrated Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, known to many for his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Two years ago, he celebrated his 90th birthday with family in Paris before flying to Zurich and ending his life in an assisted suicide clinic. “Danny,” Roth recalls, “was still in relatively good health, but he wanted to avoid the prospect of a long, disabling decline.”

...

It is a fascinating and very different economics book, from which I may bring you more as I find it."

Organ donation after euthanasia in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, not only is it legal to receive medical aid in dying (MAID), but  a growing number of MAID patients are able to successfully achieve their desire to become deceased organ donors.

 From the American Journal of Transplantation:

 Wijbenga, N., Gan, C.T., Ruigrok, D., Berg, E.M., Hagenaars, J.A.M., Siregar, S., van der Kaaij, N.P., Mathot, B.J., van Pel, R., Seghers, L. and Manintveld, O.C., 2026. The Increasing Contribution of Organ Donation after Euthanasia to the Lung Transplantation Donor Pool in the Netherlands. American Journal of Transplantation. 

 "Abstract: The number of organ donation after euthanasia (ODE) procedures in the Netherlands has grown substantially, yet their contribution to the lung-donor pool remains unclear. There is no clinical consensus on how these potential ODE lung-donors should be assessed. We aimed to describe the total contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool in the Netherlands and describe the assessment of potential ODE lung-donors.
We collected data from all ODE procedures performed between 2012-2024 in the Netherlands. We assessed the number of ODE-lungs offered, rejected, accepted, and transplanted, comparing characteristics of discarded and transplanted lungs.
Of 1166 lung-donor, 664(60%) were DCD donors of which 154(23%) were ODE lung-donors. The total proportion of donor lungs from ODE lung-donors acceptable to offer for lung transplantation was 117 of which 104 (89%) were transplanted. Evaluation prior to donation was highly variable, with medical history and chest CT most affecting acceptance decisions. Short-term outcomes were excellent, with 1-year survival of 84%.
Our findings indicate that ODE lung donors are increasingly important in the Netherlands, with high acceptance rates, despite highly variable evaluation methods. Standardizing the assessment of potential ODE lung donors could further improve acceptance rates and enhance the contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool."

Alex Chan on deceased organ donation

 The Harvard Gazette points to this interview with HBS professor Alex Chan:

Designing Incentives That Matter—Even After Death: Interview with Alex Chan By Avery Forman 

"In “Reimagining Transplant Center Incentives Beyond the CMS IOTA Model,” published in January in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Chan explores a government experiment that pays kidney centers for volume and efficiency—not just outcomes—which could increase transplant numbers. Chan cowrote the article with Alvin E. Roth, the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration, Emeritus, at HBS.

In addition, covering funeral costs for organ donors could increase donation rates by up to 35%, and save up to 419,000 life years and as much as $800 million in Medicare expenses, Chan and coauthor Kurt Sweat of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center write in “Funeral Expense Reimbursement as a Strategy to Enhance Organ Donation and Transplantation Access,” published in October in NPJ Health Systems.

 ...

"Why Chan felt compelled to study the organ market

“Two things pulled me in. First, this is a market where the stakes are brutally clear. Organ transplantation is one of the few places where inefficiency shows up not as a deadweight loss in a textbook, but as people dying on a waiting list. When a market fails here, it fails loudly.

Second, the level of inefficiency is staggering. Each year, more than 5,000 organs are recovered and then discarded, while roughly the same number of people die waiting for an organ. These are million-dollar transactions once you account for surgery, lifelong care, and avoided dialysis. So even small improvements in incentives can save lives directly and save the healthcare system billions of dollars.

For an economist or market designer, that’s a rare alignment: moral urgency and economic leverage pointing in the same direction.”

Incentives must consider what’s socially acceptable

“Incentive design is much harder than we like to admit. Organ transplantation is a supply chain. You have procurement organizations, hospitals, surgeons, patients, regulators, all responding to different incentives.

Designing a good incentive for one actor is already difficult. Designing incentives so that the entire chain works well is not just adding up the optimal incentives for each link. Sometimes improving one part of the system quietly breaks another.

The choice isn't between market and no market. It’s between a system we design on purpose and a system that fails by accident.

This is a market with moral and political constraints embedded in it. In healthcare, and frankly now in most markets, the incentives that are economically sensible also need to be socially legitimate.

Incentives don’t just change behavior; they express values. In markets that touch life, death, or dignity, people react not only to what the incentive does, but to what it seems to say. That makes incentive design less like tuning a machine and more like negotiating a fragile social contract.

 ...

"The ‘ick factor’ might prevent progress

“Very often people do not want to use the right incentives because they have this concept of it being repugnant.

[For instance], we would pay for the funeral of someone who gives their life for their country when they serve in the military. We will pay for the funeral of someone who donated their body for scientific research to advance society. But if people want to donate an organ to save another person's life? If [that donor’s] family would very much welcome some support at a moment of crisis, we are not going to pay for the funeral. Even a very sensible incentive sometimes is bound by social norms, or even what we call the ‘ick factor,’ and we have a less effective system at the end.

People worry that incentives will corrupt the gift of life. But the truth is that we already have incentives; they’re just accidental and poorly distributed. The choice isn't between market and no market. It’s between a system we design on purpose and a system that fails by accident. Ignorance of incentives doesn't make a system moral; it just makes it inefficient.”