School choice in Newark

Innovative Enrollment Initiative Gives Students Real Choice

"If we're serious about reforming public education in our nation, we have to ensure all our kids have access to high-quality schools. Newark, New Jersey, is launching an innovative new universal enrollment program this week aimed at achieving that goal as well as promoting equity and transparency, but federal regulations may stand in the way of full implementation. The federal government needs to loosen the reins and let cities and school districts do what's best for their students.

"Newark's universal enrollment program, part of the district superintendent's One Newark initiative, is representative of a promising trend emerging in a handful of school districts across the United States. Under universal enrollment, parents will simply fill out a single application to rank their top public district or charter school choices. This streamlined process will ease the burden for parents who will no longer need to go door to door to find out the options, timelines and enrollment requirements of their local schools.

"The program, which went live Jan. 6, is a groundbreaking collaboration between the Newark public school district and the city's robust charter school sector. As of now, more than three quarters -- 16 of the city's 21 public charter schools -- are on board to participate. "

Barcelona experimental economics summer school

Experiments and macroeconomics at Barcelona, this just in:

Announcing the 2014 Barcelona LeeX Experimental Economics Summer School in Macroeconomics

Macroeconomic theories have traditionally been tested using non-experimental "field" data. However, modern, micro-founded macroeconomic models can also be tested in the laboratory, and researchers have begun to pursue such experimental testing and evaluation. This June, graduate students specializing in macroeconomics or experimental economics, as well as junior faculty members and researchers of macroeconomic are invited to attend the Barcelona LeeX summer school devoted to experimental macroeconomics research. This intensive 5 day summer school will be held from June 11 to 17, 2014 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain.  Students will be taught experimental methods and exposed to a number of macroeconomic applications that have been tested experimentally. Students will be asked to participate in experiments and to develop their own experimental macroeconomic projects. Faculty will assist with and critique these projects.

Details about the summer school including how to apply are provided on the summer school website

http://www.upf.edu/leex/events/bleess_2014/index.html

This year we invite summer school students to present their ongoing research during the summer school. Such presentations may take the form of presentations during the summer school or a poster session during the associated conference workshop, depending on the number of students seeking to present their work. Such presentations will be at the discretion of the summer school organizers.

Students can submit research proposals as part of their summer school application, though this is not a requirement for participation in the summer school.  Indeed, one purpose of the summer school is to think of macroeconomic topics and models that can be implemented in the laboratory in a way that advances our knowledge of behavior.

Summer school students are also invited to attend the 2 day 5th LeeX International Workshop co-organized with Barcelona GSE Summer Forum on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics  from June 9-10, 2014 that will also take place at UPF immediately prior to the summer school.

The deadline for summer school applications is Monday, April 21 2014.  

Summer school in experimental macroeconomics faculty:

• Guest lectures
• Charles Noussair (Tilburg University)
• Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam)
• Shyam Sunder (Yale University)
• John Duffy (University of Pittsburgh)
• Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and  Barcelona GSE )

Summer school organizers:

• John Duffy (University of Pittsburgh)
• Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Rosemarie Nagel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Please forward this message to any interested parties.

Organ donor registration in Israel

Judd Kessler and I just got this email from Jacob Lavee (about whom I've written before), with good news that he kindly gave me permission to post:

Dear Al and Judd,

Just a short note to let you know that the Israeli Minister of Health has adopted this week my recommendation to establish by law the modified mandated choice model based upon your work, whereby the issuing or renewal of an ID, passport or driving license will be conditional upon answering the question of becoming a registered donor to which only a positive answer will be given as an option or else the “Continue” button will be selected. It seems that, contrary to my previous worries, the entire registration for these documents is currently being done online and therefore there should be no technical issues to implement this model.

Thank you guys for providing the proof of concept which I cited to the ministerial committee.

This model will be added upon the prioritization model, which is already implemented by law.

Jay
*******************

The work Jay is referring to is a paper, currently out for review at a journal that doesn't like prepublication on the web, "Don’t Take ‘No’ For An Answer: An experiment with actual organ donor registrations," which finds, in a study of the online MA state organ donor registry, that requiring potential donors to choose either "yes" or "no" when asked if they wish to be on the donor registry does not increase registrations, and seems likely to reduce the rate of donations by next of kin when the deceased is unregistered.

Womb transplants in Sweden (where surrogacy is illegal)

The NY Times has the story: Swedish Doctors Transplant Wombs Into 9 Women

 "STOCKHOLM — Nine women in Sweden have successfully received transplanted wombs donated from relatives in an experimental procedure that has raised some ethical concerns. The women will soon try to become pregnant with their new wombs, the doctor in charge of the pioneering project has revealed.

"The women were born without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are in their 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether it's possible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to their own children.

"In many European countries, including Sweden, using a surrogate to carry a pregnancy isn't allowed.
...
"Some experts have raised concerns about whether it's ethical to use live donors for an experimental procedure that doesn't save lives. But John Harris, a bioethics expert at the University of Manchester, didn't see a problem with that as long as donors are fully informed. He said donating kidneys isn't necessarily life-saving, yet is widely promoted.

"Dialysis is available, but we have come to accept and to even encourage people to take risks to donate a kidney," he said.

"Brannstrom said the nine womb recipients are doing well. Many already had their periods six weeks after the transplants, an early sign that the wombs are healthy and functioning.
...
"None of the women who donated or received wombs has been identified. The transplants began in September 2012 and the donors include mothers and other relatives of the recipients.
...
"The transplant operations did not connect the women's uteruses to their fallopian tubes, so they are unable to get pregnant naturally. But all who received a womb have their own ovaries and can make eggs. Before the operation, they had some removed to create embryos through in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were then frozen and doctors plan to transfer them into the new wombs, allowing the women to carry their own biological children.
...
""If this had been possible when I was younger, no doubt I would have been interested," she said. Gimre, who has two foster children, said the only option for women like her to have biological children is via surrogacy, which is illegal in many European countries, including Norway and Sweden.
...
"The technique used in Sweden, using live donors, is somewhat controversial. In Britain, doctors are also planning to perform uterus transplants, but will only use wombs from dying or dead people. That was also the case in Turkey. Last year, Turkish doctors announced their patient got pregnant but the pregnancy failed after two months.

"Mats has done something amazing and we understand completely why he has taken this route, but we are wary of that approach," said Dr. Richard Smith, head of the U.K. charity Womb Transplant UK, which is trying to raise 500,000 pounds ($823,000) to carry out five operations in Britain.

"He said removing a womb for donation is like a radical hysterectomy but it requires taking a bigger chunk of the surrounding blood vessels to ensure adequate blood flow, raising the risk of complications for the donor. Smith said British officials don't consider it ethical to let donors take such chances for an operation that isn't considered life-saving.
...
"Doctors in Saudi Arabia performed the first womb transplant in 2000, using a live donor, but it had to be removed after three months because of a blood clot."

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is officially over

Here is the official announcement, dated January 13, 2014:

To: All United States Judges
From: Judge John D. Bates
RE: LAW CLERK HIRING (INFORMATION)

In accordance with recommendations made by the Online System for Clerkship
Application and Review (OSCAR) Working Group (Working Group), I am writing to inform
you that the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan has effectively been discontinued and no further
dates are being set in connection with that plan.
I also have adopted the Working Group’s recommendation that there be a phased
approach for opening OSCAR to law school students in 2014. The Administrative Office
will open OSCAR to rising second-year law school students in a read-only capacity effective
June 1, 2014, and permit them to build and finalize clerkship applications effective August 1,
2014. Third-year law school students and alumni will continue to have full access to OSCAR
year-round.
The Working Group judges have developed a list of Federal Law Clerk Hiring Best
Practices to support transparency in the hiring process. In addition, the Working Group is
asking the National Association for Law Placement to create a list for judges of
recommendations regarding clerkship recruiting best practices from the law school
perspective. The Administrative Office will post the list in OSCAR. I hope you will find
both lists helpful in determining your clerkship recruitment and hiring practices.
The Judiciary supports a transparent clerkship recruitment and hiring process, and
OSCAR plays a valuable role in ensuring transparency. OSCAR’s online application process
eliminates paper and saves court staff time. Using OSCAR adds diversity to judges’
applicant pools and enables judges to electronically manage a large volume of applications
through search and sort features. I encourage you to use OSCAR to post your hiring
practices. To register for an OSCAR account, please visit the OSCAR registration page.


HT: Catherine Rampell

An economist's advice on online dating by Stanford's Paul Oyer

In a WSJ column and in a new book, Paul Oyer offers his perspective on economics and online dating, based on his personal experience. In the column he gives an economist's advice on dating, and in the book he illustrates principles of economics using online dating as his main example.

Here's the column: How Nobel-Winning Economic Theories Can Help Your Online Dating

And here's the book: Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating 
by Paul Oyer

Women protest Saudi driving ban, in small numbers

The WSJ has the story: Women Accelerate Challenge to Saudi Driving Ban

"Three Saudi women drove cars on Saturday in an ongoing challenge of the world's last official ban on women driving, activists and female drivers in the kingdom said.

Security forces in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah pulled over one female driver there within minutes of her taking the wheel, a passenger in the woman's car said. In the eastern city of Khobar, another woman drove at length Saturday without being stopped. A third drove Saturday evening in the capital, Riyadh, and also wasn't detained, activists said.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are officially forbidden from driving."

**************
It must be difficult to get a lot of Saudi women drivers to protest the driving ban, since there can't be a lot of Saudi women drivers. Most if not all of the women protesters at this and similar demonstrations must have learned to drive outside of Saudi Arabia, i.e. in places where it is legal for them to drive.  Perhaps women who want to protest the driving ban should find another way...e.g. many more women would be able to participate in a protest that involved blocking traffic by lying down in the road, which would resemble protests that have attracted attention to causes in other countries.

Kidney exchange at University of Alabama at Birmingham

UAB Launches Paired Exchange and Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program

Dale Mortensen, 1939-2014

Dale Mortensen, Nobelist for Labor Market Work, Dies at 74

Here's the short bio from his website:

Dale T. Mortensen 

is the Board of Trustees Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, a visiting Professor of Economics at Aarhus University, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Professor Mortensen received his B.A. in Economics from Willamette University in 1961 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967. Mortensen is a fellow of Econometrica Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and the European Economic Association.  He was awarded the IZA Labor Economics Prize in 2005 and the Society of Labor Economics Mincer Prize in 2007. In 2008 he was elected an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow. Together with Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides he was awarded the 2010Sveriges Riksbank (Nobel) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2010 for their contributions to the analysis of “markets with search friction.” In 2013 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Science and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

 

Mortensen pioneered the theory of search and search unemployment and extended it to study labor turnover, personal relationships, and labor reallocation. His insight, that friction is equivalent to the random arrival of trading partners, has become the leading technique for analysis of labor markets and the effects of labor market policy. The development of equilibrium dynamic models designed to account for wage dispersion, the time series behaviour of job and worker flows, and the role of reallocation in the determination of aggregate growth and productivity are the principal topics of his current research. His publications include over fifty scientific articles. His books include Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?, published by MIT Press in 2003, and Job Matching, Wage Dispersion, and Unemployment (jointly authored with Christopher A. Pissarides),published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

Learning and adaptation in the social sciences: NAS Sackler conference, January 10-11

Ido Erev and I will be presenting a paper  on learning and choice behavior at one of the Sackler Colloquia run by the National Academy of Sciences:

In the Light of Evolution VIII: Darwinian Thinking in the Social Sciences

Organized by Brian Skyrms, John C. Avise and Francisco J. Ayala

January 10-11, 2014 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.

 Overview

Darwinian thinking is now having a major impact in social science, both in the consideration of the consequences of biological and cultural evolution on traditional questions, and in the use of quasi-Darwinian adaptive dynamics in evolutionary game theory. This Darwinian point of view is having a major impact on economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and demography.

Agenda

I.  Evolution of Social Norms

Bargaining and Fairness, Kenneth Binmore, University College London
Cooperation, Natalia Komarova, University of California, Irvine
Friendship and Natural Selection, James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego
Reputation and Punishment, Michihiro Kandori, University of Tokyo

II. Social Dynamics

The Replicator Equation and Other Game Dynamics, Ross Cressman, Wilfrid Laurier University
Payoff-Based Learning Dynamics, Alvin Roth, Harvard University
Strategic Learning Dynamics, David K. Levine, Washington University
Cultural Evolution, Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University

Keynote Address:  Public Goods: Competition, Cooperation, and Spite, Simon A. Levin, Princeton University

III. Special Sciences

Evolutionary Demography, Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley
Folklore of the Elite and Biological Evolution, Barry O’Neill, University of California, Los Angeles
Economics, Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Psychology, Dale Purves, Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School

IV. Applications

Evolutionary Implementation in Mechanism Design, Éva Tardos, Cornell University
Some Dynamics of Signaling, Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine
The Rate of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks, H. Peyton Young, Oxford University
Homophily, Culture, and Coordinating Behaviors, Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University

Black markets and black market prices

A website call Havocscope (subtitle: Global Black Market Information) compiles information from news stories and other public sources about black markets and reported transaction prices around the world, from counterfeit goods of various sorts (from pharma to tech to food), to repugnant markets from narcotics to contract killing.

Here's their take on prices in the black markets for kidneys for transplantation.

When you click on the prices they indicate, you find their source, often a newspaper story that may only contain an anecdotal report of a transaction, so I don't think they make strong claims for the accuracy of their data, but it makes for interesting reading.

Video of market design talk at USF

Not long ago I gave a talk at the University of San Francisco. My host was Professor Ludwig Chincarini, and he has posted this video of my lecture:

Celebrating experimental economics (and being celebrated for it) at the University of Amsterdam, January 8

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the home of one of Europe's important centers of experimental economics at Creed:

On January 8 I'll be helping celebrate CREED when I receive an honorary doctorate at UvA, along with the legal scholar James Crawford. The announcement says this about me, and my professional connection to the focus of CREED's work:
"He is also one of the pioneers of experimental economics, regarded as one of the Big Four (along with Charles Plott, Reinhard Selten and Vernon Smith) responsible for putting this field on the map in the latter half of the 20th century.
Prof. Arthur Schram, professor of Experimental Economics, has been designated honorary supervisor."

I'll also get a chance to talk to students: Room for Discussion ontvangt Nobelprijswinnaar Alvin Roth, or maybe with more English here
*************
update: here's the video, see at 1:11:41)

D47. Market Design is now officially a field of study

I returned last night from Philadelphia where the American Economic Association’s annual meeting was held. While I was there, my Pittsburgh colleague Asatoshi Maeshiro informed me that Market Design has arrived. In particular, the AEA publishes the Journal of Economic Literature, which classifies articles according to what field they are in. And the newest JEL Classification Codes include market design, under the overall heading of Market Structure and Pricing.  We’re D47.

•        D4          Market Structure and Pricing

•        D40        General

•        D41        Perfect Competition

•        D42        Monopoly

•        D43        Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection

•        D44        Auctions

•        D45        Rationing; Licensing

•        D46        Value Theory

•        D47 Market Design

•        D49        Other

When you click on microeconomics, followed by market structure, followed by market design on the JEL classification webpage, you get to this description of the new field, with example (which are clickable on the web page, but don't seem to be when I copy them...:

D470 Market Design

Guideline: Covers studies concerning the design and evolution of economic institutions, the design of mechanisms for economic transactions (such as price determination and dispute resolution), and the interplay between a market�s size and complexity and the information available to agents in such an environment.

Keywords: Markets, Microeconomic Engineering, Price Formation, Quasi-markets

Caveats: Purely theoretical studies concerning mechanism design should be classified in D82. Purely empirical studies concerning market structure should be classified in the appropriate category under L1.

Examples:

• Investment Incentives and Electricity Market Design: The British Experience
• The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics
• Unraveling Reduces Mobility in a Labor Market: Gastroenterology with and without a Centralized Match

Market design today in Philadelphia

Two sessions I'll be attending at today's AEA meetings...


Jan 05, 2014 8:00 am, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 204-C 
American Economic Association

Frontiers of Market Design (D4)

Presiding: ALVIN ROTH (Stanford University)

The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response

ERIC BUDISH (University of Chicago)

PETER CRAMTON (University of Maryland)

JOHN SHIM (University of Chicago)

[View Abstract]

Organ Donation Loopholes Undermine Warm Glow Giving: An Experiment Motivated By Priority Loopholes in Israel

ALVIN E. ROTH (Stanford University)

JUDD KESSLER (University of Pennsylvania)

[View Abstract]

Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy

MICHAEL KEARNS (University of Pennsylvania)

MALLESH PAI (University of Pennsylvania)

AARON ROTH (University of Pennsylvania)

JONATHAN ULLMAN (Harvard University)

[View Abstract]

Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency, and Marginal Returns: An Equivalence

JOHN WILLIAM HATFIELD (Stanford University)

FUHITO KOJIMA (Stanford University)

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

[View Abstract]

Discussants:

MICHAEL OSTROVSKY (Stanford University)

JAMES ANDREONI (University of California-San Diego)

ILYA SEGAL (Stanford University)

LARRY SAMUELSON (Yale University)

Jan 05, 2014 10:15 am, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 204-A 
American Economic Association

Market Design for Auction Markets (D7)

Presiding: PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

The VCG Auction in Theory and in Practice

HAL VARIAN (Google)

CHRIS HARRIS (Google)

[View Abstract]

Market Design and the Evolution of the Combinatorial Clock Auction

LAWRENCE AUSUBEL (University of Maryland)

OLEG BARANOV (University of Colorado)

[View Abstract]

The Continuous Combinatorial Ascending Price Auction

CHARLES R. PLOTT (California Institute of Technology)

[View Abstract]

Deferred Acceptance Heuristic Auctions and United States Spectrum Repurposing

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

ILYA SEGAL (Stanford University)

[View Abstract]

Discussants:

ALVIN E. ROTH (Stanford University)

TAYFUN SONMEZ (Boston College)

Paul Milgrom and Roger Myerson on matching and market design at lunch today

I gather that Lloyd Shapley won't be making the trip to Philadelphia, so I'll be standing in for the two of us.

Jan 04, 2014 12:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Grand Ballroom - Salons G & H 
American Economic Association

Nobel Laureate Luncheon

Presiding: WILLIAM NORDHAUS (Yale University)

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

ROGER MYERSON (University of Chicago)

Market design experiments today in Philadelphia

Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307 
Economic Science Association

Market Design Experiments (C9)

Presiding: JACOB GOEREE (University of Zurich)

From Boston to Chinese Parallel to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on a Family of School Choice Mechanisms

YAN CHEN (University of Michigan)

ONUR KESTEN (Carnegie Mellon University)

[View Abstract]

Opt-In versus Mandated Choice for Deceased Organ Donation: An Experimental Study of Actual Organ Donation Decisions

ALVIN E. Roth (Stanford University)

JUDD KESSLER (University of Pennsylvania)

[View Abstract]

Ascending Prices and Package Bidding: Further Experimental Analysis

JOHN H. KAGEL (Ohio State University)

YUANCHUAN LIEN (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Spectrum Auction Design: Simple Auctions for Complex Sales

MARTIN BICHLER (Technical University Munich)

JACOB K. GOEREE (University of Zurich)

STEFAN MAYER (Technical University Munich)

PASHA SHABALIN (Technical University Munich)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Discussants:

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

ERIC GLEN WEYL (University of Chicago)

CARY DECK (University of Arkansas)

TOM WILKENING (University of Melbourne)

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

Later in the day there will be another experimental session sponsored by the ESA, and another tomorrow...:

Jan 03, 2014 2:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Experiments in Economic Development
Presiding: PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)

Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation: Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment
PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)
ALESSANDRA CASSAR (University of San Francisco)
GIOVANNA D'ADDA (University of Birmingham)

Trust and Social Collateral: Empirical Evidence
TANYA S. ROSENBLAT (Iowa State University)
DEAN KARLAN (Yale University)
MARKUS M. MOBIUS (Iowa State University, NBER and Microsoft Research)
ADAM SZEIDL (Central European University)

Health Providers and Patients in Kenya: An Evaluation of Motivations, Interactions and Reports on Sub-Par Behaviors
DANILA SERRA (Southern Methodist University)
ISAAC MBITI (Southern Methodist University)
 ********

Jan 04, 2014 8:00 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Identifying Time Preferences from Lab and Field Data
Presiding: CHARLES SPRENGER (Stanford University)

A Perspective on Measuring Discounting and Present Bias
JAMES ANDREONI (University of California-San Diego)

Recent Developments in the Measurement of Time Preferences
GLENN W. HARRISON (Georgia State University)

Identifying Self Control in Field Data
SENDHIL MULLANAITHAN (Harvard University)
SUPREET KAUR (Columbia University)
MICHAEL KREMER (Harvard University)

Markets for blood, milk, and sperm (new book)

Here's the announcement of a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press (by Professor Kara Swanson, whose earlier papers include The Birth of the Sperm Bank):

Banking on the Body

The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America

Kara W. Swanson

Not yet available

Book Details

HARDCOVER

$35.00 • £25.95 • €31.50

ISBN 9780674281431

Publication: May 2014

Available 05/05/2014

* Academic Trade

310 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

10 halftones

World

Related Subjects

• MEDICAL: History
• HISTORY: United States: 20th Century
• LAW: Property
• MEDICAL: Health Policy
• SOCIAL SCIENCE: Sociology: General

Share This

Facebook Twitter

Pinterest Email

• About This Book
• About the Authors
• Table of Contents

Scientific advances and economic forces have converged to create something unthinkable for much of human history: a robust market in human body products. Every year, countless Americans supply blood, sperm, and breast milk to “banks” that store these products for later use by strangers in routine medical procedures. These exchanges entail complicated questions. Which body products are donated and which sold? Who gives and who receives? And, in the end, who profits? In this eye-opening study, Kara Swanson traces the history of body banks from the nineteenth-century experiments that discovered therapeutic uses for body products to twenty-first-century websites that facilitate a thriving global exchange.

More than a metaphor, the “bank” has shaped ongoing controversies over body products as either marketable commodities or gifts donated to help others. A physician, Dr. Bernard Fantus, proposed a “bank” in 1937 to make blood available to all patients. Yet the bank metaphor labeled blood as something to be commercially bought and sold, not communally shared. As blood banks became a fixture of medicine after World War II, American doctors made them a frontline in their war against socialized medicine. The profit-making connotations of the “bank” reinforced a market-based understanding of supply and distribution, with unexpected consequences for all body products, from human eggs to kidneys.

Ultimately, the bank metaphor straitjacketed legal codes and reinforced inequalities in medical care. By exploring its past, Banking on the Body charts the path to a more efficient and less exploitative distribution of the human body’s life-giving potential.

Here's the table of contents:

• Introduction: Banking for Love and for Money
• 1. Bankable Bodies and the Professional Donor
• 2. Banks That Take Donations
• 3. Blood Battles in the Cold War
• 4. Market Backlash
• 5. Feminine Banks and the Milk of Human Kindness
• 6. Buying Dad from the Sperm Bank
• Conclusion: Beyond the Body Bank

Cornes and Neto celebrate Gale and Shapley, and the practical value of good theory

Here's a paper that points out that there's nothing more practical--even for policy--than good theory, and that it might be hard to guess where that will come from.

I was struck not just by the title of the paper, but by the parenthetical comment in the first sentence of the abstract...

Is Policy Too Important to be Left to Empiricists? Lessons of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics
Richard Cornes and José A. Rodrigues-Neto

Abstract
Fifty years ago, a paper entitled ‘College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage’was published in a somewhat obscure journal, the American Mathematical Monthly (currently a ‘B’ journal, according to the Australian Business Deans Council). The research program and policy developments that have flowed from that abstract and apparently slight seven-page paper recently led to the award of  the 2012 Nobel Prize for Economics to one of its authors, Lloyd Shapley. (Shapley’s co-author, David Gale, died in 2008.) Shapley shared the Nobel Prize ‘for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design’ with US economist Alvin Roth, who has been responsible for much of the applied work that has built on Gale and Shapley’s insights. The history of the path leading from the abstract Gale/Shapley insights to the design of resource allocation mechanisms in 2012 is a fascinating and instructive one for many reasons. This article tries to give the reader an idea of what this literature is about, and of the many ways in which Matching Theory has led to real improvements in the design of operational resource-allocation mechanisms.
**************

The article makes some points about how funny sounding theory can turn into practical institutions that were also made in the recent Golden Goose awards (see this post and this one).

Iguassu falls, by night and day

A recent trip to the Iguassu falls, where the full moon made a lunar rainbow in the permanent mist around the falls, was a bookend to a remarkable year.