Harvard's lawsuit against the Trump administration

 Read it and weep for our country:

"7. Defendants’ actions are unlawful. The First Amendment does not permit the Government to “interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance,” Moody v. NetChoice, 603 U.S. 707, 741 (2024), nor may the Government “rely[] on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech,” Nat’l Rifle Ass’n v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 189 (2024) (citation omitted). The Government’s attempt to coerce and control Harvard disregards these fundamental First Amendment principles, which safeguard Harvard’s “academic freedom.” Asociacion de Educacion Privada de P.R., Inc. v. Garcia-Padilla, 490 F.3d 1, 8 (1st Cir. 2007). A threat such as this to a university’s academic freedom strikes an equal blow to the research conducted and resulting advancements made on its campus.
8. The Government’s actions flout not just the First Amendment, but also federal laws
and regulations. The Government has expressly invoked the protections against discrimination
contained in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis for its actions. Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus. But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism and Title VI compliance. Moreover, Congress in Title VI set forth detailed procedures that the Government “shall” satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns. 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-1. Those procedures effectuate Congress’s desire that “termination of or refusal to grant or to continue” federal financial assistance be a remedy of last resort. Id. The Government made no effort to follow those procedures—nor the procedures provided for in Defendants’ own agency regulations—before freezing Harvard’s federal funding.
9. These fatal procedural shortcomings are compounded by the arbitrary and
capricious nature of Defendants’ abrupt and indiscriminate decision..."

Food: from luxuries to tragedies--chocolate and peanut butter at the opposite ends of human welfare

Below are two stories about food, that couldn't be more different (although the foods, chocolate and peanut butter, have some connection when times are good).

 The (sort of) luxury story, from the Guardian comes with a picture of bonbons:

 US chocolate prices surge amid soaring cocoa costs and tariffs
Price of cocoa – chocolate’s key ingredient – has climbed over past year and tariffs on imports will keep prices high  by Lauren Aratani

 And here's the tragedy, reported on in The Atlantic

‘In Three Months, Half of Them Will Be Dead’
Elon Musk promised to preserve lifesaving aid to foreign children. Then the Trump administration quietly canceled it. By Hana Kiros

"As DOGE was gutting USAID in February, it alarmed the global-health community by issuing stop-work orders to the two American companies that make a lifesaving peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition"

...

"The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What’s more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States."

The Mystery of the Ultimatum Game, by Kayoko Kobayashi,

 I get very little snail mail these days, but every now and then an interesting book arrives.  The latest is the English translation of the prizewinning book (originally in Japanese) by Kayoko Kobayashi, an economist at Nanzan University. (The link is to her English language webpage, but Google translate is still helpful...)

 The Mystery of the Ultimatum Game. Why We Are Predictably Irrational by Kayoko Kobayashi, Springer, 2025.

"The original Japanese edition won the Nikkei Prize for Economics Books (the 64th Nikkei-Keizai Tosho Bunka award) in 2021, an accolade bestowed upon an outstanding economics book published in a given year. Furthermore, this edition also received the Takashima Kunio Jiyu Prize Encouragement Award in 2024."

While the book invites one to think about "irrationality," the introductory chapter ends with a brief encomium towards the traditional notion of economic rationality, as exhibited by those mythical creatures, homo economicus, also known as the Econ.

"I will close with a modest defense of the Econ.  I said earlier that the Econ might not be much fun to be around. Yet the Econ is also a good person, and in some sense an amazing one.  The Econ does not get jealous. The Econ does not deprecate himself in comparison with others. He does not abandon hope for the future nor sink into despair. He is the kind of person who, no matter how hopeless the situation may seem, doe not dwell on the past but calmly assess the present, focuses solely on the future, and pursues what needs to be done with unwavering determination, choosing the best course of action from the options available."

 

One Nation One Swap: National kidney exchange in India

 In India, the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) wrote this week to all the State organizations (the SOTTOs) announcing the plan to form a nationwide kidney exchange program, called the "Uniform One Nation One Swap Transplant Program."

This has been the work of many people for a long time.  Of particular importance has been and will continue to be Dr. Vivek Kute from IKDRC Ahmedabad

 Here's the story in the Hindustan Times.

 NOTTO writes to states, UTs to implement swap organ transplant

Here's the letter itself:

#########

Earlier post:

Tuesday, February 27, 2024  Stanford Impact Labs announces support for kidney exchange in Brazil, India, and the U.S.

MAID in the Netherlands, together

 The Guardian publishes a moving photo, and an interview with the photographer about his parents' decision to avail themselves of medical aid in dying, together.

My parents holding hands after their assisted deaths: Martin Roemers’ most personal photograph Interview by Charlotte Jansen   16 Apr 2025

 

 

"They had a good life and a very happy marriage, but the last years were difficult. They were both sick and exhausted. Both had heart failure, my mother had a lot of pain. Both were in a really bad shape. They still lived in their own house but life was getting harder and harder, even with help. They did not want to go to a nursing home and neither wanted to live without the other – they wanted to step out of life together. They were afraid one would die naturally and the other would be left behind. They were very close, and did everything together, really everything – so it made sense they would leave this life together

 

"In the Netherlands, where assisted dying is legal, this is possible if you have a very good reason. My mother always said: ”We will stay with you as long as we can, until we can see no other way out.” Physicians have to be convinced that the patient is suffering unbearably and has no chance of recovery. My parents were independently evaluated by different doctors, and it was granted to both of them.

 

"It’s a very long process but once the decision was made, it all happened very fast. They picked a date, and it was a week later – much sooner than I had thought. My father wanted to go out to dinner somewhere, and on the last evening before they would die, we were able to do that. My father was a very optimistic and worry-free person who would always laugh at our jokes, until the end. He was visibly enjoying his dinner that evening – that was good".

Kidney transplantation in Latin America, and School assignment in Chile, Friday lectures at Stanford by Julio Elias and Juan Matta

 Two lectures tomorrow at Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies may be of interest to market designers.

The Economics of Kidney Transplantation in Latin America / The Importance of Peers in Education: Evidence from Chile
Sponsored by      Center for Latin American Studies

 Friday, April 18, 2025  1:30pm PT  In person and online

Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA 94305Event Details:

"The Economics of Kidney Transplantation in Latin America"

This lecture explores the economics of kidney transplantation in Latin America, applying the economic approach to analyze organ procurement systems, their history, and evolution in the region. We will examine the social costs associated with the organ shortage and the accessibility challenges that affect kidney transplantation in the region. The session will also discuss potential solutions to address these issues. The lecture highlights the effects of altruistic versus incentive-based policies and the ethical complexities surrounding organ donation systems.

Julio J. Elias is Professor of economics at Universidad del CEMA (UCEMA), Argentina, and the Executive Director of the UChicago/UCEMA Joint Initiative for Latin American Experimental Economics (JILAEE). He earned his BA from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina, and his MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. Elias's research focuses on organ donation, exploring financial incentives, strategies to alleviate organ shortages, and the associated moral aspects. He also studies Creativity Economics and its relation to economic development, particularly in Latin America. Together with Casey B. Mulligan and Kevin M. Murphy, he edited a collection of Gary Becker’s unpublished writings, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023.

"The Importance of Peers in Education: Evidence from Chile"

How do classmates influence a student’s academic success? While peer effects are widely recognized as important, measuring their true impact is challenging. Students are not randomly assigned to classrooms, making it difficult to separate peer influence from other factors like family background or school quality. This talk explores new evidence from Chile’s centralized school admissions system, which uses a lottery-based mechanism to assign students, providing a unique opportunity to study peer effects more rigorously. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for designing policies that promote equitable access to quality education. The discussion will highlight key findings, the challenges of measuring peer effects, and what these results mean for school admissions policies and educational equity in Chile and beyond.

Juan Matta is a professor of economics at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, specializing in the economics of education. His research uses empirical methods to study the causes and effects of educational choices, with a particular focus on gender and social mobility. Professor Matta is currently a Luksic Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Livestream: tinyurl.com/CLAS041825
 

Freezing and thawing organs for transplant moves one step closer

 In March, surgeons at Mass General Hospital thawed and transplanted a frozen pig organ into a pig.  The challenge of freezing and then thawing an organ back to life, so that it can be stored until an appropriate transplant can be arranged, is one of long standing. The difficulty is that during both freezing and thawing, there is a danger of ice crystals forming inside the cells, which would destroy them.

Here's a NYT article that explains why being able to freeze and then successfully thaw organs could help relieve the congestion in kidney transplants for humans.

This Kidney Was Frozen for 10 Days. Could Surgeons Transplant It?
Scientists developed a way to freeze a large mammal’s kidney, which could ease organ shortages in the future. First, they had to see if their method would work in a pig.   By Gina Kolata

"the promise from freezing and storing organs is great.

"There is a severe and ongoing shortage of kidneys for transplants — more than 92,000 people are on waiting lists. One reason is that the window of 24 to 36 hours is so brief that it limits the number of recipients who are good matches.

"How much better it might be to have a bank of stored, frozen organs so an organ transplant could be almost like an elective surgery.

"That, at least, has been the decades-long dream of transplant surgeons.

But the attempts of medical researchers to freeze organs were thwarted at every turn. In many cases, ice crystals formed and destroyed the organs. "

 

HT: Colin Rowat

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

Here's an earlier post, about a 2017 paper that turns out to have set some of the goal posts:

Monday, June 12, 2017  Organ preservation could bring big changes to transplantation

Transplantation would be a lot less hectic if organs could be preserved. Here's a 42-author paper (the biggest coauthorship I've been involved in) that discusses some of the possibilities.

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine 
 Sebastian Giwa, Jedediah K Lewis, Luis Alvarez, Robert Langer, Alvin E Roth, George M Church, James F Markmann, David H Sachs, Anil Chandraker, Jason A Wertheim, Martine Rothblatt, Edward S Boyden, Elling Eidbo, W P Andrew Lee, Bohdan Pomahac, Gerald Brandacher, David M Weinstock, Gloria Elliott, David Nelson, Jason P Acker, Korkut Uygun, Boris Schmalz, Brad P Weegman, Alessandro Tocchio, Greg M Fahy, Kenneth B Storey, Boris Rubinsky, John Bischof, Janet A W Elliott, Teresa K Woodruff, G John Morris, Utkan Demirci, Kelvin G M Brockbank, Erik J Woods, Robert N Ben, John G Baust, Dayong Gao, Barry Fuller, Yoed Rabin, David C Kravitz, Michael J Taylor & Mehmet Toner

Nature Biotechnology 35, 530–542 (2017) doi:10.1038/nbt.3889
Published online 07 June 2017

##

Here's the Google Scholar link, which also includes links to the subsequent literature:

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine

S Giwa, JK Lewis, L Alvarez, R Langer, AE Roth… - Nature …, 2017 - nature.com

Cited by 552 Related articles All 17 versions Web of Science: 371

 

Pat Bajari (1969-2025)

 Pat Bajari has died at 55.  As Amazon's chief economist from 2010-2023, he oversaw a revolution in the labor market for economists, making Amazon at least for a time the leading employer of new PhD economists, and firmly establishing them among Amazon's many product lines.

He also taught at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Michigan, Minnesota and U. of Washington.

There are a whole lot of moving tributes to him at the memorial Kudaboard: Celebrating Pat Bajari. He apparently touched a lot of lives.

 Here's an old CNN story:

 Amazon gets an edge with its secret squad of PhD economists 
By Lydia DePillis, CNN Business, Wed March 13, 2019

"In the past few years, Amazon has hired more than 150 PhD economists

...

"The architect of Amazon’s massive team of data crunchers is Pat Bajari

...

"At other companies, economists are often clustered in a small team, but at Amazon, they are integrated into many teams across the company. In a glossy recruiting brochure, Amazon describes how its economists help build risk models for lending to third-party sellers, advise on product design and engagement tracking for devices like Alexa and Kindle, help target customers for its booming cloud services business, and forecast server capacity needs for the consumer website."

##########

Here's the obit from U. Minnesota:

Remembering Patrick L. Bajari (1969-2025),  April 15, 2025

"Pat Bajari, a major figure in the economics profession who was deeply connected to Minnesota Economics, tragically passed away on Monday at age 55 after a battle with cancer. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family.

"Pat was born and raised in Minnesota. He completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, earning BS degrees in Economics and Mathematics in 1992 and his PhD in Economics in 1997. His academic career included faculty positions at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and Michigan before he returned in 2006 to join the Minnesota faculty. In 2010, he went on leave to become Chief Economist at Amazon, eventually making the move permanent. In Pat’s words, “...when I saw the data wave blowing up in tech, I knew I had to stay and be a part of it. I gave up tenure and dove all in.” He played a transformational role in leading the emergence of tech-economics in industry—one of the major developments in economics in recent years. In 2023, he became Chief Economist at Keystone."

 

Danny Kahneman's last interview, and its backstory

 Sometimes the backstory is more revealing than the story.

In yesterday's NYT, the philosophers Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer published a piece that recalled their interview with Danny Kahneman, a week before he flew to Switzerland to end his life.

There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death, by  Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer  April 14, 2025

"On March 19, 2024, we emailed the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, inviting him to appear on our podcast, “Lives Well Lived,” and suggesting a date in May. He replied promptly, saying that he would not be available then because he was on his way to Switzerland, where, despite being relatively healthy at 90, he planned to die by assisted suicide on March 27.

"In explanation, Professor Kahneman included a letter that his friends would receive a few days later. “I have believed since I was a teenager,” he wrote, “that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go.”

 ...

"We did not try to dissuade Professor Kahneman, but we asked him to view the interview as a final opportunity to tell people what he thought they should know about living well. He accepted the invitation, though he did not wish to discuss his decision to end his life."

"The interview took place on March 23. Professor Kahneman was cheerful and lively, with no mental lapses."

######### 

They go on to think aloud about why Danny might have decided to end his life, and about medical aid in dying--i.e. physician assisted suicide--more generally.  But, as agreed, they didn't discuss this in the interview, which you can listen to below.  (I found it a little slow moving, almost as if they would have preferred to be talking about assisted suicide...)

 

“Schrödinger’s persons". The indeterminate legal status of embryos.

 Courts are increasingly called on to decide who should get custody of frozen embryos. Their decisions will touch on both abortion and IVF.

This NYT oped discusses some of the issues.

Are Embryos Property? Human Life? Neither?  By Anna Louie Sussman

 "For over a century, courts generally did not grant personhood or independent rights to embryos or fetuses in utero. An 1884 decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes, at the time a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, held that when a pregnant woman slipped and fell on a road, resulting in the loss of the fetus, no claim could be pursued on behalf of the fetus against the town; he voiced skepticism about “whether an infant dying before it was able to live separated from its mother could be said to have become a person recognized by the law.”

"Once embryos began appearing ex utero, however, courts and legislatures were forced to reckon with their legal status in novel scenarios — notably in divorce cases in which the parties disagreed on how to deal with frozen embryos created during the marriage. The answers courts have come up with for how to view embryos have been all over the map, ranging from seeing them as property to declaring them, in the Alabama decision, “unborn children.”

...

"Embryo custody cases, as they’re sometimes termed, were typically resolved along similar lines — that parenthood should not be forced on a person who does not want it, with a few exceptions, said Ellen Trachman, a Denver-based lawyer specializing in assisted-reproduction-related cases. That principle was challenged in 2018, when the Arizona State Legislature passed a law requiring judges to award disputed embryos “to the spouse who intends to allow the in vitro human embryos to develop to birth,” regardless of any contracts signed by both parties 

...

"The murkiness of embryos’ status has sent courts on strange detours in their legal reasoning. In a 2023 Virginia case a judge was tasked with deciding whether two frozen embryos should be awarded to Honeyhline Heidemann, who wanted to implant them, or kept frozen, per the wishes of her ex-husband, Jason Heidemann. Ms. Heidemann asked that the embryos be considered property, so they could be assigned to her like any other salable item. Mr. Heidemann said each was unique and nonfungible and thus could not be treated as personal property.

"The case, as Leah Libresco Sargeant wrote, turned embryos into “Schrödinger’s persons,” resulting in “one parent bizarrely needing the embryos to be considered persons in order to prevent them from being born and the other parent needing to argue the children were property in order to let them be born.”

##########

Earlier:

Tuesday, February 20, 2024 Frozen embryos are children: Alabama Supreme Court ruling

 

 

 

Ritalin and Adderall

 The NYT has a long story this morning on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the amphetamines prescribed to treat it, which go by the brand names Adderall and Ritalin.  College students sometimes take one of these  as a performance-enhancing study aide, so I read the story with attention.The undergraduates I meet always deny taking it but know those who do, and acknowledge that it is readily available.  The story suggests that it might be most helpful for studying boring material...

Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
Even as prescriptions rise to a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it.   By Paul Tough 

" The number of American children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. more than doubled in the early 1990s, from fewer than a million patients in 1990 to more than two million in 1993, almost two-thirds of whom were prescribed Ritalin.

...

" Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys. Seven million American children have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, up from six million in 2016 and two million in the mid-1990s.

The preferred treatment for A.D.H.D. remains stimulant medications, including Ritalin and Adderall, and the market for those stimulants has expanded rapidly in recent years, in step with the growth of the diagnosis. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescriptions for stimulants to treat A.D.H.D. increased in the United States by 58 percent. Although the prescription rate is highest among boys ages 10 to 14, the real growth market today for stimulant medication is adults. In 2012, Americans in their 30s were issued five million prescriptions for stimulants to treat A.D.H.D.; a decade later, that figure had more than tripled, rising to 18 million.

That ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. 

...

"Accurately diagnosing A.D.H.D. can be challenging, for a number of reasons. Unlike with diabetes, there is no reliable biological test for A.D.H.D. The diagnostic criteria in the D.S.M. often require subjective judgment, and historically those criteria have been quite fluid, shifting with each revision of the manual. The diagnosis encompasses a wide variety of behaviors. There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.

...

"Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.

"On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”

"Historically, this is one of the main reasons people have taken amphetamines: They make tedious tasks seem more interesting. During World War II, the American military distributed tens of millions of amphetamine tablets to enlisted men for use during the many boring stretches of war. The pills were given to Air Force pilots flying long missions and to Navy sailors who had to keep watch all night. In the 1950s, suburban housewives took amphetamines to get through the boredom of endless days of housework and child care. Long-distance truckers have for decades used them to tolerate the tedium of the road. For the college students Scott Vrecko interviewed, term papers were just as boring as laundry or a long-haul truck route — but they became more bearable with the help of stimulants.

...

"Compared with other psychiatric medications, Gabrieli explained, Ritalin and Adderall (and the many similar formulations on the market today) are relatively safe and effective. They don’t help everyone, but in the short term, at least, they provide significant symptom control in most of the children who take them. Clinicians generally consider them easy to prescribe, in part because they’re usually easy for patients to quit. Unlike antidepressants or many anti-anxiety medications, they don’t linger in the bloodstream for more than a day, which means that even with the extended-release versions, they don’t require a weaning process. You can just stop taking them. “At some level,” Gabrieli told me, “these stimulants are not that far from Red Bull.”

Pig kidney transplant fails after four months--longest so far.

 A news item in Science reports on the failure of a xenotransplant after four months.  Four months is not nothing.  So kidneys from transgenic pigs remain in the future of clinical medicine, but maybe not the imminent future..

Longest human transplant of pig kidney fails. In latest xenotransplant test, Towana Looney’s body rejects gene-edited organ after more than 4 months  11 Apr 2025 By Jon Cohen

"Towana Looney, a 53-year-old grandmother from Alabama who received a kidney from a gene-edited pig on 25 November 2024, had it removed last week after the organ suddenly stopped functioning, Science has learned. The 4 months and 9 days Looney spent with the kidney set a new record for a pig organ in a human, but it is yet another setback for the long-struggling field known as xenotransplantation.

Looney had donated one kidney to her mother and then had her remaining one fail. For 9 years she had to schedule her life around dialysis, before having the transplant done at New York University (NYU) Langone Health. She was one of two recent recipients of kidneys from pigs in which U.S. companies did elaborate gene edits to make their tissues appear less foreign to the human immune system, and xenotransplant researchers had high hopes for these pioneering surgeries. (Chinese researchers in March reported their first xenotransplant of a gene-edited pig kidney, but few details have been made public.)

...

"The United States and other countries have long waiting lists for human organs, with many in need dying before they become eligible. Xenotransplantation for decades has held the prospect of addressing this crisis, but several approaches to preventing rejection of animal organs have failed to keep them functioning beyond a few months. Now, many in the field contend that a finer understanding of what the human immune system is reacting against on pig organs, simpler and cheaper tools to do gene edits in pigs, and improved drugs that suppress the immune system herald a new era for the field.

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital on 25 January transplanted a gene-edited pig kidney made by a different company, eGenesis, to Tim Andrews, then 66. Andrews, who also is on immunosuppressive drugs, soon returned to his home in New Hampshire, but since has been hospitalized a few times for minor complications. Although eGenesis and Revivicor scientists have introduced several similar edits to the genomes of their pigs, such as three that eliminate pig-specific sugar molecules on cells that can trigger rejection, the kidney in Andrews has many that disable what are known as porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs). These remnants of ancient viruses have never caused an infection in humans, but the edits are an extra precautionary measure. Revivicor in contrast aimed to reduce that risk by selectively breeding pigs that did not have progeny with all of the genetic components necessary to reactivate PERVs."

Let's get Chai: Cannabis, now kosher for Passover

 When I was young, it was a big deal when kosher for Passover chocolate became available. (It still is--available and a big deal that is.)  But the universe of things available on Passover is still expanding, now there are kosher cannabis edibles.

The name of the merchant may have been picked while high: Tokin' Chews. 

Among their offerings is Gelt for Adults.

"Tokin' Chews is the newest venture from the team behind Tokin' Jew, where we take pride in cultivating a new type of Jewish community: those who find their identity through humor, culture, and not taking yourself too seriously.

"Tokin' Chews offers the highest quality hemp-derived, THC-infused kosher gummies. We uphold rigorous kashrut standards and use only natural, high quality ingredients.

"Whether it's merch, smoking accessories, events, or gummies, our mission is simple: take pride in being Jewish."

See also their page Too Cool for Shul

Kidneys and Controversies at Mt. Sinai hospital

 I gave a talk yesterday at Mt. Sinai hospital. They had encouraged me to talk about controversies, which I happily did.  They were a sympathetic audience (although the majority of their last five speakers would not have been:)

 

 

 

The End Kidney Deaths Act is reintroduced to the 119th Congress

 Resolved: lets be generous to nondirected kidney donors

H.R.2687 - To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a refundable tax credit for non-directed living kidney donations.
119th Congress (2025-2026) |
Sponsor:    Rep. Malliotakis, Nicole [R-NY-11] (Introduced 04/07/2025)
Committees:    House - Ways and Means; Energy and Commerce 

###########

Earlier

Tuesday, January 21, 2025 The debate over compensating organ donors is heating up

Tuesday, August 13, 2024 End Kidney Deaths Act intoduced in Congress

 

 

Kennedy proposes to focus on chronic disease, but terminates large-scale long-running NIH Diabetes Prevention study

 The NYT has the story:

As Kennedy Champions Chronic Disease Prevention, Key Research Is Cut.  Two significant programs that invested in research on diabetes, dementia, obesity and kidney disease have ended since the start of the Trump administration. By Gina Kolata  April 7, 2025

"on Monday he is starting a tour in the Southwest to promote a program to combat chronic illness, emphasizing nutrition and lifestyle.
 

"But since Mr. Kennedy assumed his post, key grants and contracts that directly address these diseases, including obesity, diabetes and dementia, which experts agree are among the nation’s leading health problems, are being eliminated.

...

“This is a huge mistake,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine."

Decades of Diabetes Research Discontinued
"Ever since its start in 1996, the Diabetes Prevention Program has helped doctors understand this deadly chronic disease. The condition is the nation’s most expensive, affecting 38 million Americans and incurring $306 billion in one recent year in direct costs. With about 400,000 deaths in 2021, it was the eighth leading cause of death.
"The program has been terminated 

..

"On March 7, the Trump administration cut $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia, saying Jewish students were not protected from harassment during protests over the war in Gaza. The diabetes grant was among those terminated: $16 million a year that Columbia shared across 30 medical centers. The study ended abruptly.

...

"Now much of the work cannot begin, and the part that had started remains incomplete."

After the proposal: the market for weddings

Weddings are a big business. So is the business of matching brides to wedding service providers.  But there are a lot of vendors with complaints about the Knot, the biggest matchmaker of brides and service providers.

 The New Yorker has the story:

Does the Knot Have a “Fake Brides” Problem?
The popular wedding website helps d.j.s, caterers, and florists find spouses-to-be. Some venders say they’re finding something else.  By Adam Iscoe

" In addition to hosting gift registries and wedding websites, and offering reception ideas and relationship advice (“What to Know About Walmart Wedding Cakes,” “How to Prepare for Sex on Your Wedding Night,” “Dislike Your Spouse’s Last Name? Here’s What to Do”), the Knot is used by millions of couples to find their wedding venders, who pay to advertise on it. 

...

"Each year, Americans drop roughly seventy billion dollars hosting weddings. Most people think that this is too much—that couples are overspending, that venders are overcharging, and that the wedding-industrial complex verges on unethical.

...

" running a wedding business is especially tough: there are hundreds of thousands of competitors; costs are rising, owing in part to inflation; and, for many venders, bookings and budgets have decreased by about twenty-five per cent. According to a recent industry survey, a third of all wedding venders said that they are doing poorer financially than they were a year ago. “Florists are the worst,” McIntosh said. “There are so many broke florists.”

...

"Last year, the Knot facilitated four billion dollars in consumer spending via advertising on its platforms. Most of the company’s revenue comes not from brides and grooms but from wedding venders. Nine hundred thousand venders in more than ten countries use the Knot, and many pay to be advertised to couples—“leads,” in industry parlance—seeking their services. "

CDC’s laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration

 Statnews has the story:

CDC’s top laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration
‘We are blind,’ researcher says, noting the lab is crucial to tracking drug-resistant gonorrhea and other diseases  By Helen Branswell April 5, 2025

"At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory, leaving experts aghast and fearful about what lies ahead.

"The STD lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leading player in global efforts to monitor for drug resistance in the bacteria that cause these diseases — was among the targets of major staff slashing at the CDC this past week. All 28 full-time employees of the lab were fired.

...

"A CDC white paper on antibiotic resistance released during the first Trump administration listed drug-resistant gonorrhea as one of five urgent threats facing the country. Antimicrobial resistance to that last drug that reliably works to cure gonorrhea, ceftriaxone, is rare but on the rise globally."

 

High school and higher education (30 second video)

 Someone recently sent me this old video snippet (about 30 seconds) from an interview in Stockholm in 2012.  Whenever I'm asked about my high school career I try to emphasize that I'm a big fan of education, even though I didn't finish high school.

Note to the un-Facebooked: if, like me, you don't have a facebook account, you may have to close a facebook come-on before you can see the video.

The market for rare (and signed) books

 Books inscribed by the author are stories in themselves.

Here's a story published last year in The New Yorker about the rare book market, and the art of selling.

A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges.  By Tad Friend

"Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf—sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. When I told him that Susan Cheever, the writer and the daughter of John Cheever, said that Horowitz had paid her handsomely for her father’s inscribed novels and letters “because Glenn is a gentleman, and because he wanted to help me,” he seemed offended. “I like Susan enormously,” he assured me, “but I bought from her at prices that allowed me to sell the material profitably.” 

...

" Traditional collecting aims at first editions in “pristine” or “mint” condition; the booksellers’ wry joke is “Never judge a book by its contents.”

A user's guide to Experimental Economics, by Muriel Niederle

 Here's a magisterial handbook chapter, by Muriel Niederle

Experiments: Why, How, and A Users Guide for Producers as well as Consumers  by Muriel Niederle
NBER Working Paper 33630, DOI 10.3386/w33630,  March 2025A

Abstract:"This chapter is intended as an introduction to laboratory experiments, when to use, how to evaluate them, why they matter and what are the pitfalls when designing them. I hope that users as well as consumers will find Sections that broaden their views. I start with when an economist might want to run an experiment. I then discuss basic lessons when designing experiments. I introduce a language to start a systematic description of tools we have when designing experiments to show the importance or role of a new model or force in explaining behavior. The penultimate chapter provides an advanced toolkit for running experiments. I end this chapter with my views on pre-registration, pre-analysis plans and the need for replications, robustness tests and extensions. "

...

"While I hope to convey general lessons, I will make them more accessible and understandable by providing specific examples. These will often, though not always, come from my own papers, or from economists whose work I know exceptionally well (mostly my advisors, students or coauthors). While this may seem self-serving, the main reason is that for those experiments I know– rather than have to infer– why authors made certain choices. And one aspect of experiments that will become obvious almost immediately, is that they require the researcher to make a lot of decisions. This chapter therefore is in no way a literature survey, nor really a highlight of amazing papers. It rather showcases papers whose history I am exceptionally familiar with. I will also not provide negative examples, but rather present potential pitfalls, with one exception in Section 3.1 "

The Economist as Designer: Susan Athey's AEA presidential address

 Susan Athey, throughout her career and in her presidential address to the AEA, has added to our vision of how economists can make our way in the world.

Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products  By Susan Athey,  American Economic Review 2025, 115(4): 1059–1099, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.115.4.1059

"This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to each stage of the innovation process. Key contributions include identifying problems, developing theoretical frameworks, translating goals into measurable outcomes, analyzing historical data, and estimating counterfactual outcomes. The paper also surveys recently developed tools  designed to address challenges in designing and analyzing data from complex experiments "

##########

I'm fond of papers that consider "The Economist As..."  See e.g.

Monday, January 30, 2017 Economists as artisans, doctors, entrepreneurs...dentists, engineers and plumbers

and

The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimentation, and computation as tools for design economics,  AE Roth, Econometrica, 2002 

 

Headlines that could have been dated April 1

 This year there's one headline that stands out from all the others:

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.  By Jeffrey Goldberg

##########

Back before the  November election, the headlines that seemed most Foolish were much more cheerful

 French pole vaulter video: Anthony Ammirati dislodges bar with penis, costing him medal opportunity at 2024 Olympics

    (And here's the video)

LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

 

Open letter on Science

 Here's the NYT story out this morning,

Trump Administration Has Begun a War on Science, Researchers. Say Nearly 2,000 scientists urged that Congress restore funding to federal agencies decimated by recent cuts.

 

And here's the letter (and all the signatures):
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
We all rely on science. Science gave us the smartphones in our pockets, the navigation systems in our cars, and life-saving medical care. We count on engineers when we drive across bridges and fly in airplanes. Businesses and farmers rely on science and engineering for product innovation, technological advances, and weather forecasting. Science helps humanity protect the planet and keeps pollutants and toxins out of our air, water, and food.

For over 80 years, wise investments by the US government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world. Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.

The undersigned are elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, representing some of the nation’s top scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. We are speaking out as individuals. We see real danger in this moment. We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.

The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration. The funding cuts are forcing institutions to pause research (including studies of new disease treatments), dismiss faculty, and stop enrolling graduate students—the pipeline for the next generation’s scientists.

The administration’s current investigations of more than 50 universities send a chilling message. Columbia University was recently notified that its federal funding would be withheld unless it adopted disciplinary policies and disabled an academic department targeted by the administration. Destabilizing dozens of universities will endanger higher education—and the research those institutions conduct.

The quest for truth—the mission of science—requires that scientists freely explore new questions and report their findings honestly, independent of special interests. The administration is engaging in censorship, destroying this independence.  It is using executive orders and financial threats to manipulate which studies are funded or published, how results are reported, and which data and research findings the public can access. The administration is blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.

A climate of fear has descended on the research community. Researchers, afraid of losing their funding or job security, are removing their names from publications, abandoning studies, and rewriting grant proposals and papers to remove scientifically accurate terms (such as “climate change”) that agencies are flagging as objectionable. Although some in the scientific community have protested vocally, most researchers, universities, research institutions, and professional organizations have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.

If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.

We call on the administration to cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science, and we urge the public to join this call. Share this statement with others, contact your representatives in Congress, and help your community understand what is at risk. The voice of science must not be silenced.  We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.  

The views expressed here are our own and not those of the National Academies or our home institutions.

Mike Ostrovsky on congestion pricing (podcast)

Congestion pricing: as it's happening:

Congestion Pricing: Economics, Theory, Reality

March 29, 2025 • 57 mins
with @mostrovs @skominers @rhhackett

Welcome to web3 with a16z. I’m your host Robert Hackett, and today we’re talking about congestion pricing — an area of mechanism design that’s aimed at alleviating something everyone hates: traffic.

Now you may have heard this term recently since New York adopted its own version of congestion pricing at the beginning of the year. This is the first program of its kind in the U.S. — and it’s got supporters and detractors. We’ll talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about much more.

In the first part of today’s episode we’ll trace the history of the economic ideas that got us here. In the middle, we’ll dig deeper into the details of putting congestion pricing into practice, plus technological alternatives. And in the final part, we’ll explore parallels to — and implications for — crypto networks.

Our guests are Michael Ostrovsky, a Stanford Economics Professor who specializes in this area and who has done research on congestion pricing in New York. We’re also joined by a16z crypto Research Partner Scott Kominers, who is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School where he teaches market design and entrepreneurship.

Resources:

• Michael Ostrovsky's paper on congestion pricing in New York City (from before the launch, foreseeing its issues): https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/nyc.pdf
• Michael Ostrovsky's thread that went viral on X shortly after the debut of congestion pricing in New York, discussing the post-launch evidence, his team's data collection efforts, and the link between observed data and predictions in the above paper: https://x.com/mostrovs/status/1876798157595476420
• Two of Ostrovsky's earlier theoretical papers on the topic: (1) https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/complementarity.pdf, (2) https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/sdc.pdf
• Economist William Vickrey's influential paper on congestion pricing: Vickrey, W. S. (1969). Congestion theory and transport investment. American Economic Review 59 (2), 251–260. https://matthewturner.org/ec2410/readings/Vickrey_AER_1969.pdf

Billionaires and their nannys

 Billionnaires have been moving to Palm Beach and that has changed the local market for nannys.

The New Yorker has the story:

The Six-Figure Nannies and Housekeepers of Palm Beach.  An influx of ultra-high-net-worth newcomers has increased demand for experienced—and discreet—household staff.  By Emily Witt 

"Palm Beach is an island—known locally as “the Island”—connected to the larger and less posh city of West Palm Beach, on the mainland, by a series of bridges. It was first developed as a winter escape for the wealthy, in the late nineteenth century, by the railroad and Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, and quickly became an old-money enclave whose pretentiousness was entwined with antisemitism and racism. 

...

" an estimated sixty-five billionaires now have homes in Palm Beach County. President Trump’s ties to Florida, especially his seventeen-acre oceanfront social club, Mar-a-Lago, have cemented South Florida as a center of financial and political power, and there’s heavy overlap between the list of his boosters and the newcomers to Palm Beach

...

"A director of estates managing a family’s eight or ten houses might earn three to five hundred thousand dollars a year and oversee dozens of employees and contractors, but even housekeepers, if they possess the right qualifications, can earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year with benefits, and paid vacation, in certain markets

...

"Thompson said that she had already signed up two hundred and fourteen members to the Polo Club that year. (At thirty-four thousand dollars, its initiation fee is much lower than those of Palm Beach’s Carriage House, the Breakers, or Mar-a-Lago, whose fee Trump hiked in August to a million dollars.)

...

" In job interviews, Lisa Miller, senior search executive with Mahler Private Staffing, will test candidates. “One of the joys of what I do is getting them not to be discreet,” Miller said, of the interviewing process. “I ask them questions and see if they share too much.”

...

“The parents want to have the top staff, so they hire the top nannies,” she said. “They’ve been in élite people’s homes, they don’t get starstruck if they see a professional athlete or someone that’s in the White House.”

Healthcare as a modern jobs engine, by Gottlieb, Mahoney, Rinz and Udalova

Here's a paper with cheerful results about employment and wages in health care.

Rise of Healthcare Jobs  by Joshua D. Gottlieb, Neale Mahoney, Kevin Rinz, and Victoria Udalova, NBER Working Paper No. 33583  March 2025

ABSTRACT: "Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009. We document key facts about the rise of healthcare jobs. Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in other industries, with relatively large increases in the middle and upper-middle parts of the earnings distribution. Healthcare workers have remained predominantly female, with increases in the share of female doctors offsetting increases in the shares of male nurses and aides. Despite a few high-profile examples to the contrary, regions experiencing manufacturing job losses have not systematically reinvented themselves by pivoting from ``manufacturing to meds.'' 

...

"In 2006, healthcare overtook manufacturing in terms of employment, and in 2009 healthcare overtook retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in the U.S. 

...

"We show that employment growth has been fairly uniform across most clinical occupations. The exception is a new category known as midlevels, which includes physician assistants and nurse practitioners. This category—which was too small to be consistently measured prior to 2010—has more than doubled since 2010, growing from 227,000 to 505,000 workers. As of 2022, there were more midlevels than primary care physicians, and midlevels provided more than half of primary care services in the U.S. (HRSA, 2023).

"This healthcare employment growth was accompanied by strong earnings growth, especially for nurses and midlevels in the middle and upper-middle parts of the clinical occupational distribution. Specifically, earnings grew nearly twice as fast for healthcare workers as for non-healthcare workers from 1980 to 2022; during this window, average healthcare earnings rose from 4% below to over 14% above the average for non-healthcare workers. While the top percentile of the wage distribution has fared better outside of healthcare, healthcare wages have grown faster for the rest of the distribution, and are particularly strong between the middle and the 95th percentiles. Indeed, with strong employment growth and earnings growth that outpaced the rest of the economy outside the very top, it is reasonable to conclude that healthcare has been a modern middle-class “jobs engine.”

 

 "The descriptive analysis in this paper offers three key findings about the rise of healthcare jobs: the relatively strong growth of earnings in the middle and upper-middle parts of the distribution, including for nurses and midlevels; the partial convergence in gender ratios across clinical occupations; and the scant evidence of a systematic manufacturing-to-meds transition, despite high-profile examples."