Egypt arrests 'organ trafficking ring'

The BBC has the story: Egypt arrests 'organ trafficking ring'
Egyptian authorities have arrested doctors, nurses and professors suspected of being involved in an international organ trafficking ring.

(professors!)

"The arrests of at least 25 people on Tuesday also included organ buyers and middlemen, the country's Administrative Control Authority said.
Authorities also found "millions of dollars and gold bullion".
It is illegal to purchase organs in Egypt, but poverty drives some to sell their body parts.
The Administrative Control Authority, a powerful anti-corruption body, claimed the network targeted on Tuesday was "made up of Egyptians and Arabs taking advantage of some of the citizens' difficult economic conditions so that they buy their human organs and sell [them] for large sums of money".
The statement on the government website added that the group was "the largest international network for trading human organs".
...
"The arrests follow years of concern over the illegal organ trade in Egypt.
In 2010, it was named as one of the top five countries for illegal organ trade by the World Health Organization's co-ordinator at the time, Luc Noel.
Egypt passed laws to try to curb the trade, but according to the United Nations, hundreds of poor Egyptians still sell kidneys and livers each year to be able to buy food or pay off debts.
There have also been concerns over the fate of migrants who come into contact with the traffickers.
In 2012, then UN refugee agency chief, Antonio Guterres, said some migrants in Egypt's Sinai peninsula were being "killed for the traffic of organs", while earlier this year a people smuggler told Italian prosecutors that those who could not pay their debt were sold to the organ traffickers.
The allegations have not been proven, however."
*******************

Here is a related story from the Daily Mail:
45 doctors, nurses and 'middlemen' are arrested for HUMAN ORGAN trade in Egypt as migrants sell body parts to reach Europe 
The harvesting of human organs is being described as the biggest ever in Egypt
Reports those involved were targeting African migrants trying to get to Europe
As well as the arrests, health ministry recovered millions of dollars in a raid
Some arrested worked at medical faculties of Cairo and Ain Shams Universities

Black markets for kidney transplants--arrests in Israel

A late December story of black markets and law enforcement from the Times of Israel:
2 charged with running international organ traffic ring. Patients allegedly paid $180,000 for a kidney; illegal transplants carried out in Turkey, Bulgaria, Thailand, Philippines

"Roini Shimshilashvili and Albert Murdakhayev were charged with multiple counts of trafficking in organs, brokering organ trafficking and conspiracy, according to a court statement. A third man, identified as a doctor, Zachi Shapira, was charged with multiple counts of assisting in organ trafficking.
...
"The two men allegedly found prospective donors from the former Soviet Union who matched sick Israelis. The donors would be paid to donate their kidneys to the Israelis, “who paid sums of up to $180,000 in most cases,” the court heard. It was not clear how much the donors were paid.

...

"In the last two years, the ring reportedly arranged for 14 transplants in four countries; Turkey, Bulgaria, Thailand and Philippines"


HT: Robert Gutman

2016 Baby Markets 10th Anniversary International Congress in April

Here's the call for papers:

2016 Baby Markets 10th Anniversary International Congress

April 1-3, 2016 • University of California, Irvine School of Law

The Baby Markets International Congress celebrates the 10th Anniversary of the Baby Markets Roundtable series founded by the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy's Director, Chancellor’s Professor Michele Goodwin.

The Center welcomes abstracts engaging adoption, assisted reproduction, surrogacy trafficking, custodial parenting, care-giving, foster care, legal implications, and more through historical and contemporary lenses. View the full list of Congress themes »

Congress attendees will have the opportunity to submit papers to the Organizing Committee for publication in UC Irvine Law Review. The Organizing Committee will choose a select number of proceedings from the Congress for publication. Papers may also be accepted for the Second Edition of Professor Michele Goodwin’s Baby Markets volume.

All abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2016. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words.

Genetic testing for heritable diseases

JScreen is a genetic testing service associated with Emory University that allows individuals and couples to learn what heritable diseases they may carry.  It also offers advising on Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), Use of donor sperm or egg, Adoption, Prenatal Diagnosis, and Preparation and Early Treatment (when expecting a child who may have a congenital disease).

A well established service of this kind, with a focus on Tay Sachs disease, is Dor Yeshorim (which translates roughly as "straight generation") about which I blogged last year with particular attention to the privacy protecting part of their protocol:

A privacy-preserving market design intervention to avoid Tay Sachs disease

Evolution of kidney exchange markets, and other short videos from the AEA Poster session

Below is the video interview that goes with my poster presentation at the just concluded American Economic Association/ASSA meetings in Chicago:

AEA POSTER PRESENTER VIDEO

Al Roth on the evolution of kidney exchange markets

Subtitle: Al Roth is the current president of the American Economic Association and the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He sat down with the AEA to talk about the market for a product (human kidneys) that can't legally be bought or sold, and the potential for huge savings in the U.S. health care system if we do a better job facilitating kidney exchanges across international borders.

You can also find the video here, on vimeo.

Al Roth on the evolution of kidney exchange markets from American Economic Association on Vimeo.

Here's the poster itself: The Ongoing Design of Kidney Exchange: Recent and Prospective Developments

You can videos related to other posters at the 2017 Annual Meeting Videos , and here you can see the whole poster session.

Backpage closes it's marketplace for sex

Yesterday I posted about the legal battle brewing over whether Backpage.com is in violation of the laws against pimping and prostitution, and today comes the news that it is shutting down those ads. Here's the Washington Post story:
Backpage.com shuts down adult services ads after relentless pressure from authorities

"Fighting accusations from members of Congress that it facilitated child sex trafficking, the classified advertising site Backpage.com abruptly closed its adult advertising section in the United States on Monday, saying years of government pressure left it no choice but to shutter its most popular and lucrative feature.

"The decision came shortly after a Senate panel released a report alleging Backpage concealed criminal activity by removing words from ads that would have exposed child sex trafficking and prostitution. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to hold a hearing on the report Tuesday morning. Backpage’s founders and executives will appear in the hearing but do not plan to testify, according to their attorneys.

...

"The federal Communications Decency Act provides immunity to website operators that publish third-party content online, but multiple lawsuits have argued that the 1996 law does not protect Backpage because the site contributes to illegal activity — claims Backpage has vigorously denied.

"The Senate subcommittee raised similar concerns Monday. Its report alleged that Backpage knowingly hid child sex trafficking and prostitution by deleting incriminating terms from its ads before publication. The report found that the company used a feature that automatically scrubbed words such as “teenage,” “rape” and “young” from some ads, while manually removing terms from others."

European Network for Collaboration on Kidney Exchange Programmes

The European Network for Collaboration on Kidney Exchange Programmes will have its first meeting in January in Estonia, January 12 and 13 at the Estonian Business School (EBS). The aim of the network is to share information and coordinate practices among planned and existing kidney exchange programs throughout Europe.

DAY 1

8:30-9:00 registrations

Welcome
9:00-9:45 Introduction by Joris vd Klundert:
-    Welcome Introduction of the participants
-    Aim and structure of the project
9.45-10.00 Aim of the first meeting by Peter Biro

Session 1 (moderated by Lisa Burnapp/ Bernadette Haase)
10.00-10.20  Aline Hemke: updates on the Dutch KEP
10.20 -10.40 Rachel Johnson: updates on the UK KEP
10.40-11.00  Discussion and key points

11.00:-11:30 coffee break

Session 2 (moderated Lisa Burnapp/Bernadette Haase)
11:30-11:50 Maria Valentin: KEP in Spain
11:50-12:10 Catarina Bolotinha: KEP in Portugal
12:10-12:30 Marie-Alice Macher: KEP in France
12:30-12:50  Paola Di Ciaccio and Vito Sparacino: KEP in Italy
12.50-13.30  Discussion and key points

13:30-14:30 lunch break

Session 3 (moderated Peter Biro)
14:30-14:50 Jiri Fronek: KEP in Czech Republic
14:50-15:10 Gregor Bond: KEP in Austria
15:10-15:30 Rafal Kieszek: KEP in Poland
15:30-15:45 Katarina Cechlarova: plans in Slovakia
15:45-16:00 Karine Hadaya: plans in Switzerland

16.00 – 16.30 coffee break

Session 4  (moderated by Lisa Burnapp/Bernadette Haase)
16:30-18:00 Interactive discussion on key themes from the morning session

Day 2

Session 5 (moderated by Joris vd Klundert)
9:00-9.15   Discussing the issues identified at the meeting in relation with the COST Action plans
9.15-10.30  Identify the specialised areas (organisational, legal ,financial, mathematical etc) which need further investigations and concrete actions. Division of work among participants.

10.30-11:00 coffee break

Session 6 (open discussion, moderated by Peter Biro)
11:00-11:45 Handbook: structure, details of data collection
11:45-12:30 Organisation of further activities of WG1

Racial discrimination in Uber and Lyft

Here's an NBER paper that investigates, in connection with Uber and Lyft, some of the issues that crop up in other distributed decision making marketplaces:

Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies 
Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf
NBER Working Paper No. 22776 October 2016

ABSTRACT Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African Americansounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.

Yanbo Ge University of Washington Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering yanboge@uw.edu
Christopher R. Knittel MIT Sloan School of Management 100 Main Street, E62-513 Cambridge, MA 02142 and NBER knittel@mit.edu
Don MacKenzie University of Washington Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering dwhm@uw.edu
Stephen Zoepf Stanford University Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) szoepf@stanford.edu
************

See these posts for a related problem of peer to peer discrimination faced by Airbnb:

Airbnb consider market design changes to reduce discrimination

Airbnb and racial discrimination by hosts

Classified ads as a marketplace for sex

Here's a story about a classified ad sex site whose publishers were recently arrested, in a case that pits freedom of the press against accusations of making a market for illegal prostitution, and very illegal trafficking in children. The case may extend the criminal definition of illegal pimping to the owners of a newspaper that no one seems to dispute is used to advertise prostitution, among consenting adults and possibly also by nonconsenting adults and children.

Digital Pimps or Fearless Publishers?
The owners of Village Voice Media gamed the online classified business with Backpage.com and made millions. But when it became a breeding ground for child rape, the publishers became something else: defendants.  by Kate Knibbs

"Backpage is the most prominent online destination for on-demand paid sex in the United States, and according to the arrest warrant for Ferrer and others, it made nearly 99 percent of its over $50 million revenue in California from January 2013 to March 2015 from charging for erotic classified ads. It is, in essence, an escort advertising network nestled in a Craigslist knockoff.
...
"“Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement in October. Her office had brought the charges against the men in the middle of what would turn out to be her successful campaign for U.S. Senate.

"Backpage general counsel Liz McDougall called the arrests an “election year stunt.”

"Whether or not it was designed to be a brothel, and whether its owners are neutral web hosts attacked for political gain or nefarious pimps adept at skating the law, is what the court must decide.

...

"The executives at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were also gratified.

The nonprofit views Backpage as so tightly tied to the sale of children for rape that the website is now the first place it searches for children reported missing. In a 2016 amicus brief, the organization outlined the ways in which it believes that Backpage has been deliberately optimized to keep the child trafficking industry going, including having relaxed posting rules for escort ads while requiring other sellers to provide valid telephone numbers. It also describes a case in which one child was “sold for sex more than 50 times on backpage.com beginning when she was 12 years old.” The organization has worked on more than 420 cases in which children were trafficked through Backpage.

“I don’t know that anyone really believes that there’s a way, with a website offering those services, to completely eliminate [the sex trade],” Staca Shehan, the executive director of the NCMEC’s Case Analysis Division, told me. “But there’s a lot to be done to reduce the likelihood, to reduce this website as a target to buy and sell children for sex.”

The relationship between Backpage and NCMEC was originally cooperative, but Shehan says it soured in 2013, when the center decided the site’s crackdown attempts were theater. She said that Backpage would voluntarily report that it took down one advertisement for a minor, but that her researchers would discover the same image of the child in many other posts that remained online and untouched. This infuriates Shehan. “Why would you report one, and not all the other ones that your website is hosting? Why wouldn’t you remove that ad if you suspect that a child is being sold for sex and block the individual user?” she said.

In March, the Senate voted unanimously to hold Ferrer in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena for a separate investigation into Backpage’s activities — the first contempt authorization in more than 20 years. This investigation paints Backpage as a deliberately sinister operation, claiming that the company edits advertisements to make them look less like sex trafficking. “Our investigation showed that Backpage ‘edits’ advertisements before posting them, by removing certain words, phrases, or images. For instance, they might remove a word or image that makes clear that sexual services are being offered for money. And then they would post this ‘sanitized’ version of the ad,” Senator Rob Portman said in a statement. “In other words, Backpage’s editing procedures, far from being an effective anti-trafficking measure, only served to sanitize the ads of illegal content to an outside viewer.”

While lawmakers like Portman see Backpage as a demonic helpmate for rapists and abusive pimps, the website has a reputation as a valuable safety tool within some sex worker communities.

Consenting, adult sex workers often praise Backpage for helping minimize the risks of their job. Sex worker advocacy groups have condemned the prosecution of Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin. In San Francisco, sex workers and supporters gathered to protest the Backpage arrests. “This culmination of a three-year investigation by the California government is a shocking waste of resources for a political stunt that leaves sex workers and trafficking victims stigmatized, isolated, and more vulnerable to violence,” the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project said in a statement condemning Ferrer’s arrest.

The phantoms of other shuttered and beleaguered sex ad sites worry sex workers who view digital classifieds as instrumental to their safety. RedBook, a long-running Bay Area hub for sex work ads, was shut down after an investigation by the IRS and FBI in 2014. “Authorities say the San Francisco–based website, which primarily served California and Nevada, facilitated prostitution and had to fall. Sex workers say the site provided a meager safeguard against predators, pimps, and cops,” the Sacramento News & Review wrote. “When it disappeared, the most at-risk workers — those of limited means and greatest need — were displaced to the streets.”

...

"While lurid and sad, the arrest report for Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin has another striking feature: None of the incidents recounted involved the men arranging for or paying for sex, nor did they involve the participation of the men authorities describe as “pimps.” There is no mention of “pimping” in the traditional sense, the act of controlling sex workers, or arranging meet-ups, or taking a cut of their income. The men were arrested as pimps simply by dint of owning and operating a website where other people pimped, even though Backpage’s disclaimer instructs users to report underage trafficking and illegal activity.

The arrest warrant describes how a California Department of Justice agent personally called Ferrer to alert him of an illegal ad. Upending expectations, the warrant notes that the CEO promised to promptly remove this ad — and then kept his word and promptly removed it. So it isn’t that the website lacks moderation; the allegation is that Backpage’s moderation isn’t sufficient enough, and that insufficiency is tantamount to the act of pimping.

It is an unusual stretch of the definition of a very old crime. By arresting Backpage’s current and former executives, Harris was sending a message: If the definition of pimping hadn’t yet changed, she was trying to change it."

HT: Scott Cunningham

AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts

2017 AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts of Selected Sessions

View Webcasts of selected sessions from the Annual Meeting in Chicago on January 6-8, 2017! (compliments of the AEA):

January 6, 2017

Brexit: Six Months Later (Panel Discussion)
Presiding: Olivier BlanchardJonathan Portes
Andrew Lilico
Karl Whelan
View Webcast

Nobels on Where is the World Economy Headed?
Presiding: Dominick Salvatore
Where in the World Is the World Headed? Angus DeatonSeeking Political Keys for Economic Growth Roger MyersonHow the Left and Right Are Failing the West Edmund PhelpsEconomic Risks Associated with Deep Change in Technology Robert J. ShillerNew Divisions in the World Economy Joseph E. StiglitzView Webcast

AEA/AFA Joint Luncheon - Will the Market Fix the Market?Eric Budish, introduced by Alvin E. RothView Webcast

Gender AgendaPresiding: Muriel Niederle
Quantifying the Disincentive Effects of Joint Taxation on Married Women's Labor Supply Alexander Bick and Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln
Long Hours and Women's Job Choices: Cross Country and Within United States Evidence Patricia Cortes and Jessica Pan
The Expanding Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence from the LEHD-Census Claudia Goldin, Sari Pekkala Kerr, Claudia Olivetti, and Erling Barth
Competitiveness and Education Choices Muriel Niederle
Discussants: Erik HurstView Webcast

AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy MakingEsther Duflo, introduced by Alvin E. RothView Webcast

January 7, 2017

Economists as Engineers (Panel Discussion)
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth
Paul Milgrom
Atila AbdulkadirogluView Webcast

Economic Issues Facing the New President (Panel Discussion)
Presiding: Greg Mankiw
Jason Furman
Glenn Hubbard
Alan Krueger
John TaylorView Webcast

AEA Nobel Laureate Luncheon Honoring Angus Deaton from Princeton University
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth
James Heckman
David Laibson
Christina Paxson
View Webcast

Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Curse of the Top Five (Panel Discussion)
Presiding: James J. Heckman
George Akerlof
Angus Deaton
Drew Fudenberg
Lars Hansen
View Webcast

AEA Awards Ceremony
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth
View Webcast

AEA Presidential Address - Narrative Economics
Robert J. Shiller, introduced by Alvin E. Roth
View Webcast

Pictures from ASSA 2017

I saw, listened to and even introduced some famous economists at the ASSA meetings. Here are a few;  see who you recognize...

Update: and here are some photos by a professional photographer:  https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2017-photos

AEA Poster session: The Ongoing Design of Kidney Exchange

This year we've organized an expanded set of posters at the AEA meetings in Chicago, and mine is  on The Ongoing Design of Kidney Exchange: Recent and Prospective Developments. Below is a picture of the poster taken by Craig Huey (but it is probably easier to read at the link above:).

Kidney exchange has become an increasingly standard and important part of kidney transplantation in the U.S.. But in some ways how it has developed is very different than my experience in other areas of market design. One way to see the difference is that in some other markets on which I've worked, like labor markets for doctors and other healthcare professionals, and school choice, the initial designs that were proposed, adapted, adopted and implemented are still in use today, using variants of the deferred acceptance algorithm in more or less the original form in which they were implemented in each labor market and school district. Not so for kidney exchange, which has to constantly adapt to the ways that transplant centers themselves adapt to kidney exchange, and to each other and the several multi-hospital kidney exchange networks.

Here are the papers of mine that I chose to reflect this evolution on the poster, in chronological order. (Of course there's lots of related work in which I'm not a coauthor, but posters have their limits.) Another difference from some of my previous market design experience is that a lot of the discussion of practical design issues goes on in medical journals...

1.Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sönmez and M. Utku Ünver, "Kidney Exchange," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119, 2, May, 2004, 457-488.

2.Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sönmez, M. Utku Ünver, Francis L. Delmonico, and Susan L. Saidman, “Utilizing List Exchange and Undirected Good Samaritan Donation through “Chain” Paired Kidney Donations,” American Journal of Transplantation, 6, 11, November 2006, 2694-2705.

3.Rees, Michael A., Jonathan E. Kopke, Ronald P. Pelletier, Dorry L. Segev, Matthew E. Rutter, Alfredo J. Fabrega, Jeffrey Rogers, Oleh G. Pankewycz, Janet Hiller, Alvin E. Roth, Tuomas Sandholm, Utku Ünver, and Robert A. Montgomery, “A Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain,” New England Journal of Medicine, 360;11, March 12, 2009, 1096-1101.

4.Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, “Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation – Revisited,” American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994  

5. Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, “NEAD Chains in Transplantation,” American Journal of Transplantation, December 2011; 11: 2780–2781.

6. Rees, Michael A.,  Mark A. Schnitzler, Edward Zavala, James A. Cutler,  Alvin E. Roth, F. Dennis Irwin, Stephen W. Crawford,and Alan B.  Leichtman, “Call to Develop a Standard Acquisition Charge Model for Kidney Paired Donation,” American Journal of Transplantation, 2012, 12, 6 (June), 1392-1397. (published online 9 April 2012

7.Ashlagi, Itai, and Alvin E. Roth, "Free Riding and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-hospital Kidney Exchange,” Theoretical Economics 9 (2014), 817–863.

8.Anderson, Ross, Itai Ashlagi, David Gamarnik and Alvin E. Roth, “Finding long chains in kidney exchange using the traveling salesmen problem,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), January 20, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 3 | 663–668

9. Fumo, D.E., V. Kapoor, L.J. Reece, S.M. Stepkowski,J.E. Kopke, S.E. Rees, C. Smith, A.E. Roth, A.B. Leichtman, M.A. Rees, “Improving matching strategies in kidney paired donation: the 7-year evolution of a web based virtual matching system,” American Journal of Transplantation, October 2015, 15(10), 2646-2654

10.Melcher, Marc L., John P. Roberts, Alan B. Leichtman, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, “Utilization of Deceased Donor Kidneys to Initiate Living Donor Chains,” American Journal of Transplantation, 16, 5, May 2016, 1367–1370.

11.Michael A. Rees, Ty B. Dunn, Christian S. Kuhr, Christopher L. Marsh, Jeffrey Rogers, Susan E. Rees, Alejandra Cicero, Laurie J. Reece, Alvin E. Roth, Obi Ekwenna, David E. Fumo, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Jonathan E. Kopke, Samay Jain, Miguel Tan and Siegfredo R. Paloyo, “Kidney Exchange to Overcome Financial Barriers to Kidney Transplantation,” American Journal of Transplantation, forthcoming  

12.Nikzad, Afshin, Mohammad Akbarpour, Michael Rees, and Alvin E. Roth, “Financing Transplant Costs of the Poor: A Dynamic Model of Global Kidney Exchange,”  2016

Some special sessions at the ASSA meetings

It was my responsibility to organize the AEA portion of the ASSA meetings this year (which I did with the help of a distinguished and hard working program committee). My only academic presentation here this year will be at our newly expanded poster session. But I'll be presiding over a number of special events.

If you would like to hear exciting economists giving special talks, I'll be introducing some of them at these sessions (two today and three tomorrow):

AEA/AFA Joint Luncheon
 Friday, Jan. 6, 2017    12:30 PM – 2:15 PM
 Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand Ballroom F
Hosted By:  AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION/AMERICAN FINANCE ASSOCIATION
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University
Speaker: Eric Budish, University of Chicago - Will the Market Fix the Market?

AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture
 Friday, Jan. 6, 2017    4:45 PM – 5:45 PM
 Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand Ballroom F
Hosted By:  AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University
Speaker: Esther Duflo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology--The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making

Economists as Engineers
 Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017    8:00 AM – 10:00 AM
 Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand Ballroom AB
Hosted By:  AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
Chair:  Alvin Roth, Stanford University
 Paul Milgrom , Stanford University
Topic: Using Auctions for Complex Resource Allocations
Atila Abdulkadiroglu , Duke University 
Topic: School Choice: Using Matching Theory to Allocate Seats in Schools

AEA Nobel Laureate Luncheon - in honor of Angus Deaton
 Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017    12:30 PM – 2:15 PM
 Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand Ballroom F
Hosted By:  AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University
Speakers:
James Heckman, University of Chicago
David Laibson, Harvard University
Christina Paxson, Brown University

AEA Awards Ceremony and Presidential Address
 Saturday, Jan. 7, 2017    4:40 PM – 5:45 PM
 Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand Ballroom F
Hosted By:  AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
Presiding: Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University
Speaker: Robert Shiller, Yale University, "Narrative Economics"

Richard Ely and the founding of the American Economic Association

Some history of the AEA, and Richard Ely.

First, from the Democracy Journal, published before last year's AEA meetings in SF, but just as interesting this year...

Economists of the World, Unite!

"Indeed, the AEA was founded both to conduct scientific research and to agitate for reform, both inside academia and in the public sphere. At its start, the two missions were inextricably linked. The old economics claimed to have discovered immutable laws governing the distribution of wealth, derived from a theoretical construction of an abstract, idealized economy. The founders of the AEA, on the other hand, looked first to study economic outcomes as they found them. Treating income, wealth, work, wages, depressions, trade, and so on as contingent realities as opposed to abstract truths naturally led to the conclusion that they could be altered by policy. That implication clashed with the political bulwark against so-called “class legislation,” namely any attempt to alter the social hierarchy through collective action or public policy. At all levels, therefore, this approach defied the intellectual foundations of classical economics.

"The leader of this group of young Turks was Richard Ely, a 31-year-old professor at Johns Hopkins University. Ely was a committed evangelical and a believer in the “social gospel” movement, which preached the application of Christian ethics to the creation of a just social order. But he was also an ambitious, modernizing professional academic. This combination of traditional and modern values drove him into the area of public persuasion, where he felt called to present economics as a friend to the common man rather than an apologist for his employer."
*************

Another window on Ely (who turns out to have had racial views on eugenics) comes from this MR post:
Richard T. Ely, Alt-Right Founder of the American Economic Association, by Alex Tabarrok

Tabarrok's post is in response to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
When Economics Was Radical  By Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger 

France introduces opt-out policy on organ donation

The Guardian has the story:
France introduces opt-out policy on organ donation
Change in law means consent for organs to be removed is presumed unless person joins official ‘refusal register’

"France has reversed its policy on organ donations so that all people could become donors on their death unless they join an official register to opt out.
The new law presumes consent for organs to be removed, even if it goes against the wishes of the family.

Until 1 January, when the legislation took effect, unless the person who had died had previously expressed a clear wish for or against donation, doctors were required to consult relatives who, in almost a third of cases, refused.

Those who do not want all or any of their organs to be used must now put their name on a “refusal register” – so far 150,000 people have signed up. The authorities have promised to make it easier for those who wish to refuse by allowing them to join the register online instead of by registered post.

Alternatively, those vehemently opposed to their organs being used can leave a signed document with their next-of-kin or transmit their wish orally to relatives who must make a written declaration of non-consent to doctors at the time of death. The process is explained on the agency’s Facebook page.

In November, the French Agence de la Biomédecine released a film, Déjà-vu2, aimed at encouraging 15- to 25-year-olds to agree to organ donation.

The European Union has highlighted the lack of organs for transplant and the increasing number of patients on waitings lists worldwide. Its figures claim that in 2014, 86,000 people were waiting for organ donations in EU states, Norway and Turkey, and 16 people were dying every day while waiting for a transplant.

In the UK, doctors lament one of the lowest consent rates in Europe, as well as a shortage of donors from black or Asian communities. A record number of organs were donated and transplanted in the UK in 2015-16, but the rate remains short of the target of 80% by 2020. The biggest obstacle remains relatives’ opposition, who have vetoed transplants even from registered donors.

NHSBT, which is responsible for the NHS organ donor register and for matching and allocating donor organs, said it was considering further steps it could take when approaching families to ensure more potential donors’ decisions were not vetoed.

One option would be to no longer ask the next-of-kin to confirm consent or authorisation. Their permission is not required by law if someone has registered a decision to donate on the NHS organ donor register.

Families in Scotland are already required to complete a retraction form to record why they overturned a relative’s decision to donate. NHSBT said a similar form be introduced across the UK."

HT: Frank McCormick