Misc. repugnant transactions

What is it about mercenaries? Deane-Peter Baker explores the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights view on the repugnance of mercenaries:  Are mercenaries just warriors?

"In its most recent annual session, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) passed resolution A/HRC/15/L.31, which addresses “The use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination”. In the resolution, the UNHRC declares itself, among other things, to be “Extremely alarmed and concerned about recent mercenary activities in developing countries in various parts of the world, in particular in areas of conflict, and the threat they pose to the integrity and respect of the constitutional order of the affected countries.”
...
"Consider first the title of the mercenary resolution. It’s directed against “The use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination.” That certainly sounds like something to be concerned about. After all, violating human rights and the self-determination of peoples is undoubtedly a bad thing. But, on reflection, it seems somewhat odd for the resolution to be focused on mercenaries. To see why this is so, consider another, fictional, UNHRC resolution directed against “The use of boxcutters as a means of hijacking passenger aircraft in order to crash them into buildings and commit mass murder and violate state sovereignty.” If I were to read the title of such a UNHRC resolution my first instinct would undoubtedly be that this is something I’d want to support. But then it would be very odd indeed if the resolution turned out to be all about the evils of boxcutters. That would seem to miss the point, to say the least.

"Perhaps, however, we might imagine from its title that the point of the mercenary resolution is to delineate inappropriate uses of mercenary forces (violating human rights, impeding peoples’ self-determination) from legitimate uses of mercenaries. If that were so, then focusing the resolution on mercenaries would make some sense. It turns out, however, that this is not the case. As we read on further we find the UNHRC expressing itself to be “Convinced that, notwithstanding the way in which mercenaries or mercenary-related activities are used or the form they take to acquire a semblance of legitimacy, they are a threat to peace, security and the self-determination of peoples and an obstacle to the enjoyment of human rights by peoples.” So, then, no matter how they are used and no matter what form they take, mercenaries are nonetheless a threat to peace, security, the self-determination of peoples, and human rights."
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"win a baby" game draws fire
"A controversial IVF lottery will launch in Britain this month giving prospective parents the chance to win thousands of pounds toward expensive fertility treatments in top clinics.

"The scheme, which the media have dubbed "win a baby," has already run into trouble on ethical grounds with critics calling it inappropriate and demeaning to human reproduction.

"Britain's Gambling Commission has granted a license to fertility charity, To Hatch, to run the game from July 30.

"Every month, winners can scoop 25,000 pounds' ($40,175) worth of tailor-made treatments at one of the UK's top five fertility clinics for the price of a 20 pound ticket bought online. The tickets may eventually be sold in newsagents.

"The lottery is open to single, gay and elderly players as well as heterosexual couples struggling to start a family.

"If standard IVF fails, individuals can be offered reproductive surgery, donor eggs and sperm or a surrogate birth, the charity says, though the winner will only be able to choose one treatment."
...
"Britain's fertility regulator, The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said using IVF as a prize was "wrong and entirely inappropriate."
...
"The Gambling Commission said it had noted reaction to the scheme but said it had no regulatory powers to intervene and that any decision to revoke a license would be a government one.

"This particular example, perhaps, has thrown up some questions which may need looking at and whether that is by us or the government I don't know," a spokesman said.

"There has been concern expressed about this, but from our perspective it's a pretty straightforward granting of a license application for a lottery operator."

(HT Dean Jens, who sent the link to me in an email whose subject line was "gambling and IVF -- a repugnance twofer!"
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Susanne Lundin in Lund University, an ethnologist, writes about illegal kidney black markets: The Great Organ Bazaar .
"Trade in humans and their bodies is not a new phenomenon, but today’s businesses are historically unique, because they require advanced biomedicine, as well as ideas and values that enhance the trade in organs. Western medicine starts from the view that human illness and death are failures to be combated. It is within this conceptual climate – the dream of the regenerative body – that transplantation technology develops and demand for biological replacement parts grows.

"One of the more obvious manifes­tations of treating the human body as a resource to be mined is the hospital waiting list, used in many countries. "

*******

A compromise that both sides find repugnant: In Rhode Island, Chafee makes same-sex civil unions legal

"Governor Lincoln Chafee signed a bill into law yesterday that allows gay couples in Rhode Island to enter into civil unions, acknowledging that it was an imperfect piece of legislation but a “step forward’’ toward full marriage rights. Chafee said the bill fails to give homosexual couples the full marriage rights given to heterosexual couples and that he was concerned that an exemption given to religious groups was too broad. But he added that the legislation “brings tangible rights and benefits to thousands of Rhode Islanders.’’ The General Assembly voted Wednesday to approve civil unions. Gay rights groups urged Chafee to veto the measure, saying it continued discrimination against gays. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence denounced the Assembly vote."
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Saudi women defy ban to take driver's seat: Several women drive around in kingdom in open defiance of rule that prohibits them from driving.
"Women who had driving licences obtained abroad were urged to run their errands themselves without relying on male drivers."
******



Some believe a rabbit's place is cuddling on the sofa, not stewing with garlic and shallots on the stove. Agriculture laws should reflect that, bunny advocates said.
"Raising rabbits for food is not 'green,' it's not eco-friendly. It only adds to animal suffering," said Marcy Schaaf, director of Save a Bunny, a Mill Valley nonprofit. "Rabbits are sentient beings, just like dogs and cats. In our culture, they're companion animals."
Companion animals already have Oakland's shelter busting at the seams, Webb said. The shelter barely has staff to care for the 7,000 animals a year that filter through. Animal control officers are already swamped with animal abuse cases, including cock-fighting and other livestock-related infractions, she said.
Some think Oakland should go one step further and discourage residents not just from slaughtering rabbits but from eating them.
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Economic Science Association

I'm beginning a term as president of the Economic Science Association, which is the professional organization specifically devoted to experimental and behavioral economics.

If you can think of something useful that we ought to be doing that we're not, let me or one of the other officers or executive committee members know.

Work hours for medical residents

Even With New Limits, Medical Residents' Work Hours Are Still Dangerously Long, Experts Say

"New rules limiting work schedules for medical residents don't go far enough in protecting patients from errors caused by exhausted trainees, says an article signed by 26 leading medical and health experts...

"Among the key recommendations of the report ...:

• Capping all resident-physician work shifts at 12 to 16 hours.
• Making work-hour compliance a condition for residency programs to receive Medicare support.
• Identifying "in real time" when a resident is overworked and additional staff needs to be called in.

"The report ... came out of a conference held last summer at Harvard Medical School.
The article, "Implementing the 2009 Institute of Medicine Recommendations on Resident Physician Work Hours, Supervision, and Safety: Report from a Conference at Harvard Medical School," is available in the June 24 issue of the online journal Nature and Science of Sleep.

School assignment as viewed by families over time, when sibs are given priority

As I've noted before, demand for pre-kindergarten increases when pre-k kids are guaranteed spots at kindergarten, since it gives families a way to increase their chances in the school choice game. That is, families can change their priority at the kindergarten they want if they succeed in enrolling their child in that school's pre-k.

Two recent papers model some of the timing issues facing families thinking about school (or daycare) placement, when there are preferences for incumbent students, and the siblings of incumbent students. Needless to say, mechanisms that are strategy proof for static choice problems are no longer strategy proof when the strategy sets are expanded to take account of the dynamic problem. Both papers will be presented at the July 11 - 15, 2011: International Conference on Game Theory at Stony Brook.

The papers are:

The Daycare Assignment Problem, by John Kennes, Daniel Monte and, Norovsambuu Tumennasan
(HT: EL)

Abstract

"In this paper we introduce and study the daycare assignment problem. We take the mechanism design approach to the problem of assigning children of different ages to daycares, motivated by the mechanism currently in place in Denmark. The dynamic features of the daycare assignment problem distinguishes it from the school choice problem. For example, the children's preference relations must include the possibility of waiting and also the different combinations of daycares in different points in time. Moreover, schools' priorities are history-dependent: a school gives priority to children currently enrolled to it, as is the case with the Danish system.

"First, we study the concept of stability, and to account for the dynamic nature of the problem, we propose a novel solution concept, which we call strong stability. With a suitable restriction on the priority orderings of schools, we show that strong stability and the weaker concept of static stability will coincide. We then extend the well known Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm for dynamic problems and we prove that it yields a matching that satisfies strong stability. We show that it is not Pareto dominated by any other matching, and that, if there is an efficient stable matching, it must be the Gale-Shapley one. However, contrary to static problems, the Gale-Shapley algorithm does not necessarily Pareto dominate all other strongly stable mechanisms. Most importantly, the Gale-Shapley algorithm is not strategy-proof. In fact, one of our main results is a much stronger impossibility result: For the class of dynamic matching problems that we study, there are no algorithms that satisfy strategy-proofness and strong stability. Second, we show that, due to the overlapping generations structure of the problem, the also well known Top Trading Cycles algorithm is neither Pareto efficient nor strategy-proof. We conclude by showing that a variation of the serial dictatorship is strategy-proof and efficient.

and

Dynamic School Choice by Umut Dur, a student at UT Austin, who I heard in Montreal...
Abstract:
"Both families and public school systems desire siblings to be assigned to the same school. Although students with siblings at the school have a higher priority than students who do not, public school systems do not guarantee sibling assignments. Hence, families with more than one child may need to misstate their preferences if they want their children to attend to the same school. In this paper, we study the school choice problem in a dynamic environment where some families have two children and their preferences and priority orders for the younger child depend on the assignment of the elder one. In this dynamic environment, we introduce a new mechanism which assign siblings to the best possible school together if parents desire them to attend the same school. We also introduce a new dynamic fairness notion which respects priorities in a dynamic sense. Finally, we show that it is possible to attain welfare gains when school choice problem is considered in a dynamic environment."


Jacob Leshno, who will be at the Stony Brook conference, writes to me about these papers as follows.


"The incentive problems in the daycare problem are akin to the incentive problems of the Boston mechanism. In the Boston mechanism changing your report changes your priority (the Boston mechanism is equivalent to DA where priorities are changed so students who ranked a school as their k-th choice get higher priority than student who rank the school > k). In the daycare problem your report changes your priority since priorities are history dependent (for example, kids are guaranteed to be allowed to stay where they first got admitted). Misreporting preferences to get a more advantageous priority can be a profitable manipulation, and these manipulations will probably still persist even when the market becomes large."

Motorcycles, organ donation, and helmet laws

NY motorcyclist dies on ride protesting helmet law

"Police say a motorcyclist participating in a protest ride against helmet laws in upstate New York died after he flipped over the bike's handlebars and hit his head on the pavement.
...
"Troopers say Contos would have likely survived if he had been wearing a helmet."
******

What can you say?

I hope he was an organ donor.

(Should riding without a helmet be repugnant? What would you think about a helmet law that said that registered donors don’t have to wear helmets?)

Speaking to a captive audience (not such a valuable offer to a college professor)

Since I am occasionally asked to do a radio interview, it took me a moment to parse this email I received recently:

Hi Alvin,

I'm pleased to announce for a limited time we're offering a 70% discount to participate in our upcoming September/October 2011 edition of "The Innovators" airing on American Airlines.

This special ongoing series spotlights innovative organizations and is a cost effective way to speak to millions of business travelers.  Our team will produce a dynamic one-on-one radio interview that will reach 8.4 million potential listeners.

Your cost is now only $1,497 (normally $4,995) for a one-on-one interview to broadcast worldwide on 58,000 American flights.

For details, click http://info.altitude-media.net/aa

We only have a few spots remaining and they will go fast.  Please contact me asap to secure your space.

Sincerely,

Steven James

Producer

Altitude Media, Inc.

In-Flight Media Specialists

*************

If you click on the link you get to a page that says

Make Your Advertising Dollars
Work Harder - Reach 8.4 Million Travelers on
American Airlines with your own High-Impact,
Long-Form Talk Radio Interview

and lists among the benefits: "Worldwide captive audience"

Maybe it's just the way I earn my living, but speaking to a captive audience doesn't seem like the sort of thing I should be paying them for:)

A Spanish market in stolen babies?

In a chilling story, the NY Times reports Spain Confronts Decades of Pain Over Lost Babies

"Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen.Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.

"The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain’s 1936-39 Civil War and Franco’s rule.
...
"Spain’s judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January. Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions.
...
"The cases of disappeared infants stretch from 1950 to 1990, continuing well after Franco’s death in 1975. It is not known whether government officials played any role.
...
"Antonio Barroso, the president of Anadir, said he believed that over time Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas.
...
"Mr. Barroso, 42, founded Anadir last year, after being told by a friend that they were both adopted. He took DNA samples from the woman he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that his sample and hers were not a match. She admitted paying a nun for a baby and misleading her son about his birth for decades.
...
"As in Mr. Barroso’s case, a few nuns have confessed to selling children, but without suggesting that they were part of a criminal network.
...
"During the Franco regime and in its immediate aftermath, “you simply didn’t challenge what an official told you,” said María Luisa Puro Rodríguez, a former tobacco factory worker who claims that her newborn was abducted in 1976 from a Malaga hospital. “We now thankfully live in a society where it is normal to question what we hear,” she said. “I’ve learned this bitter lesson and am now ready to fight all the way to find out what actually happened.”

The New Yorker on Online Dating

Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker: Looking for Someone

"Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five.  

"It is tempting to think of online dating as a sophisticated way to address the ancient and fundamental problem of sorting humans into pairs, except that the problem isn’t very old. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. Society—family, tribe, caste, church, village, probate court—established and enforced its connubial protocols for the presumed good of everyone, except maybe for the couples themselves. The criteria for compatibility had little to do with mutual affection or a shared enthusiasm for spicy food and Fleetwood Mac. Happiness, self-fulfillment, “me time,” a woman’s needs: these didn’t rate. As for romantic love, it was an almost mutually exclusive category of human experience. As much as it may have evolved, in the human animal, as a motivation system for mate-finding, it was rarely given great consideration in the final reckoning of conjugal choice.


"The twentieth century reduced it all to smithereens. The Pill, women in the workforce, widespread deferment of marriage, rising divorce rates, gay rights—these set off a prolonged but erratic improvisation on a replacement. In a fractured and bewildered landscape of fern bars, ladies’ nights, Plato’s Retreat, “The Bachelor,” sexting, and the concept of the “cougar,” the Internet promised reconnection, profusion, and processing power.

"The obvious advantage of online dating is that it provides a wider pool of possibility and choice. In some respects, for the masses of grownups seeking mates, either for a night or for life, dating is an attempt to approximate the collegiate condition—that surfeit both of supply and demand, of information and authentication. A college campus is a habitat of abundance and access, with a fluid and fairly ruthless vetting apparatus. A city also has abundance and access, especially for the young, but as people pair off, and as they corral themselves, through profession, geography, and taste, into cliques and castes, the range of available mates shrinks. We run out of friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. You can get to thinking that the single ones are single for a reason.
...
"Match.com, one of the first Internet dating sites, went live in 1995. It is now the biggest dating site in the world and is itself the biggest aggregator of other dating sites; under the name Match, it owns thirty in all, and accounts for about a quarter of the revenues of its parent company, I.A.C., Barry Diller’s collection of media properties. In 2010, fee-based dating Web sites grossed over a billion dollars. According to a recent study commissioned by Match.com, online is now the third most common way for people to meet. (The most common are “through work/school” and “through friends/family.”) One in six new marriages is the result of meetings on Internet dating sites.

 ...
"There are thousands of dating sites; the big ones, such as Match.com and eHarmony (among the fee-based services) and PlentyOfFish and OK Cupid (among the free ones), hog most of the traffic. Pay sites make money through monthly subscriptions; you can’t send or receive a message without one. Free sites rely on advertising.
...
"I had a talk-about-dating date with a freelance researcher named Julia Kamin, who, over twelve years as a dater on various sites, has boiled down all the competing compatibility criteria to the question of, as she put it, “Are we laughing at the same shit?” This epiphany inspired her to build a site—makeeachotherlaugh.com—on which you rate cartoons and videos, and the algorithms match you up. As she has gone around telling people about her idea, she says, “women get instantly excited. Men are, like, ‘Um, O.K., maybe.’ ” It might be that women want to be amused while men want to be considered amusing. “I really should have two sites,” Kamin said. “Hemakesmelaugh.com and shelaughsatmyjokes.com.” (She bought both URLs.)

...
"The online dating sites are themselves a little like online-dating-site suitors. They want you. They exaggerate their height and salary. They hide their bald spots and back fat. Each has a distinct personality and a carefully curated profile—a look, a strong side, and, to borrow from TACT, a philosophy of life values. Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders.


"OK Cupid, in its profile, comes across as the witty, literate geek-hipster, the math major with the Daft Punk vinyl collection and the mumblecore screenplay in development. Get to know it a little better and you’ll find that it contains multitudes—old folks, squares, more Jews than JDate, the polyamorous crowd. Dating sites have for the most part always had either a squalid or a chain-store ambience. OK Cupid, with a breezy, facetious tone, an intuitive approach, and proprietary matching stratagems, comes close to feeling like a contemporary Internet product, and a pastime for the young. By reputation, it’s where you go if you want to hook up, although perhaps not if you are, as the vulgate has it, “looking for someone”—the phrase that connotes a desire for commitment but a countervailing aversion to compromise. Owing to high traffic and a sprightly character, OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought, for fifty million dollars, by Match.

"OK Cupid’s founders, who have stayed on since the sale, are four math majors from Harvard.
...
"OK Cupid sends all your answers to its servers, which are housed on Broad Street in New York. The algorithms find the people out there whose answers best correspond to yours—how yours fit their desires and how theirs meet yours, and according to what degree of importance. It’s a Venn diagram. And then the algorithms determine how exceptional those particular correlations are: it’s more statistically significant to share an affection for the Willies than for the Beatles. The match is expressed as a percentage. Each match search requires tens of millions of mathematical operations. To the extent that OK Cupid has any abiding faith, it is in mathematics.


"There’s another layer: how to sort the matches. “You’ve got to make sure certain people don’t get all the attention,” Rudder said. “In a bar, it’s self-correcting. You see ten guys standing around one woman, maybe you don’t walk over and try to introduce yourself. Online, people have no idea how ‘surrounded’ a person is. And that creates a shitty situation. Dudes don’t get messages back. Some women get overwhelmed.” And so the attractiveness ratings, as well as the frequency of messaging, are factored in. As on Match.com, the algorithms pay attention to revealed preferences. “We watch people who don’t know they’re being watched,” Sam Yagan, the company’s C.E.O., said. “But not in a Big Brother way.” The algorithms learn as they go, changing the weighting for certain variables to adjust to the success or the failure rate of the earlier iterations. The goal is to connect you with someone with whom you have enough in common to want to strike up an e-mail correspondence and then quickly meet in person. It is not OK Cupid’s concern whether you are suited for a lifetime together.

Marriage, evolving

The New York Times has an unusually interesting discussion of marriage, motivated by NY State's recent legalization of same-sex marriage.

Two discussants speculate on what this might come to mean for incest and polygamy.

Ralph Richard Banks: "What now of the two remaining criminal prohibitions of intimate relationships: incest and polygamy? Even as same sex and interracial relationships are accepted, Americans are now imprisoned for incest or polygamy.

The cases against polygamy and incest are not nearly as strong as most people imagine. Yet they will not become legal anytime soon. To see why, it helps to understand the evolution of moral assessments of interracial and same-sex marriage.

"Courts and legislatures began to invalidate laws against interracial marriage after Hitler gave racism a bad name...

"The categorical prohibitions of incest and polygamy persist in part because people who commit either act are commonly reduced to that act (which is viewed as morally reprehensible) and, in turn, are not viewed as worthy of respect as people. More than a century ago, when the Supreme Court upheld the prohibition of polygamy the court reasoned that it was inimical to American values and identity, in part, the court stated, because polygamy was “almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people.” Historically, both polygamy and incest have been more widely practiced, and accepted, than the Supreme Court, and most Americans, seem to believe.

Over time, our moral assessments of these practices will shift, just as they have with interracial marriage and same sex marriage. We will begin to take seriously questions that now seem beyond the pale: Should a state be permitted to imprison two cousins because they have sex or attempt to marry? Should a man and two wives be permitted to live together as a family when they assert that their religious convictions lead them to do so?"

John Corvino: "Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Yes, New York’s decision to grant same-sex couples the freedom to marry was a big deal. So was Washington’s before it and New Hampshire’s and Vermont’s and Iowa’s and Connecticut’s and Massachusetts’s. And let’s not forget Maine and California, which had marriage equality and then lost it (for now)....

"Meanwhile, opponents continue to predict a slippery slope to polygamy, polyamory and other “untested, experimental” family forms.

"The grain of truth in their prediction is this: recent progress reminds us that marriage is an evolving institution and that not everyone fits in the neat boxes that existing tradition offers.

"But let’s not confuse issues. Whether it’s a good idea to allow people to marry one partner of the same sex is a separate question from whether it’s a good idea to allow anyone to marry multiple partners — or their siblings, pets, iPhones or whatever else doomsayers toss in. It’s worth remembering that polygamy is quite “traditional,” even biblical. It is no more logically connected to one side of this debate than the other.

"The truth is that New York granted same-sex couples marriage rights not because of a radical idea, but because of an old-fashioned one: when two individuals commit to a lifetime of mutual love and care, it’s good to support them — or at least get out of their way."

******

Several discussants note that long-lasting marriage is increasingly common in the U.S. among the prosperous and well educated, and decreasingly common otherwise. 

Judith Stacey: "Marriage never has been or will be an equal-opportunity institution. As the legal scholars June Carbone and Naomi Kahn document in Red Families v. Blue Families, the marriage gap between rich and poor family regimes has been widening dangerously in recent decades. Marriage rates are higher and divorce rates lower in liberal Massachusetts than in conservative Mississippi. "...

"As the United States gradually makes the membership rules to marriage gender-inclusive, it risks deepening our sharp class and race disparities in marriage and family life. If we wish to avoid this fate, we should not be celebrating the benefits of marriage. Instead we need to develop family policies that give greater recognition and resources to the growing array of families formed, as Nancy Polikoff titled her book, “Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.”

W. Bradford Wilcox: "In the nation’s affluent and educated precincts — from the Upper East Side to Bethesda, Md., to Southlake, Texas — the future of marriage is bright. After succumbing temporarily to the marital tumult of the 1970s, college-educated Americans have been getting their marital act together in recent years. For this demographic, divorce is down, infidelity is down, nonmarital childbearing still remains an exotic activity (only 2 percent of children born to white, college-educated women today are born outside of marriage) and the vast majority of children are fortunate to grow up with both their mother and their father.

"But in poor and working-class communities — from the South Bronx to Blytheville, Ark., to Youngstown, Ohio — the future of marriage is bleak. If anything, the aftershocks of the 1970s are growing, with all too many Middle American communities coming to resemble the inner city when it comes to family life. For the majority of Americans who do not hold college degrees, divorce rates remain high, infidelity is up, nonmarital childbearing is way up (more than one-third of births to white, high-school-educated women are now outside of marriage) and about half of their children will see their parents split before they reach adulthood."
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Speaking of polygamy, Malaysia to Reward Polygamous Husbands (ht Stephanie Hurder)

Kidney exchange evolving: passing the baton

Ruthanne Hanto, who has been ably running the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE) since its founding, is joining the UNOS Kidney Paired Donation pilot program as Program Manager effective July 1.

(See previous posts here and here on the UNOS KPD program. NEPKE was one of the four kidney exchange programs that were selected to participate.  The others are The Alliance for Paired Donation, Johns Hopkins and UCLA/UPMC.   Activity in the UNOS KPD pilot has been slow initially.)

Ruthanne will continue to work part-time as the Manager of NEPKE until December 31. This will allow time for NEPKE centers to transition directly into the UNOS national system prior to NEPKE ceasing operations on December 31, 2011.

The proximate cause of NEPKE's end is that during a recent audit of NEOB’s cost report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, the federal payer for  kidney transplant related costs) retroactively denied coverage for the costs associated with NEPKE. This is a really shortsighted decision, since every kidney exchange saves CMS lots of money in costs for dialysis, etc., not to mention that it is the treatment of choice. (It isn't often in medicine that the best treatment is also the cheapest.)

However, Ruthanne's expertise will give the UNOS program its best chance to succeed, which would be a very good thing indeed.

Good luck and Godspeed, Ruthanne...

College education for women: a formerly repugnant transaction

From an article about Trinity College in Washington DC, by Kevin Carey in the Washington Monthly: The Trinity Sisters

"And so the two nuns and the vice rector banded together to form a Catholic college for women: Trinity College.

"Within months, they were engulfed in protest and controversy. Men in the local church hierarchy were aghast at the prospect of a women’s college being erected within walking distance of the male students at Catholic. Like Billiart and Bourdon a century before, Sisters McGroarty and Euphrasia’s modern ideas about educating women pushed the bounds of what was acceptable within the church. Soon the fledgling project was surrounded by rumor and innuendo. Joseph Schroeder, a professor of dogmatic theology at Catholic, relayed his objections to allies in the Vatican and began publishing broadsides in conservative newspapers. “We cannot discern any advantage gained by this newfangled rise of the New Woman,” he wrote. Fending off the anti-Trinity campaign fell to Euphrasia, a tireless networker, promoter, and fund-raiser who might have been a star in the university development world had she lived in a different time.

"The face-off was dubbed by some the “War of 1897.” Catholic newspapers up and down the East Coast ran stories about the controversy. “The project of a University for the weaker sex,” said one pointed inquiry from Rome, “has made a disagreeable impression here.” Finally Sister Euphrasia determined to speak with the archbishop himself, who had fled the stifling summer heat for Atlantic City. On August 26, she and a colleague donned their heavy hooded traveling cloaks despite the soaring temperatures and set out by train for New Jersey. The archbishop was impressed by their case and their determination, and his support helped tip the battle in Trinity’s favor. (It didn’t hurt that the college’s supporters began pointing to their opponent Shroeder’s weakness for all-night sojourns in disreputable saloons.) By December the war had subsided. Trinity College enrolled its first students on November 3, 1900.
*********

Happy (American) Independence Day to all:)

Kidney sales--and donor compensation--in China

Sally Satel, writing in Slate, looks optimistically at the move by Chinese authorities to allow compensation for donors.

Yuan a Kidney? China's proposals to pay organ donors flout the status quo. That's a good thing.

"Last month, the China's health ministry announced a proposal that could expand the pool of organs available for transplant surgeries. Huang told the Chinese press that his office was considering several possible incentives. These include tax rebates, deduction of transplant-related hospital fees, medical insurance, tuition waivers for donors' family members, or deduction of burial fees for people who donated in death.

"Unfortunately, much of the international transplant establishment—including the World Health Organization, the Transplantation Society, and the World Medical Association—focuses exclusively on obliterating illicit organ sales. While this may seem like a reasonable approach to abhorrent practices, in reality it is a lethal prescription.

"Efforts to stamp out corruption either drive it further underground or cause unauthorized markets to pop up elsewhere."

Overcrowded NYC kindergartens

The NY Times reports that Big Kindergarten Wait List Limits City’s Pre-K Slots.

The first line of the story struck me...maybe it was the "but".

"There were more applications for children to enter prekindergarten classes in New York City this year than last, but a smaller proportion of them ended up getting in: 68 percent, down from 72 percent. "

Adoptions by same sex couples

Adoptions Rise by Same-Sex Couples, Despite Legal Barriers

"Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited from adopting in only two states — Utah and Mississippi — but they face significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states.

"Despite this legal patchwork, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000"

Medical education in Paris in the 1830's--cheap cadavers

Lewis Lapham discusses David McCullough's “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris."

Cadavers at $2.50 Lured Americans to 1830s Paris

"At noon, the cadavers were delivered to the dissecting rooms at the Amphitheatre d’Anatomie -- carts had arrived earlier and dumped the bodies of naked men and women on the pavement outside. Corpses came cheap: An adult cost 6 francs or about $2.50; a child could be had for less.

"The amphitheater was big enough for 600 students. They smoked cigars to offset the nauseating smell of putrefaction and walked gingerly to avoid slipping on the fragments of flesh littering the floor. Larger pieces were fed to caged dogs.

"It was a scene that in the 1830s drew students from all over to Paris, the medical capital of the world. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the first Americans trained in the new clinical methods, wrote that to understand anatomy, he’d cut his subject “into inch pieces.” He could not have done so anywhere else, he added.

"Upon returning to the U.S., Holmes taught at Harvard Medical School until 1882, expounding the benefits of dissection, the microscope and the stethoscope, all of which were largely unknown in the U.S."
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The situation in Britain (and the U.S.) was much less freewheeling. I wrote about cadavers for anatomy study in my article  Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets "


"When the British medical journal The Lancet published its first volume in 1824, its pages reflected a concern that too few cadavers were available for anatomy classes. The main source of cadavers was an illegal black market supplied by so-called “resurrection men,” and an editorial by that name opens with the news that a reliable resurrection man had recently been arrested and sentenced. The editorial goes on to suggest—in an early observation that how issues are framed may influence how they are perceived—that the government policy of only allowing the bodies of executed murderers to be used for anatomy studies “tends to keep up . . . the prejudice which is at present so strong against the obtaining of bodies for dissection” (Lancet, 1824).
... In Britain, the Anatomy Act of 1832 considerably expanded the source of legal cadavers for dissection.

School choice in Denver

Denver Public Schools is getting ready to develop a new public school choice plan, with the help of IIPSC (The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice), the nonprofit founded by Neil Dorosin after he helped implement New York City's high school choice plan. The plan is that Neil will again be assisted by the same team of economists. An innovative element of the plan is that both public and charter schools will participate in the same school choice process.

Here's a story in Colorado Education News, by Charlie Brennan: Streamlined DPS enrollment in works

"Denver Public Schools is planning to streamline its enrollment system and will ask – but not require – all students to choose their schools beginning as soon as fall 2012.

"Under the proposed plan, families for the first time would be able to use one form to apply to traditional DPS schools, magnets or charter schools, and all applications would be on the same deadline.


"Families not wishing to participate would be assigned to their neighborhood school by default, as always. District officials say people exercising choice should find this new system easier to navigate.

"Superintendent Tom Boasberg said the change is really simply one of “mechanics.”

“For those families who do exercise choice, it will be a system that is more equitable, more efficient and more transparent,” Boasberg said.
...
"District officials say the plan’s main purpose is to streamline and unify the district’s current patchwork and often confusing systems of school choice. During the 2010-11 school year, 53 percent of DPS students attended schools outside their assigned attendance area. This includes charter schools.


"Dorosin said he knows no other major urban district that uses one application form for district schools and charter schools.

"The proposal would continue guaranteed enrollment in neighborhood schools as well as priority status for those with siblings already attending a school.

"Board member Mary Seawell has met with Dorosin and said she supports the change, if it will put all district families on a level playing field when choosing schools.

“To me, it is really about, is our system working and is it fair? Is there equity for all kids? And I’ve learned that it isn’t fair, and we need to be fair,” she said.
...
"In the 2004 New York system Dorosin helped design, eighth-graders were asked to rank up to 12 schools in order of preference, while schools ranked applicants without seeing how those students ranked the schools. A computer then compared rankings, using an algorithm originally created to match medical residents with hospitals.


"New York and Boston did not include its charter schools in the choice process as Denver will. New York implemented the plan only for high school students. Denver will do it systemwide, as has Boston. New York did away with wait-lists, Denver will not.

"For 2010-11 in New York, of 78,747 students who applied, the computer placed 83 percent of the students with one of their top five choices. Another 7 percent matched to schools further down their preference lists.

"However, roughly 10 percent of the city’s eighth-graders were matched with none of their listed choices.

“That just means they didn’t get matched in the first round,” said New York City Department of Education spokesman Matt Mittenthal. “We’re currently in a supplementary round, so the process is not by any means over. There’s always a period for appeals but after the supplementary round, they are essentially given one assignment.”

"Mittenthal added there are “hundreds of appeals every year.”

"Dorosin said technical aspects of the Denver program are still under development. Using a formula to match students to schools prevents savvy parents from gaming the system at the expense of less sophisticated families, he said.

"While Dorosin said the New York and Boston models hold lessons for Denver, DPS spokesman Vaughn underscored a fundamental difference in what’s contemplated here.

“We do think it’s good to encourage families to think proactively about their choices, but in no way is any part of this mandatory,” Vaughn said.

School choice in England

László Sándor points me to an Economist blog post about school choice: Schools admissions codes--Playing games.

It begins with a nice paragraph about how school choice, and other selection processes, are two-sided matching markets.

"CHOICE is a central tenet to the reform of public services, whether it is made by patients seeking the best hospital care or parents looking for a decent education for their child. But there is another, widely neglected aspect to choice: that made by those who head publicly-funded institutions. It is all very well for a youngster to chose to apply to Oxford University, but admissions tutors also chose which candidates to admit.
...
"The rule book that governs all this is absurdly complex, and education secretary Michael Gove is bent on simplifying it. On May 27th he  launched a consultation* on the proposed new admissions code. It suggests that selecting pupils by lottery (as Brighton does) rather than by how close they live to the school should be banned. More controversially it also proposes that the children of school staff should be offered places ahead of others, a practise that was banned only a few years ago and which,  research suggests, led to good schools being forced to take pupils from poorer homes. For the first time, it recommends, head teachers should be free to admit children whose families have incomes that are so low that the children are offered free school meals.
The reasoning behind these proposals is fairly clear: they are necessary to make palatable the opening of the independently-run but state-funded "free" schools, the first tranche of which will admit pupils in September. These schools can be established by parents who might then be unable to get their child into the schol under the existing rules, hence the suggestion that such pupils should be favoured over others."

*this link only seems to work from the original article, linked at the top...

Options for nondirected kidney donors

There was a time not long ago when nondirected kidney donation was so unusual that donors had few options. Recent developments in kidney exchange, in particular long nonsimultaneous nondirected donor chains have changed that. Yesterday's NY Times Magazine's column The Ethicist starts with the following question:

"A few months ago, I signed up to be a living kidney donor to help someone in need who was not related to me. Recently I was told that I was a match for a local 16-year-old. But if I were to enroll in the national kidney registry, my donation could facilitate a donor chain, potentially benefiting 5 or 10 patients. Should I help one person now or several people in the future? It’s hard to say no to a child, yet does the good of the many outweigh the good of the one in this case?"

Design of enforcement mechanisms: policing versus gunfighting

A new addition to the experimental literature on how the possibility of punishment influences the efficient provision of public goods (and the inefficient provision of punishments):

Gun For Hire: Does Delegated Enforcement Crowd out Peer Punishment in Giving to Public Goods? -- by James Andreoni, Laura K. Gee

from NBER Working Papers

This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the "hired gun" mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. The "hired gun" mechanism (Andreoni and Gee, 2011) is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliances and minimal enforcement as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time, and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% to 40%. Moreover, the lion's share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.

The Hired Gun Mechanism -- by James Andreoni, Laura K. Gee

from NBER Working Papers

We present and experimentally test a mechanism that provides a simple, natural, low cost, and realistic solution to the problem of compliance with socially determined efficient actions, such as contributing to a public good. We note that small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader-the department chair, the building superintendent, the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. We show experimentally this mechanism, despite having very small penalties out of equilibrium, reaches the full compliance equilibrium almost instantly.

N.Y. legalizes same sex marriage

After a close vote, NY State legalizes same sex marriage.


"The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

"With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

"Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

"Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia."
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The difficult transformation of a formerly repugnant transaction into a normal one is fascinating to witness.