Super (bowl) markets

 There's also a football game, but here are some other, related markets (gambling, advertising, deal making...).

Gambling:

WSJ: Watching the Super Bowl? Bettor Beware. It’s easier than ever for the average fan to bet on sports, even mid-game. But when it comes to winning, the odds are stacked. by Danny Funt

"Thanks to the profusion of online betting, sportsbooks are encouraging customers to bet during games—a category that is “growing exponentially,” Mr. Scott said. Chris Grove, partner emeritus at Eilers & Krejcik, said in the near future, in-game betting should account for the “overwhelming majority” of U.S. sportsbook revenue.

"Roughly half of bets on NFL games this season were placed after the opening kickoff. Customers can wager on lines that move with every play, as well as on short-term “prop” bets like, “Will this possession end in a touchdown?” 

...

"An even bigger source of growth for sportsbooks has been parlays, in which bettors string together multiple bets for the chance at a larger payout, but lose if any of the components fails to transpire. Bettors can now place same-game parlays, bundling wagers on, say, the winning team, the total points scored and a quarterback’s passing yards. (Naturally, sportsbooks offer in-game same-game parlays, too.)

"FanDuel, which controls about half of the national online betting market, according to Eilers & Krejcik, leads the industry due in part to its success capitalizing on parlays. Last October in Illinois, for example, seven out of every 10 bets placed at FanDuel was a parlay, according to data published by the state’s gaming board. FanDuel made about $29.60 for every $100 bet on parlays, compared with $4.80 for every $100 in non-parlay bets."

------------

Record 50 Million Americans to Wager $16B on Super Bowl LVII Press Release 

"A record 50.4 million American adults (20%) are expected to bet on Super Bowl LVII, a 61 percent increase from the record set in 2022, according to a new American Gaming Association (AGA) survey. Bettors plan to wager an estimated $16 billion on this year’s championship game, more than double last year’s estimates.

"With the expansion of legal sports betting, traditional Super Bowl wagers are expected to pass casual wagers for the first time ever:

"30 million American adults plan to place a traditional sports wager online, at a retail sportsbook or with a bookie, up 66 percent from 2022.

"28 million plan to bet casually with friends or as part of a pool or squares contest, up 50 percent from 2022."

********

Advertising:

The 2023 Super Bowl Ads Will Feature Booze, Betting and Jesus. Alcohol is an open field after Anheuser-Busch InBev gave up category exclusivity, while cryptocurrency is set to be a no-show. By Megan Graham

"The Super Bowl still regularly draws an audience of around 100 million people, making it TV’s biggest event of the year and advertising’s biggest night.

"Fox this week said it has sold out of advertising for its Super Bowl broadcast, with some 30-second slots selling for more than $7 million"

----------------

The Backstory to the Jesus Ad Coming to the Super Bowl. The political underpinnings of this campaign are hiding beneath the surface. BY MOLLY OLMSTEAD

"The campaign is being run by something called The Signatry, a Kansas-based Christian foundation that exists, essentially, to connect donors (and their financial advisors) with causes in order to “inspire and facilitate revolutionary, biblical generosity.” According to Ministry Watch, an evangelical watchdog organization that scrutinizes the finances of Christian charities, in 2018, the foundation reported more than $1 billion in contributions. "

*******

Dealmaking by DEALBOOK NEWSLETTER:

"For most of America, the Super Bowl starts on Sunday evening. But for the deal makers who use the event as a backdrop for doing business, the real game starts days before kickoff.

"It’s not uncommon to attend exclusive dinners and parties during the week, and then jet out of town before the opening kickoff. “Once the game starts, it’s just a game,” said George Foster, a professor at Stanford Business School who directs the school’s sports management initiative. “It’s much more effective to get extended time fairly focused on the business relationship on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”

...

Sex work (same link as Dealmaking):

"In December, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, like many government officials preparing to host the Super Bowl before him, announced a statewide campaign to raise awareness of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, ahead of the big game. Though the claim that increased sex trafficking and sex work occurs during major sporting events like the Super Bowl has been debunked over and over and over and over and over again, anti-human trafficking campaigns often target these events.

"Campaigns by cities have been criticized by advocates for sex workers, who say such efforts often rely on law enforcement “raids.” More patrolling can lead to more arrests of sex workers who are not being trafficked, they say, as well as the possibility that victims of trafficking will be arrested.

"It’s also unclear whether campaigns to raise awareness about sex trafficking are effective at addressing it. “If we want to protect people who are being trafficked, we need to protect sex workers because they are the most vulnerable for that happening to them next,” Kristen DiAngelo, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Project in Sacramento, told The Washington Post ahead of last year’s Super Bowl."

The 2023 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research is now soliciting nominations

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research is now soliciting nominations for the 2023 award.

→ Nominations and Applications
→ Jury
→ Recipients
→ Award Presentation
→ Booklet
→ FAQs

Calendar and deadlines

April 30, 2023 – Deadline for Applications
Fall 2023 – Final Selection

Human evolution in the last 12,000 years, in PNAS

My loose impression is that, not so long ago, scholars of human evolution discounted recent changes in the human genome, pointing out that maybe the frequency of lactose intolerance had been altered by the domestication of cattle, goats, and sheep, but suggesting that recent changes (i.e. since the invention of agriculture) were rare. This may have been an anti-racism perspective, or it may be that new data have changed this view, but indeed it seems to have changed.

Gene changes in recent milennia offer a window on how human patterns of interaction, regarding food acquisition and preparation, and communal living, may even cause changes in human biology.  

Here's a special feature on the subject, at the PNAS:

Special Feature: The Past 12,000 Years of Behavior, Adaptation, and Evolution Shaped Who We Are Today

"The authors of this Special Feature focus on challenges pertaining to dietary and nutritional quality and adequacy, resource inequality, interpersonal conflict and warfare, climate change, population trends, demographic transitions, migration, mobility, infectious disease and the rise of novel pathogens, and the transformative circumstances of human biology over the last 12,000 years.

• INTRODUCTIONJANUARY 17, 2023

  The past 12,000 years of behavior, adaptation, population, and evolution shaped who we are today

  • Clark Spencer Larsen and
   

  "Based on the study of human remains from Holocene settings and the associated contexts of diet, behavior, and lifestyle, this set of Perspectives and Research Articles provides readers with new and emerging insights into the human condition and what has shaped human biology, health, and lifestyle over the course of the last 10 or so millennia. This record makes clear that human evolution and biological change, adaptation, exposure to long-standing and newly emerging infectious diseases, population demography, and warfare have continued in important ways over the course of the last 10 millennia, leading to the conditions associated with overpopulation, undernutrition, violence, and other circumstances we face globally today."
• PERSPECTIVEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Climate change, human health, and resilience in the Holocene

  • Gwen Robbins Schug,
   
  • Jane E. Buikstra,
   
  • [...]
  • Sonia R. Zakrzewski,
   
• PERSPECTIVEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Genomic perspectives on human dispersals during the Holocene

  • Mark Stoneking,
   
  • Leonardo Arias,
   
  • [...]
  • Jae Joseph Russell B. Rodriguez,
   
• PERSPECTIVEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Ancient pathogens provide a window into health and well-being

  • Cecil M. Lewis,
   
  • Mercy Y. Akinyi,
   
  • [...]
  • Anne C. Stone,
   
• RESEARCH ARTICLEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe

  • Linda Fibiger,
   
  • Torbjörn Ahlström,
   
  • [...]
  • Martin Smith,
   
• RESEARCH ARTICLEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Population trends and the transition to agriculture: Global processes as seen from North America

  • George R. Milner,
   
  • Jesper L. Boldsen,
   
• RESEARCH ARTICLEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Mobility and kinship in the world’s first village societies

  • Jessica Pearson,
   
  • Jane Evans,
   
  • [...]
  • Eva Fernández-Domínguez,
   
• RESEARCH ARTICLEJANUARY 17, 2023

  Long-term trends in human body size track regional variation in subsistence transitions and growth acceleration linked to dairying

  • Jay T. Stock,
   
  • Emma Pomeroy,
   
  • [...]
  • Jonathan C. K. Wells,

Ticketmaster and the secondary market for tickets, by Budish and Bhave

 Here's a still-timely paper that was a work in progress for quite a while.

Primary-Market Auctions for Event Tickets: Eliminating the Rents of “Bob the Broker”? By Eric Budish and Aditya Bhave, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 2023, 15(1): 142–170 https://doi.org/10.1257/mic.20180230 

Abstract: "Economists have long been puzzled by event-ticket underpricing: underpricing reduces revenue for the performer and encourages socially wasteful rent-seeking by ticket brokers. What about using an auction? This paper studies the introduction of auctions into this market by Ticketmaster in the mid-2000s. By combining primary-market auction data from Ticketmaster with secondary-market resale value data from eBay, we show that Ticketmaster’s auctions “worked”: they substantially improved price discovery, roughly doubled performer revenues, and, on average, nearly eliminated the potential arbitrage profits associated with underpriced tickets. We conclude by discussing why, nevertheless, the auctions failed to take off."

From the conclusions:

"over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared. LexisNexis searches suggest that TM auctions were in use from their introduction in 2003 through around 2011, with a peak in around 2005–2008 but that with limited exceptions, they have not been used since.33

"We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction, economic theory suggests that there are two basic choices for how to eliminate the rents of and rent-seeking by Bob the Broker: ban resale or set a market-clearing price. While auctions are no longer in use, what has at least partly taken off is using available data, including historical resale values, to set fixed prices in the primary market that more accurately approximate market clearing.

...

"We conjecture that the popularity of this practice relative to auctions partly reflects the simplicity and convenience for fans of posted prices relative to auctions, as has been documented more widely by Einav et al. (2018) and partly reflects a harder-to-model “repugnance” cost of ticket auctions (Roth 2007). 

...

"Setting market-clearing prices and banning resale are two ways to modify the primary market to eliminate Bob the Broker’s rents. TM has also aggressively expanded into the secondary market, acquiring TicketsNow for $265 million in 2008 (as well as UK-based Get Me In! for an undisclosed amount); entering into secondary-market partnerships with the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and National Football League (Major League Baseball has a partnership with StubHub); and most recently launching a secondary market within ticketmaster.com called Fan-to-Fan Resale that lists available primary-market tickets alongside secondary-market tickets.38 This business exploits TM’s unique ability, for events where it manages the primary market, to verify the authenticity of tickets in the secondary market. With transaction fees of about 30–40 percent in the largest secondary-market venues (Budish 2019)—of the full resale value, not of just the markup versus the fixed price—perhaps eliminating the rents of Bob the Broker is less profitable than taking a cut."

Song of the year Grammy award for organ donation: Bonnie Raitt - Just Like That

Stephanie Wang alerts me to the surprising fact that this year's Grammy Award for Song of the Year is Bonnie Raitt's song, Just Like That, about organ donation.  You can listen below (have some tissues handy):

CNN has the story: 

No one was expecting Bonnie Raitt to win Song of the Year, least of all the singer herself By Hafsa Khalil, CNN  February 6, 2023

"Raitt’s winning song, “Just Like That,” is about a woman visited by a man who is only alive because of the heart he received – a heart that had belonged to the woman’s son.

“I was so inspired for this song by the incredible story of the love and the grace and the generosity of someone that donates their beloved’s organs to help another person live and this story was so simple and so beautiful for these times,” Raitt explained in her acceptance speech.

Social media advertising and COVID vaccination, in PNAS

 Vaccine rollout is different than allocating other (initially) scarce goods because it involves overcoming vaccine hesitancy.  Here's a meta-analysis which concludes that advertising was helpful and cost effective.

Athey, Susan, Kristen Grabarz, Michael Luca, and Nils Wernerfelt. "Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 5 (2023): e2208110120.

Abstract: Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in the first year of the vaccine roll-out. The 819 randomized experiments in our sample were run by 174 different public health organizations and collectively reached 2.1 billion individuals in 15 languages. We find that these campaigns are, on average, effective at influencing self-reported beliefs—shifting opinions close to 1% at baseline with a cost per influenced person of about $3.41. Combining this result with an estimate of the relationship between survey outcomes and vaccination rates derived from observational data yields an estimated cost per additional vaccination of about $5.68. There is further evidence that campaigns are especially effective at influencing users’ knowledge of how to get vaccines. Our results represent, to the best of our knowledge, the largest set of online public health interventions analyzed to date.

Obstacles facing liver exchange

 Liver exchange is different than kidney exchange in a number of important dimensions, some of which will present obstacles that need to be overcome in different ways. (Although it looks like in liver exchange the donors will travel to the recipients instead of having the organs shipped, as is now mostly done in U.S. kidney exchange.  That's actually how kidney exchange worked when it began) Here's a recent article from Medscape:

Can a Nationwide Liver Paired Donation Program Work?  by Lucy Hicks

"To expand the number of living liver donations in the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) has launched the first national paired liver donation pilot program in the United States.

...

"In 2020, 1095 people died while waiting for a liver transplant

...

"Paired kidney donation programs have been running since 2002, but paired liver donation is relatively new. Since the first US living-donor liver transplant in 1989, the procedure has become safer and is a viable alternative to deceased liver donation. A growing number of living donor programs are popping up at transplant centers across the country.

"Still, living-donor liver donation makes up a small percentage of the liver transplants that are performed every year. In 2022, 603 living-donor liver transplants were performed in the United States, compared to 8925 liver transplants from deceased donors

...

"There are several notable differences between living donor kidney transplants and living donor liver transplants. For example, living donor liver transplant is a more complicated surgery and poses greater risk to the donor. According to the OPTN 2020 Annual Report, from 2015–2019, the rehospitalization rate for living liver donors was twice that of living kidney donors up to 6 weeks after transplant (4.7% vs 2.4%). One year post transplant, the cumulative rehospitalization rate was 11.0% for living liver donors and 4.8% for living kidney donors.

"The risk of dying because of living donation is also higher for liver donors compared to kidney donors. The National Kidney Association states that the odds of dying during kidney donation are about 3 in 100,000, while estimates for risk of death for living liver donors range from 1 in 500 to 1 in 1000. But some of these estimates are from 10 or more years ago, and outcomes have likely improved

...

"In addition to a more complex surgery, surgeons also have a smaller time window in which to transplant a liver than than they do to transplant a kidney. A kidney can remain viable in cold storage for 24–36 hours, and it can be transported via commercial airlines cross country. Livers have to be transplanted within 8–12 hours, according to the OPTN website. For living donation, the graft needs to be transplanted within about 4 hours, Samstein noted; this poses a logistical challenge for a national organ paired donation program.

"We worked around that with the idea that we would move the donor rather than the organ," he said. The program will require a donor (and a support person) to travel to the recipient's transplant center where the surgery will be performed. While 3 of the 15 pilot paired donation transplant centers are in New York City, the other programs are scattered across the country, meaning a donor may have to fly to a different city to undergo surgery.

"Including the preoperative evaluation, meeting the surgical team, the surgery itself, and follow-up, the donor could stay for about a month. The program offers up to $10,000 of financial assistance for travel expenses (for both the donor and support person), as well as lost wages and dependent care (for the donor only). Health insurance coverage will also be provided by the pilot program, in partnership with the American Foundation for Donation and Transplant.

...

"The 1-year pilot program is set to begin when the program conducts its first match run — an algorithm will help match pairs who are enrolled in the program. About five to seven enrolled pairs would be ideal for the first match run, a UNOS spokesperson said. It is possible that the 1-year pilot program could run without performing any paired transplants, but that's unlikely if multiple pairs are enrolled in the system, the spokesperson said. At the time of this story's publication, the one enrolled pair are a mother and daughter who are registered at the UCHealth Transplant Center in Colorado."

Advice on dealing with exploding offers in the Economics job market

 The market for new Economics Ph.D.s is in flux, with interviews this year being conducted remotely by Zoom rather than in person at the annual January conference. (Zoom interviews were a Covid innovation that seems likely to stay--mostly because remote interviews seemed to work well.)  But issues of timing can be delicate, and there's some concern that, now that initial interviews aren't being synchonized with the annual meetings, we're seeing more early interviews, flyouts (subsequent in-person, on campus interviews) and offers than in previous years, including more offers that require replies very quickly--exploding offers.  Exploding offers cause difficulties to those who receive them, and they contribute to market-wide difficulties, as they can cause the market to move earlier from year to year, i.e. to unravel into very early offers at diffuse times, so that the market loses thickness.

So...I wasn't too surprised to get an email this week from a colleague who has a student on the market who presently has two exploding offers, each with a one-week deadline.  My colleague writes that his student  presently has flyouts scheduled with other schools through February, and so won't even have visited them by the time his exploding offers expire. "He would much prefer an offer from several of them to these 2 current offers--but I have no idea what is the likelihood of getting offers from them."

He asks me "Does any entity such as the ASSA, Stanford, etc. have a policy that I can mention to these schools? "  And he asks for my advice.  I don't have great advice, but here's my slightly redacted reply:

"The AEA doesn’t have a good policy on this, but the AFA does: see my blog post here

Tuesday, August 2, 2022 American Finance Association guidelines to prevent unravelling of the job market  (it says) “the AFA promotes the following professional norm: If a job candidate receives and accepts a coercive exploding offer (i.e., one that expires before February 20), the AFA does not consider such an acceptance to be binding.”

 "That said, talking to the schools that have issued coercive exploding offers is a good idea, and it may or may not help.  I think there are three main reasons they might make exploding offers.

• 1.       Pure evil: they think your student might get a better offer if they wait, and want to capture him before that.
• 2.       Fear that their other candidates will disappear: they may have a second choice candidate who already has an exploding offer, in which case they may be able to tell you when that offer explodes.  But maybe their fear is less focused than that, in which case you might get them to extend the offer on the understanding that they can make it explode later.
• 3.       Boilerplate: they may have just copy-pasted from some template that had a short fuse offer. In this case there’s a good chance they’ll relax the drop dead date.

 "I’ve encountered other reasons as well. In the 2008 financial crisis some of our students got exploding offers, and when I called one school to inquire, was told that their dean wouldn’t allow them to schedule any more flyouts until/unless they’d been rejected by our student.

 "There are labor markets that suffer a great deal from exploding offers (e.g. private equity right now, among others).  But it’s still not the norm in economics, so I think you have a good chance of getting some more time by asking for it."

Unraveling of the private equity labor market, continued (and continuing)

 Here's some news and history on the

Private Equity On-Cycle Recruiting Timeline

by Matt Ting (Peak Frameworks)

"The sheer absurdity of the private equity recruiting process is perhaps best illustrated by the recruiting timeline.

"In recent years, private equity recruiting has kicked off within months of people graduating. Private equity firms commonly interview and hire people that have fewer than 6 months of work experience. And the thing is, private equity firms are hiring people who won’t actually start their jobs for another 2 years.

"Over a decade ago, recruiting occurred only 1 year in advance. This gave analysts much more time to do actual deals, technically prepare, and thoughtfully decide if they wanted to recruit for private equity.

"Every single year, the recruiting timeline inches forward by a month or so. There was a brief stretch for the 2012 – 2016 associate classes where the start time held relatively constant at around 1.5 years in advance.

"Over the past five years, the recruiting timeline has consistently moved up a month or two at a time. Every single year, many firms get caught off-guard or unprepared because of how accelerated things have become. It’s at the point where it seems like there’s no further it can move forward.

"The only time over the last 15 years that recruiting has moved backwards in time was during the Great Recession (recruiting during July 2009). And even then, recruiting only moved back by a couple of months."

HT: Mike Ostrovsky

Selling flavored cigarettes after California's ban

 It's hard to regulate tobacco. The NY Times brings us up to date on California's ban on flavored tobacco products.

R.J. Reynolds Pivots to New Cigarette Pitches as Flavor Ban Takes Effect. Now that California’s tobacco prohibitions are in place, some Camel and Newport items are billed as newly “fresh” or “crisp” non-menthol versions. By Christina Jewett and Emily Baumgaertner

"R.J. Reynolds has wasted no time since California’s ban on flavored tobacco went into effect in late December. “California, We’ve Got You Covered,” the company declared in bold letters on a flier mailed to its cigarette customers.

"The law prohibits flavors, odors or “tastes” in tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes. But antismoking experts argue that R.J. Reynolds, the maker of Camel and Newport brands, is trying to circumvent the ban by luring smokers with a suite of what it says are new non-menthol versions offering “a taste that satisfies the senses” and “a new fresh twist.”

"The campaign is viewed by critics as a provocation of California authorities who are supposed to enforce the ban, which includes a provision outlawing packaging or claims that suggest a product has a flavor. The Food and Drug Administration also is moving forward with a national plan to take menthol cigarettes off the market.

...

"Dr. Robert Jackler, a professor at Stanford Medicine who provided the ads to The New York Times, called the new marketing “outrageous.”

“The thing that surprises me is there’s no camouflage,” said Dr. Jackler, who received the mailers along with staff members of Stanford’s program on tobacco advertising. “They’re saying, ‘This is our menthol replacement. And by the way — wink, wink — it is not really menthol.’”

...

"Worldwide, tobacco companies have discovered loopholes to bans on menthol or flavored tobacco, studies show. In Canada, flavor cards and additive drops have been used to supplement unflavored products. In Denmark, smokers now have access to menthol sprays, capsules and tubes."

***********

Earlier:

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Suppressing vaping is hard

Legal Frontiers for Safeguarding Reproductive Freedoms, in JAMA

 We can expect long legal battles to follow the repeal of Roe v. Wade.  Here's a survey of the battlefield in JAMA.

New Legal Frontiers for Safeguarding Reproductive Freedoms by Rebecca B. Reingold, JD; Lawrence O. Gostin, JD, JAMA. Published online January 30, 2023. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.1004

"In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the landmark ruling, thus eliminating a national right to abortion before viability. Key federal strategies to address this ruling include expanding access to medication abortions and emergency abortion services. Federal conscience protections for health workers balance nondiscriminatory access to abortion services. Ballot initiatives and courts are seeking to protect reproductive rights under state constitutions. At stake is whether pregnant people can access essential services, with significant consequences for autonomy, dignity, health, and emotional well-being.

...

"In January 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) modified its Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) to allow retail pharmacies to dispense mifepristone.2 Previously, mifepristone could be dispensed only in certain clinics, medical offices, and hospitals.

...

"In December 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ) at the request of the US Postal Service (USPS) issued guidance clarifying the lawfulness of sending abortion medications through the USPS.3 An 1873 federal law (the Comstack Act) prohibits mailing any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”4 The DOJ determined that the Comstack Act does not prohibit mailing, delivery, or receipt by mail of mifepristone or misoprostol because the sender cannot know if the drug will be used unlawfully.

...

"The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals that receive Medicare funds to provide stabilizing treatment to patients experiencing a medical emergency.6 Urgent medical treatment should extend both to saving life and preserving health. In July 2022, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued guidance stating that EMTALA requires abortion services wherever necessary to stabilize a pregnant patient experiencing an “emergency medical condition.”6 The CMS concluded that EMTALA preempts contrary state laws banning or restricting abortions under urgent circumstances.

...

"In December 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights proposed a new rule for health workers and entities that refuse to provide abortion or other services for religious or moral reasons. ... The Biden administration’s proposed rule would strike a balance between “safeguarding conscience rights and protecting access to health care.”8 Marginalized, disadvantaged, and underserved communities, including LGBTQ+ patients, persons with disabilities, and persons living with HIV, are disproportionately affected by conscience protections. The proposed rule should better protect patients’ autonomy, health, and dignity, while also respecting clinicians’ moral and religious convictions."

Donate blood or organs to pay a traffic fine or shorten a prison term?

I spend a lot of my time thinking and writing about repugnant transactions and controversial markets, and some of that intersects with my work on blood and organ donation and transplantation (particularly on the controversial issue of compensation for donors, and how that might intersect with varieties of coercion). But today's post is about two proposals that mix all these things together. (My guess is that many people will find them differently repugnant: think of them as a quick test of your own views.)

In Argentina, a municipal judge proposes blood donation to pay traffic fines, and in Massachusetts several legislators co-sponsor a bill to allow bone marrow (blood stem cell) donation or organ donation to reduce prison sentences.

First, blood donation and traffic fines:

 Mario Macis points me to this story in La Nacion, about a city in the Argentine province of Salta:

En una ciudad de Salta las multas de tránsito se pueden pagar con una donación de sangre  [In a city of Salta, traffic fines can be paid with a blood donation]  (English from Google Translate)

"In the city of Tartagal, Salta, it is possible to pay a traffic ticket with a blood donation . The measure, taken two months ago, generates both support and questioning.

...

"The judge of the Court of Misdemeanors of the Municipality of Tartagal, Farid Obeid , proposed in a ruling last August that those who had traffic fines could pay them with their own blood donation or from third parties on behalf of the offenders.

"It was then determined that donations be made in hospitals, voluntarily and only once; that is to say that repeat offenders cannot opt ​​for blood donation.

...

"The ruling received support and criticism, the latter basically from the health sector. Oscar Torres, president of the Argentine Association of Hemotherapy, Immunohematology and Cellular Therapy , sent a letter to the Deliberative Council of Tartagal indicating that the measure removes the "spirit of solidarity and altruism from blood donation" 

Here's a related story about the ongoing debate (also using Google translate):

Controversy over an unusual municipal project: they claim that fines can be paid with blood. "This controversial project was presented to the Deliberative Council of Tartagal, and criticism has already begun"

***********

And here's the new bill proposed in Massachusetts (don't hold your breath waiting for it to be passed into law). It's in English, so the phrase about the necessary "amount of bone marrow and organ(s) donated to earn one’s sentence to be commuted" isn't a translation error; I think it's just awkward (i.e. not meant to be chilling). (But the discussion of donated "organ(s)" makes me think of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go"). 

Bill HD.3822, 193rd (Current), An Act to establish the Massachusetts incarcerated individual bone marrow and organ donation program

"Section 170. (a) The Commissioner of the Department of Corrections shall establish a Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program within the Department of Correction and a Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Committee. The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program shall allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence in Department of Corrections facilities, or House of Correction facilities if they are serving a Department of Correction sentence in a House of Corrections facility, on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s). 

...

"The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Committee shall also be responsible for promulgating standards of eligibility for incarcerated individuals to participate and the amount of bone marrow and organ(s) donated to earn one’s sentence to be commuted. Annual reports including actual amounts of bone marrow and organ(s) donated, and the estimated life-savings associated with said donations, are to be filed with the Executive and Legislative branches of the Commonwealth. All costs associated with the Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program will be done by the benefiting institutions of the program and their affiliates-not by the Department of Correction. There shall be no commissions or monetary payments to be made to the Department of Correction for bone marrow donated by incarcerated individuals."

Simultaneous HT to Ron Shorrer, Kim Krawiec, Akhil Vohra