Advice for Wake County schools

It sounds like the troubled Wake County school system is about to get some advice on school choice.  But, to the extent that you can judge from a newspaper story, they may not be looking for the right kind of advice, or in the right places (more about right places at the end...)

Here's the problem. Suppose you want a school choice plan, and would like to be able to say that it results in lots of families getting their first choice. That might be hard, if the most popular schools are overdemanded.  But you could adopt a choice procedure that is punitive to those who fail to get the school they list as their first choice. That would present families who liked overdemanded schools with a risky decision, and the safe choice would be to choose a school (e.g. their local school) that they could be pretty confident of getting into, and saying that was their first choice. When parents feel compelled to play it safe this way, it looks like they are getting their first choice, even though they aren't really. Once upon a time that was how schools were chosen in Boston, and that kind of system is still used in some places, including Cambridge, MA.

So, here's the news story that makes me worry about this.

Idea intrigues Wake school board factions
"A controlled choice model for Wake would create a dozen or more attendance zones, each of which would reflect the makeup of Wake County - no rich zones or poor zones, said Massachusetts education consultant Michael Alves, who's helped design dozens of such systems nationally.

"Parents would be able to choose from a wide range of school offerings in their zone, with a lottery to make another choice when schools are too crowded or apply to a countywide system of magnets, Alves said. He will be in Raleigh on Tuesday for a presentation before the board committee charged with developing a new plan. Parents would not be guaranteed of getting their first choice, but in systems that use controlled choice, such as Lee County, Fla., and Cambridge, Mass., a large majority do.

"We've been looking at a number of plans from a number of districts across the country," board chairman Ron Margiotta said Wednesday. "He's very close to what we have in mind, to my understanding."

Here's some background on School choice that pays attention to making it safe for families to reveal their true preferences. Which brings me to where the Wake County school board can look for advice. 

One of the world's experts on the design of school choice systems is Atila Abdulkadiroglu, who is a professor at Duke, in Raleigh NC, the largest city in Wake County. So he's on location.  Here is Atila's blog on school choice.

Here are my previous posts on Wake County: School choice in North Carolina, School choice gets contentious in Wake County, NC

Abandoned horses not headed for foreign tables

Speaking of the pony express, Activists Keep Nev. Horses From Going to Slaughter
"With the financial backing of the wife of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens and others, activists on Saturday purchased almost all 174 horses up for sale at a state-sanctioned auction in Nevada to keep the horses from going to the slaughterhouse.

"Stephanie Hoefener of the Lancaster, Calif.-based Livesavers Wild Horse Rescue group said activists purchased 172 horses for $31,415. The other two horses were acquired by private individuals for their personal use, she said.
...
"The horses were rounded up by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management last month near the Nevada-Utah line and turned over to the Nevada Department of Agriculture for disposal.

"Agriculture department officials acknowledge the stray horses could have wound up at slaughterhouses because they did not have the federal protections afforded to wild-roaming horses.
"The horses are believed to be strays or descendants of horses abandoned by private owners over the years in Pilot Valley north of West Wendover.

''For advocacy groups to step up to the plate and make a financial commitment like this to save the horses, we think this is a wonderful thing,'' Nevada Department of Agriculture spokesman Ed Foster said.

"Jill Starr, president of Lifesavers, said the purchase of the horses at the Fallon auction was made possible by the financial backing of Madeleine Pickens and other donors.

"Starr said high bidders of such horses usually are representatives of slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. The meat of the horses is processed for sale in Europe and Asia, where it fetches as much as $25 a pound, she added. "

For previous posts on the American repugnance for the use of horse meat for human consumption, as compared to the high prices it fetches overseas, see here.

Express mail 1.0

The Pony Rides Again (and again)
" The heroic, nearly 2,000-mile delivery of mail across the country hemorrhaged money, from the first day a rider saddled up until the click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later. "

Matching Marine officers to MOS

A reader writes:
"Dear Al,

I was a grad student a few years ago in your econ 2010a segment.

I came across a market design problem recently that I thought you might find interesting.  My brother is a Marine officer and is approaching the point when he gets matched to his "Military Occupational Specialty"-his future job (infantry, engineering, logistics etc).  As in matching medical residents, upcoming officers provide a ranking of their preferences.  Then the Marine administration ranks all the upcoming candidates on the basis of their performance in basic training (their overall average grade in "military skills, leadership, and academics").

The matching process is as follows: in a class of 100 officers, the officer ranked #1 gets his first choice, the 33rd ranked officer gets his first choice, then the 67th ranked officer gets his first choice.  Then the #2 ranked guy gets his top choice of the remaining jobs, then 34th, 68th, 3rd, 35th, 69th etc.

The intended purpose is clearly to ensure that there is an even distribution of "quality" in all specialties (you don't want all the best officers doing infantry (highest prestige) and all the worst officers managing logistics or supply).  (Actually this seems like a good idea for doctors too.)  However, the mechanism is clearly not incentive compatible-the 32nd ranked guy tries to fail his last tests to drop in rank to 33...

More details are here: http://www.dbdriven.net/mymos/All_MOS_Assignment_Process.asp.  I also believe that the Army and other branches use similar systems.

Anyway, perhaps you've already seen this. And perhaps the Marines are totally uninterested in changing a "tried and true" system. But it sounded like an interesting question on a socially important topic.

Best,

A.L.

Misc. repugnant transactions

A transaction is repugnant if some people don't want other people to do it. Here are some recent developments:

International Space Station sex ban : "Commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station, it has been disclosed"

The journal of the American Enterprise Institute has an article by a father-daughter kidney recipient and kidney donor called Our Deeply Unethical National Organ Policy. It argues in favor of compensating organ donors. It ends with this list of further readings on the subject:
"FURTHER READING: Gershowitz earlier offered, with Stephen Porter and Stephen Fuller, “A Stimulus That Would Work.” Dr. Sally Satel discussed “The National Kidney Foundation’s Bizarre Logic” against rewarding kidney donors, and “The Limits of Bioethics.” Satel lauded Israel’s steps to solve its organ shortage in “Kidney Mitzvah,” and just published a book on compensating kidney donors: When Altruism Isn’t Enough."


Argentina Approves Gay Marriage, in a First for Region July 15, 201 BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Senate narrowly approved a law early on Thursday authorizing same-sex marriages, making Argentina the first country in Latin America to allow gay couples to wed.

"After nearly 15 hours of debate, the Senate voted 33 to 27 in favor of the measure, which was sponsored by the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. For weeks, she waged a bitter war of words with the Roman Catholic Churchover the issue, saying that it would be a “terrible distortion of democracy” to deny gay couples the right to wed and that it was time for religious leaders to recognize how much more liberal and less discriminatory the nation’s social mores had become.

"In its race to derail the change, the church organized large protests involving tens of thousands of opponents of the measure, with Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, calling the bill a “destructive attack on God’s plan.”

"Portugal and Iceland also legalized gay marriage this year, adding to the small but steadily expanding list of nations, most of them in Europe, to do so."

Vatican Revises Abuse Process, but Causes Stir July 15, 2010 VATICAN CITY — "The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia."

School choice gets contentious in Wake County, NC

19 arrested as protesters claim school plan would resegregate system
"Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, arrested 19 people at a rancorous school board meeting Tuesday afternoon where protesters accused the Wake County School Board of adopting a plan that will resegregate the school system.
The Wake County School School Board voted in March to stop the decade-long practice of socio-economic school assignment and assign students to their neighborhood schools. The system plans to transition into the new practice in the next 15 months."

The story includes a video of the arrests, that makes me think that the school board meetings I've been to haven't really been so bad...

My previous posts on Wake County schools are
Blog on school choice by Atila Abdulkadiroglu and School choice in North Carolina

HT: Parag Pathak

Me and market design, in Forbes

Susan Adams in the August Forbes magazine (but online now) has a nice article about me and market design called (maybe for search engine reasons)" Un-Freakonomics: A Harvard professor uses economics to save lives, assign doctors and get kids into the right high school."

Here's the sentence I liked best:
"Leaning over a cup of Turkish coffee at a cafe across the Charles River from his messy journal-strewn corner office, he bends over backward to give credit to his younger protégés, students and coauthors. "Market design is a team sport," he insists."

If you want to see me bend over backwards while leaning over a cup of coffee, we'll have to have a cup of coffee:) But seriously, Ms. Adams got that part very right--lots of people have to do lots of things before a new marketplace is designed, adopted, and implemented. I'm very lucky in my colleagues.

The article title might suggest I have some sort of quarrel with Freakonomics, but that's not the case, although my work is very different. I recall reading Freakonomics and being full of admiration for the way it brought Steve Levitt's work to a general audience. I wouldn't mind doing that someday with market design, and maybe Ms. Adam's generous article will be a step towards making market design known to a wider public.

Read more »

F.C.C. Indecency Policy Rejected on Appeal

The NY Times reports the story: A federal appeals court struck down a Federal Communications Commission policy on indecency Tuesday, saying that regulations barring the use of “fleeting expletives” on radio and television violated the First Amendment because they were vague and could inhibit free speech.

"The decision, which many constitutional scholars expect to be appealed to the Supreme Court, stems from a challenge by Fox, CBS and other broadcasters to the F.C.C.’s decision in 2004 to begin enforcing a stricter standard of what kind of language is allowed on free, over-the-air television.

"The stricter policy followed several incidents that drew widespread public complaint, including Janet Jackson’s breast-baring episode at the 2004 Super Bowl and repeated instances of profanity by celebrities, including Cher, Paris Hilton and Bono, during the live broadcasts of awards programs. The Janet Jackson incident did not involve speech but it drew wide public outrage that spurred a crackdown by the F.C.C.

"In a unanimous three-judge decision, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said that the F.C.C.’s current policy created “a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here” because it left broadcasters without a reliable guide to what the commission would find offensive.

"The appeals court emphasized that it was not precluding federal regulation of broadcast standards. “We do not suggest that the F.C.C. could not create a constitutional policy,” the court said. “We hold only that the F.C.C.’s current policy fails constitutional scrutiny.” "

Here's my earlier post on the case: Fleeting expletives and wardrobe malfunctions: FCC vs Fox Television and CBS

Kidney exchange story at NEPKE

Market design is full of both frustration and satisfaction. Kidney exchange provides an unusual amount of each. Sometimes the satisfactions come in unexpected ways. Below is an email I received yesterday, whose author gave me permission to share it here, along with the photo.

"Dear Dr. Roth,

I want to thank you for your role in establishing the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. On July 8 my husband Bryan, in a 3-way swap with donor/ recipient pairs at Hopkins, RIH/ Brown and Dartmouth, received his new kidney after years of failing health. He is already feeling remarkably better, and his new kidney is functioning well.

Here is a photo of our 3-year-old, Lincoln, and 3-month-old, Haven, thanking Bryan's brother for donating his kidney to a stranger at Hopkins so Bryan could receive one from Dartmouth. I can imagine that theoretical academic work can lack a human face at times, so I wanted to assure you that your work is truly changing lives. I can't thank you enough for giving my boys their Daddy back.

Yours,
Katie Silberman
Providence"

Read more »

Market design in Australia?

The Australian prime minister Julia Gillard makes a speech in which she refers to "market design." (I can't tell exactly what that means in Australian...). The story, in The Australian today, is headlined Gillard banks on Per Capita think tank.

"In her speech to Per Capita last year, she said the approach she had taken to education would provide the template for further work on policy design, innovation, research and evaluation.

"This included starting with the needs of students and focusing on the performance of institutions, rather than allowing the focus of policy to rest only on "systems, structures and sectoral concerns".

"She said this came with an emphasis on equity for the disadvantaged, a preoccupation with transparency and a concern with "market design".

"The idea of "market design" is a key theme for Per Capita. Governments have always had a role in setting the rules of conduct for markets through trade practices. Per Capita argues that with due government guidance, markets can perform a powerful role in delivering human services, such as the jobs network.

"Gillard returned to market design in her speech to the National Press Club on economic policy last week.

"As far as I am concerned, there is no inherent superiority in a public sector or a private sector provider, certainly not on ideological grounds. The challenge is not whether to combine public and private resources in these essential sectors, but how best to do it," she said. "

Update: Joshua Gans tells me that "market design" means the same thing in Australia that it does in Boston, and he points me to a talk on the subject he gave to the thinktank in question: Emerging Concepts in Market Design. (And here's Joshua's post on the subject today, to close the loop:) What is market design anyway?

Misc. kidney exchanges and chains

At the University of Wisconsin hospital, a non-directed donor chain involving four donors and four recipients was completed in a day: At UW Hospital, four kidney transplants in one day and eight people are connected forever


Here's a 21 minute video interview of Dr. Matthew Cooper at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, about a 4 transplant non-directed donor kidney exchange chain conducted there over two days. Among the logistical issues he mentions (e.g. 8 operating room teams) are those involving protecting the privacy of all the donors and recipients (around minute 3:45). And (around 9:15, and not making any specific comparisons to other hospitals) "We take no shortcuts at the University of Maryland," he says. Here is another short video, with some OR footage. More videos here from UMMC.


Here's a 4 minute video, "United by their gifts," about the meeting of the donors and recipients in the three way NEPKE exchange I posted about earlier (Kidney exchange at NEPKE ).


There have been some delays in starting a national kidney exchange program in Australia: Waiting for Kidney eXchange "One of the driving forces behind the exchange program is Professor Paolo Ferrari. He helped introduce it in Western Australia in 2007.
"We really hope it can be rolled out nationally before an election is called," he said.
"Otherwise it will be pushed back months."
A spokeswoman for the Organ and Tissue Donation Authority said the exchange program was expected to begin in Australian hospitals in August or September.
"The first step will be to enrol potential participants in the program, followed by the clinical process of matching donors and recipients, followed by the surgical processes," she said.
The spokeswoman said all states and territories had now considered the detail of the program.
"This process, through senior medical representatives, was completed last week, paving the way for health ministers to be briefed during July."
It took the UK three years to set up its kidney exchange program. "

Signaling preferences in matching markets

Preference Signaling in Matching Markets, by Peter Coles, Alexey Kushnir, and Muriel Niederle, NBER Working Paper No. 16185, July 2010. (Here's an ungated version.)

"Abstract: Many labor markets share three stylized facts: employers cannot give full attention to all candidates, candidates are ready to provide information about their preferences for particular employers, and employers value and are prepared to act on this information. In this paper we study how a signaling mechanism, where each worker can send a signal of interest to one employer, facilitates matches in such markets. We find that introducing a signaling mechanism increases the welfare of workers and the number of matches, while the change in firm welfare is ambiguous. A signaling mechanism adds the most value for balanced markets."

Two of the three authors of this paper are on the AEA job market committee that instituted the AEA's job market signaling mechanism. This new working paper brings some theory to the party.

See also

Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," revised April 6, 2010, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010.

marketdesigner.blogspot.xxx

Sex domain .xxx approved by regulators .
"ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, which is responsible for overseeing the creation and distribution of web addresses, finally gave the go-ahead for the special .xxx domain name at a meeting in Brussels.

The adult entertainment industry has long campaigned in favour of a special .xxx suffix, similar to the .com and .co.uk domain names used by other companies."

Polyandry

Polyandry is much less common in the world than the other form of polygamy, polygyny, in which a man has two or more wives. In polyandrous households, one wife has two or more husbands. It was a form of plural marriage in resource poor regions.

Now, the NY Times reports, One Bride for 2 Brothers: A Custom Fades in India

In the remote villages of this Himalayan valley, polyandry, the practice of multiple men marrying one wife, was for centuries a practical solution to a set of geographic, economic and meteorological problems.
"People here survived off small farms hewed from the mountainsides at an altitude of 11,000 feet, and dividing property among several sons would leave each with too little land to feed a family. A harsh mountain winter ends the short planting season abruptly. The margin between starvation and survival is slender."...

"Polyandry has been practiced here for centuries, but in a single generation it has all but vanished. "...

"Polyandry has never been common in India, but pockets have persisted, especially among the Hindu and Buddhist communities of the Himalayas, where India abuts Tibet."

David Blackwell

David H. Blackwell dies at 91; pioneering statistician at Howard and Berkeley

"David H. Blackwell, 91, who rose from poverty in Southern Illinois to become one of the country's most prominent statisticians and the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 at a hospital in Berkeley, Calif., of complications from a stroke.

"Dr. Blackwell was also the first black tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became chairman of the statistics department. ...

"While in Washington, he became interested in statistics after hearing a lecture by Agriculture Department statistician Meyer A. Girshick. After Dr. Blackwell challenged one of Girshick's assertions, the two met and became friends and colleagues.

"They wrote a 1954 book, "The Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions." It established them as leaders in the burgeoning field of game theory, which uses mathematics to understand winning strategies in situations that can be applied to economics, biology, engineering, political science and international relations. "

Consolidation and competition among economics jobs aggregators

At VoxEu, there's an announcement today (July 16) of a new service and a combining of forces: Introducing a free database of nearly all jobs for PhD economists by Raphael Auer and Richard Baldwin, founders of walras.org and Vox respectively.

They write:

"To help grow the next generation of economists, VoxEU.org has teamed with walras.org to form the world’s largest database of job openings for PhD economists. In addition to this comprehensive database of nearly all job openings for PhDs in economics and related fields, our partner walras.org also offers a free online application system allowing the exchange of all application documents and reference letters."

It looks like this puts them in pretty direct competition with the combination of Econjobmarket.org with the European Economic Association. And they are both competing with software providers who deal directly with the HR departments of universities and provide university-specific web sites for handling the information flow of job applications. (The AEA's Job Openings for Economists doesn't propose to handle the application process, but of course it is another big aggregator of job ads.)

We anticipated some of this in our forthcoming paper

Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," revised April 6, 2010, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010.

In that paper we wrote

"Two kinds of web applications have a presence in the market. Some departments are in institutions that use a university-wide platform, usually purchased commercially and then operated by the Human Resources department. Such university-specific systems impose high costs on applicants and references because they require individual uploading for each application and letter of reference.

"Other employers use third-party services such as EconJobMarket.org, AcademicJobsOnline.org (run by Duke’s Math Department, offering services to all sorts of departments), and others such as Academic Careers Online (http://www.academiccareers-job.com/), Economist Jobs (http://www.econ-jobs.com/), EconCareers (http://www.econcareers.com/), and LiberalArtsFacultyJobs.com. The job listing aggregator walras.org may also start such a service. The website of EconJobMarket.org (accessed March 1, 2010) indicates some consolidation: their service has been merged with that of the European Economic Association and has been endorsed by other economics organizations."

Dov Samet on marrying well

Dubi Samet has a paper on stable marriage, explaining why you might have married as well as you did, and explaining how, when there is substantial agreement on rankings, you and your spouse can't have done too differently well.

(I conclude that if, like me, you "married up" it is because your spouse has contrarian tastes.)

The paper is "Matching of like rank and the size of the core in the marriage problem" by Dov Samet

"Abstract: When men and women are objectively ranked in a marriage problem, say by beauty, then pairing individuals of equal rank is the only stable matching. We generalize this observation by providing bounds on the size of the rank gap between mates in a stable matchings in terms of the size of the ranking sets. Using a metric on the set of matchings, we provide bounds on the diameter of the core---the set of stable matchings---in terms of the size of the ranking sets and in terms of the size of the rank gap. We conclude that when the set of rankings is small, so are the core and the rank gap in stable matchings."

Game theory from A to Z

I'll be travelling this morning to Stony Brook, to participate in the part of their annual festival that is celebrating Bob Aumann's 80th birthday, and Shmuel Zamir's 70th.

Here's a picture I took of the two of them at a Stony Brook party in honor of Lloyd Shapley in the summer of 2003.

"Aumann" and "Zamir" were two of the first names I learned to conjure with, when I started studying game theory in the 1970's.

יום הולדת שמח, Happy birthday Bob and Shmuel.

And here's the program.

The Stony Brook Game Theory Festival of the Game Theory Society in Honor of Robert Aumann’s Eightieth Birthday

July 15, 2010 in Honor of Shmuel Zamir’s Seventieth Birthday

9:00 - 9:45	Olivier Gossner (Paris School of Economics & London School of Economics) The robustness of incomplete codes of law
9:45 - 10:00	Coffee Break
10:00 - 10:30	Alfredo Di Tillio (Bocconi University) Reasoning about Conditional Probability and Counterfactuals
10:30 - 11:00	Eduardo Faingold (Yale University) The strategic impact of higher-order beliefs
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
11:15 - 11:45	Marco Scarsini (LUISS) On the Core of Dynamic Cooperative Games
11:45 - 12:15	Todd Kaplan (University of Haifa) The Benefits of Costly Voting
12:15 - 13:45	Lunch Break
13:45 - 14:30	Robert John Aumann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) My Shmuel
14:30 - 14:45	Coffee Break
14:45 - 15:30	Abraham Neyman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Rate of Convergence in Repeated Games with Incomplete Information
15:30 - 16:15	Shmuel Zamir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) On Bayesian-Nash Equilibria Satisfying the Condorcet Jury Theorem: The Dependent Case
16:15 - 16:30	Coffee Break
16:30 - 17:15	Al Roth (Harvard University) Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Markets
18:00 - 21:30	Reception Dinner (Three Village Inn)

Hiring Indian wombs

Steve Leider writes:

The Indian Parliament will be considering legislation to regulate the practice of commercial surrogacy in India. There are approximately 350 clinics overseeing an estimated 1500 pregnancy attempts annually, one third of which involve foreigners, making up a $445 million industry. Surrogacy in India is much cheaper than in the United States: “The entire process costs customers around $23,000 — less than one-fifth of the going rate in the U.S. — of which the surrogate mother usually receives about $7,500 in installments.”

Surrogacy in India has been largely unregulated since being legalized in 2002 - the Indian Council of Medical Research issued guidelines in 2005, but IVF clinics often establish their own policies. The draft legislation proposes several substantial restrictions:

“Exploitation of surrogates by infertile couples, and vice versa, has been a serious concern ever since in-vitro fertilization (IVF) started in India. ‘But this will put an end to it. Infertile couples don't have to go hunting for surrogate mothers. The bank will help them get one. As a result, the couple will have all information about her background and medical history before hiring her womb,’ said Dr R S Sharma, deputy director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), who has been involved in the process of drafting the Bill.”

“These banks - both private and government - will be accredited by state boards. The board will also have a registration authority which will maintain a list of all IVF centres and monitor their functioning. ‘So far we didn't have any law regarding surrogacy. This is a step towards legalizing surrogacy and fixing responsibilities of the parties involved in the process," said Dr Sharma’”….

“These ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] banks will be independent of IVF clinics. Oocyte (unfertilized egg) and semen preservation will be their main focus. ‘In the past few years, IVF clinics have mushroomed in the country. There is no check on their practices. There is no quality check on the semen and oocytes preserved by them and offered to infertile couples. These banks will have a proper system, where every minor detail about gametes and surrogates will be documented,’ said a senior doctor at AIIMS who too is involved in the drafting of the bill.”

“Experts say that once a bank is in place, it will maintain a database of surrogate mothers. A woman is allowed five live births, including her own children. ‘It has been seen that poor women sell their womb several times for money. This has a damaging effect on their body. The new bill clearly states that a woman can't have more than five live births and donate oocytes more than six times in her life,’ said Dr Sharma.”….

“The bill proposes stringent rules for foreigners looking for surrogate mothers. It will be mandatory for foreign couples to submit two certificates - one on their country's policy on surrogacy and the other stating that the child born to the surrogate mother will get their country's citizenship. "They also have to nominate a local guardian, who will take care of the surrogate during the gestation period," said Dr Sharma.”

Prominent IVF doctors like Dr. Nayna Patel (who was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007) have objected to the new regulations:

It's a suggestion that has caused a stir in the medical community. Patel insists that she will not accept a surrogate sent to Akanksha unless she herself is permitted to perform medical and background checks. She maintains that ART banks will not have enough experience to determine whether a woman is fit for surrogacy, let alone replicate the personal bonds she cultivates with her surrogates. ‘The trust they have with me is what makes the whole thing secure and safe,’ she says. ‘And at the end, when they want to buy a house or a piece of land for farming, we get them the best deal. With this bill, we will not know what they are going to do with such a big amount of money.’”

Two recent court cases highlighted the need for increased regulation. In 2008 a Japanese couple divorced during the surrogacy:

“The husband still wanted to raise Manji, but his ex-wife did not. The father found himself in a catch-22. India requires that a child be legally adopted before leaving the country, but bars single men from adopting. Manji's father was denied travel documents for the baby. The situation was widely covered in Indian and global media, and grew into a legal and diplomatic crisis. Manji was eventually permitted to leave for Japan [after custody was granted to the child’s grandmother].”

A German couple also experienced legal problems:

“Since the day they were delivered more than two years ago, twin toddlers Nikolas and Leonard Balaz have been stateless and stranded in India. Their parents are German nationals, but the woman to whom the babies were born is a 20-something Indian surrogate from Gujarat. The boys were refused German passports because the country does not recognize surrogacy as a legitimate means of parenthood. And India doesn't typically confer citizenship on surrogate-born children conceived by foreigners. Last week, Germany relented, issuing the Balazes travel visas, and the entire family is finally going home.”

Surrogacy is also subject to substantial disapproval within India, being criticized as the "commoditisation of motherhood" and “a peculiar form of prostitution”. Surrogates often hide their pregnancy by moving away from friends and family temporarily: "Otherwise, we'll be treated like social pariahs… This isn't a respectable thing to do in our society." Others say it is their husbands’ baby, and then after giving the baby to the intended parents say the newborn has died. The Catholic Church has also opposed the new law for legitimizing surrogacy:

“An Oriental-rite Catholic Church in Kerala says it plans to try and torpedo an upcoming bill to legalize surrogacy in India, which it says will destabilize a family system already struggling ‘under Western influence.’ ‘The Church will take all possible steps to stop the bill and will alert elected state representatives about the impact it will have on family life,’ Syro-Malabar Church spokesman Father Paul Thelakat told ucanews.com on June 24. ‘We have been teaching our faithful about moral living, so if the government enacts a bill which is against our teachings, how can we sit idle,’ the priest said.”

A documentary focusing on the outsourcing of surrogacy (particularly to India) called Google Baby recently premiered on HBO (an additional trailer is available on the director’s website).

The market for musicians (in top orchestras)

Need a Job? Help Wanted at the N.Y. Philharmonic . These posts, naturally, are rarefied and have little to do with the normal job picture nationwide. But the number of openings prompts the question of why so many spots stand vacant in a market glutted with talented musicians looking to move up to better orchestras or just to find jobs.

"The economy has had an effect. It is cheaper to leave jobs unfilled and to pay substitutes, who usually receive close to the minimum base pay and fewer benefits. Starting salaries at the 10 top-paying orchestras next season range from $101,600 (Minnesota) to $136,500 (Los Angeles), but principal players can earn two or three times that.

“It happens that you do save money,” Mr. Mehta acknowledged, but he said the lingering vacancies in New York were not cost-saving measures."...

"The elaborate logistical demands of orchestral auditions cause delays. First auditions are advertised. Then time must pass for applicants to send in résumés and tapes and practice the assigned excerpts from the orchestral literature. A committee of players, usually in the section, has to be formed, and preliminary rounds of auditions have to be scheduled. After the finalists are chosen, a time must be found when the busy music director and committee members can hear them. The process can easily stretch out for many months.

"Often no winner is chosen. That happened last year with the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet job. Two rounds of auditions for associate principal horn player and a double bassist also produced no result. The music director in New York has final say but makes the decision in consultation with the committee.

"The Boston Symphony usually has a high number of openings, because the demands on the players — the Tanglewood festival, the Boston Pops and regular concerts — make scheduling auditions especially difficult, as does the orchestra’s system of hiring based on a two-thirds majority in committee.

"The finest musician can have a bad day: it’s a paradox of the process, in which less than an hour of playing is supposed to determine whether a musician is suitable for the continual day in, day out life of an orchestra member. And in another contradiction, the aspirants play alone for a job that depends on group effort. (Winners are usually on probation for a year or two, effectively a tryout with the ensemble.) On occasion, when no winner is chosen, established orchestral players from elsewhere will be invited to play as guests in a kind of informal tryout. It’s an imperfect system, but no one has figured out a better one."

The orchestra audition process is the topic of the paper"Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse American Economic Review (September 2000)