Vatican conference on organ trafficking and transplant tourism

A recent meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican:
Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism resulted in a statement and a number of news stories.  Here are several that caught my eye, with divergent views on the situation in China and how it is changing:

From the NY Times: Debate Flares Over China’s Inclusion at Vatican Organ Trafficking Meeting
"China has admitted that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent. Since Jan. 1, 2015, Chinese officials have said they no longer use prisoners’ organs, though doubts persist.

“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,” wrote the 11 signatories, who included Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Australia; Arthur Caplan of the New York University Langone Medical Center; David Matas and David Kilgour, both Canadian human rights lawyers; and Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang."
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From Statnews.com
China moves to stop taking organs from prisoners, WHO says
"The World Health Organization says China has taken steps to end its once-widespread practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners but that it’s impossible to know what is happening across the entire country.

At a Vatican conference on organ trafficking this week, a former top Chinese official said the country had stopped its unethical program, but critics remain unconvinced.

In an interview Thursday, WHO’s Jose Ramon Nunez Pena said he personally visited about 20 hospitals in China last year and believes the country has reformed. But he acknowledged that it was still possible “there may still be hidden things going on.” China has more than 1 million medical centers, although only 169 are authorized to do transplants.

Nunez Pena said he had seen data including organ transplant registries and was convinced the country was now shifting away from illegally harvesting organs.

“What is clear to me is that they’re changing,” he said. “But in a country as huge as China, we can’t know everything.”
...
"Campbell Fraser, an organ trafficking researcher at Griffith University in Australia, agreed the trends over the past few years have shown a drop in the number of foreigners going to China for transplants and an increase of organ seekers heading to the Middle East.

At a press conference at the Chinese Embassy in Italy following the two-day Vatican organ conference, Fraser said migrants — including Syrians, Somalis and Eritreans — sometimes resort to selling off a kidney to pay traffickers to get them or their families to Europe.

“Egypt is where the biggest problem is at the moment,” he said, adding that it has the best medical facilities in the region and can perform the live donor surgeries.

He estimated as many as 10 such illicit transplants could be happening per week, though he had no statistics and said he based his research largely on anecdotal information from recipients, law enforcement, doctors and even some organ “brokers.”

Fraser said he has access to transplant patient “chat boards” because he himself had a kidney transplant in his native Australia in 2003.

Nunez Pena said it was likely that organ trafficking would find its way to conflict-plagued regions.

“We’re hearing about a lot of problems in Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines,” he said, predicting that authorities were poised to break up an organ smuggling ring in Egypt in the next few weeks. “Wherever you have vulnerable people, you will see these kinds of problems.”

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From Science:

Study retraction reignites concern over China’s possible use of prisoner organs

By Dalmeet Singh ChawlaFeb. 6, 2017 , 4:15 PM

A journal has decided to retract a 2016 study because of concerns that its data on the safety of liver transplantation involved organs sourced from executed prisoners in China. The action, taken despite a denial by the study’s authors that such organs were used, comes after clinical ethicist Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues authored a letter to the editor of Liver International on 30 January, calling for the paper’s retraction in the “absence of credible evidence of ethical sourcing of organs.”

For years, Chinese officials have come under fire for allegedly allowing the use of organs from executed prisoners for transplants, including for foreigners coming to the country for so-called medical tourism. In January 2015, it explicitly banned the practice and set up a volunteer donation system, but doubts persist that much has changed.

The disputed study—published online in October 2016—analyzed 563 consecutive liver transplantations performed before the ban (from April 2010 to October 2014) at a medical center in China. Suspicious, Rogers organized the protest letter to the journal. “Publication of data from prisoners is ethically inappropriate given that it [is] not possible to ensure that the prisoners freely agreed either to donate their organs, or to be included [in] a research program,” she tells ScienceInsider.

Ethicists on compensation for blood stem cells (aka bone marrow aka hematopoietic cells) donors

The site http://donationethics.com/ hosts a letter signed by many ethicists opposing an amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act to reverse the court decision outlawing payment to blood stem cell donors. (Got that? the letter is pro compensation.)

The site is full of interesting related links.

Here's the site's front page:

This site houses an open letter to Shelley Grant of the Department of Health and Human Services regarding a proposed amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act that would effectively outlaw offering compensation for hematopoietic cells donation. The signatories are professional ethicists who believe that the proposed amendment is unethical and should be rejected.

The details of the proposed amendment can be found here.

The case that prompted the amendment, Flynn v. Holder, is explained here.

---

Peter M. Jaworski conceived of the letter and is its primary author.

David Faraci was a major contributor to the letter and maintains the website.
**************

Here's a link to Hemeos, a startup service for matching stem cell donors to patients, which plans to compensate donors.

Celebrating Adam Bingaman at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio

Working in kidney exchange has given me the opportunity to meet some remarkable surgeons, and one of them, Adam Bingaman, is being celebrated in in the San Antonio media:
Methodist Hospital Leads Nation in Live-Donor Kidney Transplants

Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital's Dr. Adam Bingaman

"Dr. Adam Bingaman, head of the live-donor kidney transplant program, joined the Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital in 2007 and became the Director of Abdominal Organ Transplantation in 2012.
...
"For those awaiting a kidney transplant but lacking a live-donor match, the only chance for a kidney donation may be from a kidney-paired donor (KPD) exchange. This offers a transplant option for patients with a living donor who is both willing and medically fit but isn’t a compatible match with the recipient.

The donor’s information is entered into a nationwide database with those of other incompatible donors and recipients who are willing to exchange kidneys. It is here that the process of finding suitable exchanges occurs. Kidney-paired donation provides a means for all transplant centers to increase patient access to live-donor transplantation.

Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital’s Program

Launched in 2008, the paired-donor program at Texas Transplant Institute at the Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital has performed more kidney-paired donation exchanges than any other center. The program focuses not just on the kidney recipient, but on the donor as well. All transplants are performed in one integrated facility, with targeted care provided for the donor from initial screening to post-surgery follow-up for two years.

The program’s approach to building community partnerships enables patient access and follow-up care in less populated areas across Texas. The program’s team has forged relationships with nephrologists throughout the state and through dedicated clinics in Corpus Christi, Laredo, McAllen, Lubbock, Waco, Temple, and Austin. The transplant physicians and team members visit these locations regularly to check on patients who have either donated or received a kidney.

“We build relationships of trust,” Bingaman said. “Community partnering in underserved areas is very important to patient outcomes. Our goal is to integrate our services with those of a patient’s nephrologist, so that we provide a true umbrella of care.”

...

"The Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist offers an educational seminar three to four times a year. The series (and videos here) teach people how to “End Your Wait” with an education program explaining living kidney donation and how to go about finding a donor on their own.

“We give them tools that help their awareness about the need for a kidney transplant,” Bingaman said. “We started this program because more than 50% of kidney donations do not come from family members. They are from coworkers, church members, or someone in the extended social network.”

“We’ve already hit a crisis point,” Bingaman said. “If you have kidney disease and diabetes and maybe heart disease, after six years on dialysis, you probably won’t be healthy enough for a transplant. So your best bet is to find a living donor as early as possible.”

U.S. academic conferences and the travel ban. What would be the effect of a boycott? Can conferences usefully be moved?

Part of the international reaction to the recent U.S. travel ban on people from seven countries has been a call to boycott U.S. academic conferences.
Here, e.g. is one such call: In Solidarity with People Affected by the ‘Muslim Ban’: Call for an Academic Boycott of International Conferences held in the US
"Among those affected by the Order are academics and students who are unable to participate in conferences and the free communication of ideas. We the undersigned take action in solidarity with those affected by Trump’s Executive Order by pledging not to attend international conferences in the US while the ban persists. We question the intellectual integrity of these spaces and the dialogues they are designed to encourage while Muslim colleagues are explicitly excluded from them."

I have had an opportunity to think about this regarding the ASSA conference run in January by the American Economic Association, and it seems to me that such a boycott won't help the majority of academics (students and professors) from the banned countries who come to our conference, or to many American academic conferences.

In our (the AEA's) particular situation, my sense is that we have had few if any Yemeni and Sudanese economists participating in the AEA meetings, and the people potentially affected by the current U.S. entry bans are mostly Iranian.*  And the majority of Iranians who have participated seem to be working or studying in the U.S.

So…if a travel ban is in place next January, and we moved the conference to some civilized city like Toronto, we would be depriving most of the potential Iranian participants of the ability to attend, since they couldn’t leave and then reliably re-enter the U.S..

My current sense is that the AEA will decide to take care of the Iranians as best we can (which for the minority who aren’t in the U.S. may involve some electronic communication efforts), rather than cater to any economists whose scruples would require us to abandon the Iranians living and working in the U.S.  by moving the conference elsewhere.

To be clear, I think moving the AEA meetings outside of the U.S. would harm the majority of Iranians who participated in past years.

Of course I’m hopeful that we’ll have come to our senses long before then.


*see this article in the Chronicle for a wider view of who studies in the U.S.:
Why the Travel Ban Probably Hits Iranian Professors and Students the Hardest

see also the data compiled by the Institute of International Education:
 International Students: All Places of Origin 2014/15 - 2015/16, and for previous years:  2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Selected Years 1950-2000
and see
Universities Spoke Up in Case That Led to Ruling Halting Trump’s Travel Ban

Pictures from the Wilson CME MSRI prize ceremony

We gathered in Chicago to celebrate Bob Wilson. Here's a story, with some nice quotes from Andy Skrzypacz:
ROBERT WILSON APPLIED GAME THEORY TO ECONOMICS AND WON

And here are some of the pictures I took:

Bob Wilson

Drew Fudenberg, Hari Govindan, Roger Myerson

Hugo Sonnenschein

Leo Melamed

Roger Myerson and the beer-quiche game

There was also a panel of some proud Wilson students, consisting of me, Paul Milgrom, and Bengt Holmstrom. Mary Wilson took this picture afterwards:

IVF: Experience suggests there's room for some regulation

The Guardian has the story: IVF mix-up: wrong sperm may have fertilised eggs of 26 women
Dozens of women may have had eggs fertilised by sperm cells from someone other than the intended father, say Dutch authorities

"A Dutch medical institution has launched an investigation after discovering that up to 26 women’s eggs may have been fertilised by the wrong sperm at its IVF laboratory.

"A “procedural error” between mid-April 2015 and mid-November 2016 during the in-vitro fertilisation was to blame, the University Medical Centre in Utrecht said.

"“During fertilisation, sperm cells from one treatment couple may have ended up with the egg cells of 26 other couples,” said a statement.

“Therefore there’s a chance that the egg cells have been fertilised by sperm other than that of the intended father.”

Although the chance of that happening was small the possibility “could not be excluded”, said the centre.

Half the women who underwent fertility treatment had become pregnant or given birth.

“For some of the 26 couples frozen embryos are still available but the chance remains that they [too] have been fertilised by the sperm from a man other than the intended father,” the UMC said.

"The couples had been informed, the centre said.

“The UMC’s board regrets that the couples involved had to receive this news and will do everything within its powers to give clarity on the issue as soon as possible.”

...

"Mix-ups do occur, including one in 2012 when a Singapore mother sued a clinic for alleged negligence after it mixed up her husband’s sperm with that of a stranger.

"The ethnic Chinese woman first suspected that something was amiss when her baby, who was born in 2010, had markedly different skin tone and hair colour from her Caucasian husband, news reports at the time said."
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Here's are two recent updates on the Singapore story (and subsequent legal proceedings) from the Straits Times: the first has some details of how the error happened, the second speaks about the legal issues associated with possible damages that might be assessed, and if so for what...
IVF mix-up at Thomson Medical: A look back at the case of 'Baby P'

IVF mix-up at Thomson Medical: Court continues to hear appeal of woman who conceived baby with stranger's sperm

Rotman School of Management is offering to help business scholars and students affected by the US restrictions

A worthwhile Canadian initiative from the Rotman School of the University of Toronto:

Rotman School of Management is offering to help business scholars and students affected by the US restrictions

Market for ideas vs travel bans: academic societies and universities react

A large group of scientific societies have signed this Multisociety letter deploring the recent Executive Order regarding travel to the U.S.  (The American Economic Association is represented through its membership in COSSA, the Consortium of Social Sciences Associations.)
http://www.cossa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Multisociety-Letter-on-Immigration-1-31-2017.pdf
"The Executive Order will discourage many of the best and brightest international students, scholars, engineers and scientists from studying and working, attending academic and scientific conferences, or seeking to build new businesses in the United States. Implementation of this policy will compromise the United States’ ability to attract international scientific talent and maintain scientific and economic leadership.
Today, we urge the Administration to rescind the Executive Order and we stand ready to assist you in crafting an immigration and visa policy that advances U.S. prosperity and ensures strong borders while staying true to foundational American principles as a nation of immigrants. "

Below are a variety of other reactions (in no particular order), many of which balance charters which require some scientific societies to be nonpartisan, with the concern that the recent Executive Order negatively affects their core mission.

http://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/best-serve-nation-and-world

http://www.asanet.org/news-events/asa-news/statement-american-sociological-association-concerning-new-administrations-recent-and-future

AMS Board of Trustees Opposes Executive Order on Immigration 
Monday January 30th 2017

Statement from the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)

Condemning the U.S. President’s 2017-01-27 Executive Order

Barring Entry into the U.S. of Citizens from Seven Muslim-Majority Countries

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/30/higher-education-leaders-denounce-trumps-travel-ban

https://www.macalester.edu/president/writing/statement-january2017executiveorders.pdf
"We are heartbroken and we are angry, but we are not defeated. This is far from the first, and will not be the last, shameful moment in our country’s history. But at every one of those moments, people have arisen to call forth and inspire “the better angels of our nature.”

http://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/28/community-letter-stanford-leadership-immigration/

http://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2017/we-are-all-harvard

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Update: February 3 letter from American Council on Education, signed by about 600 colleges and universities, to the Secretary of Homeland Security 
http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Letter-From-Institutions-to-DHS-on-Immigration-Executive-Order.pdf

Turing's law: UK posthumously pardons thousands of gay men

On Christmas Eve in 2013 Alan Turing received a posthumous pardon from the crime of being homosexual in Britain in the 1950's.  Tuesday, thousands of other men received similar posthumous pardons.

The Guardian has the story:
UK issues posthumous pardons for thousands of gay men
Justice minister hails ‘momentous day’ as so-called Turing’s law receives royal assent, but critics say move does not go far enough

"Tuesday 31 January 2017
Thousands of men convicted of offences that once criminalised homosexuality but are no longer on the statute book have been posthumously pardoned under a new law.

"A clause in the policing and crime bill, which received royal assent on Tuesday, extends to those who are dead the existing process of purging past criminal records.

"The general pardon is modelled on the 2013 royal pardon granted by the Queen to Alan Turing, the mathematician who broke the German Enigma codes during the second world war. He killed himself in 1954, at the age of 41, after his conviction for gross indecency.

"Welcoming the legislation, the justice minister Sam Gyimah said: “This is a truly momentous day. We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”

"There is already a procedure in place for the living to apply to the Home Office to have their past convictions, relating to same-sex relationships, expunged from their criminal records.

"Under what is known as the disregard process, anyone previously found guilty of past sexual offences that are no longer criminal matters can ask to have them removed.

"A disregard can be granted only if the past offence was a consensual relationship and both men were over 16. The conduct must also not constitute what remains an offence of sexual activity in a public lavatory.
...
"Rewriting history will not be easy. The complexity of the evidence, for example, that led to Oscar Wilde’s conviction in 1895 for gross indecency – including evidence of procuring male prostitutes – would make it difficult to assess.

"The gay rights organisation Stonewall has suggested the playwright and author, who was sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading jail, should be entitled to a pardon.

"The Ministry of Justice said there would be no historical limit in relation to past offences. It declined, however, to say whether Wilde would be among those deemed posthumously pardoned."

Global Entry: blanket discrimination replaces "extreme vetting"

A number of Iranian scientists received messages yesterday from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. These are long-term American residents who had chosen to go through the personal interview process needed to get into the Global Entry Program, which allows trusted travelers to enter the U.S. in an expedited way.  (I use Global Entry, and it allows me to go to a kiosk which examines my passport and fingerprints, without the necessity of standing in a long line to speak to a border agent.)

Nevertheless, these individuals have been informed that they no longer meet the eligibility requirements. (Here's a screen shot...)

Note that the people who received this message had already passed "a comprehensive background investigation."  Presumably that is what is meant by "extreme vetting."  But now, it seems, a blanket nationality ban is being invoked.

That is, as someone might say, "Sad."

Boy scouts reverse their position and accept transgender boys

That was fast. After the Cub Scouts recently expelled a transgender boy, the NY Times reports Boy Scouts, Reversing Century-Old Stance, Will Allow Transgender Boys

"Reversing its stance of more than a century, the Boy Scouts of America said on Monday that the group would begin accepting members based on the gender listed on their application, paving the way for transgender boys to join the organization.

“For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools, youth sports and other youth organizations, have ultimately deferred to the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs,” the group said in a statement on its website. “However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state.”

The announcement, reported on Monday night by The Associated Press, reverses a policy that drew controversy late last year when a transgender boy in New Jersey was kicked out of the organization about a month after joining.

“After weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization, we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point is no longer sufficient,” Michael Surbaugh, the Scouts’ chief executive, said in a recorded statement on Monday.

The announcement came amid a national debate over transgender rights, with cities and states across the nation struggling with whether and how to regulate gender identity in the workplace, in restrooms and at schools.

In recent years, the Boy Scouts of America has expanded rights for gay people. In 2013, the group ended its ban on openly gay youths participating in its activities. Two years later, the organization ended its ban on openly gay adult leaders."

Economists as artisans, doctors, entrepreneurs...dentists, engineers and plumbers

Is metaphor a verb? If so, a number of writers have taken Esther Duflo's recent Ely Lecture, "The Economist as Plumber,*" as an invitation to metaphor. The essays below add to the stock of metaphorical economists, in which you can find economists as artisans and craftspeople, weather forecasters, doctors and medical scientists, entrepreneurs, and of course as dentists, architects, engineers and now plumbers.

Here's Tim Harford (initially in the FT but now ungated on his blog The Undercover Economist):
Why economists should be more like plumbers

And here's Beatrice Cherrier, whose blog is called The Undercover Historian:
From physicists to engineers to meds to plumbers: Esther Duflo rediscovering the lost art of economics @ASSA2017


* and here's the video of Esther's Ely Lecture
AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making Esther Duflo, introduced by Alvin E. Roth  View Webcast
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Update: here's the NBER working paper The Economist as Plumber
(And here's the interesting acknowledgements, which identifies some master plumbers...)

Yuji Ijiri (1935-2017)

Yuji Ijiri passed away earlier this month. He was one of the pioneers of accounting as a form of information economics, with all that has meant for accounting rules as design features of organizations.

Here's the obituary from Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught until his retirement in 2011:
Thursday, January 19, 2017
YUJI IJIRI WAS A WORLD-RENOWNED ACCOUNTANT AND EDUCATOR
Inventor of triple-entry accounting was recognized internationally for accounting research and practice.

Here's his obituary in the Wall Street Journal:
Ijiri Explored Accounting’s Foundations and Charted New Directions
Bucking modern trend of estimating current values, Japanese-born professor defended historic costs

"At the age of 14, Yuji Ijiri began keeping the books at his father’s bakery in Japan. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he became one of the most celebrated philosophers of accounting, illuminating its underlying logic and defending its traditions, while exploring new frontiers.

"Accountants weren't the stereotypical bean counters, following clear-cut rules that inevitably led to a certain set of numbers, Dr. Ijiri found. Instead, they were champions of accountability, struggling to find a fair balance between the needs of parties with conflicting interests. While investors pushed for maximum disclosure, for example, managers were concerned about giving out information that could benefit competitors."

Complexity of matching under substitutable preferences

The Complexity of Stable Matchings under Substitutable Preferences
Yuan Deng and Debmalya Panigrahi and Bo Waggoner

Abstract In various matching market settings, such as hospital-doctor matching markets (Hatfield and Milgrom 2005), the existence of stable outcomes depends on substitutability of preferences. But can these stable matchings be computed efficiently, as in the one-to-one matching case? The algorithm of (Hatfield and Milgrom 2005) requires efficient implementation of a choice function over substitutable preferences. We show that even given efficient access to a value oracle or preference relation satisfying substitutability, exponentially many queries may be required in the worst case to implement a choice function. Indeed, this extends to examples where a stable matching requires exponential time to compute. We characterize the computational complexity of stable matchings by showing that efficient computation of a choice function is equivalent to efficient verification—determining whether or not, for a given set, the most preferred subset is the entire set itself. Clearly, verification is necessary for computation, but we show that it is also sufficient: specifically, given a verifier, we design a polynomial-time algorithm for computing a choice function, implying an efficient algorithm for stable matching. We then show that a verifier can be implemented efficiently for various classes of functions, such as submodular functions, implying efficient stable matching algorithms for a broad range of settings. We also investigate the effect of ties in the preference order, which causes complications both in defining substitutes and in computation. In this case, we tightly connect the computational complexity of the choice function to a measure on the number of ties. 

Academics against blanket immigration bans

As you may have heard, President Trump has signed an executive order that, among other things, temporarily bans visa entry to the U.S. for people from several countries (including Iran, which sends many students to U.S. universities, including many who remain as professors and in industry). It also takes a position I strongly disapprove about refugees (and was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, an occasion for me to recall with regret that we Americans did not rise well to the occasion of welcoming Jewish refugees from that genocide). I am among many academics who have signed a petition deploring these measures and imploring that they be reconsidered.

Here's the petition, still open for signatures.

Academics against immigration executive order

And here's a story in the Washington Post that explains some of the issues that particularly concern academics in our professional roles (and not just as American patriots committed to the freedom of ideas and many other freedoms).

12 Nobel laureates, thousands of academics sign protest of Trump immigration order
"What’s at stake, said Emery Berger, a professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is not one of the organizers of the petition but supports the effort, begins with free exchange of information.

"But there’s more. He said he has already heard academics overseas planning to avoid, or boycott, conferences in the United States. “It’s very chilling,” he said.

"Students are horrified, he said, at the prospect of not being able to get back to their U.S. university if they return to their home country.

“I’m sure it will send really promising star students across the border to Canada or elsewhere,” Berger said. The order comes just as many U.S. universities are offering admission to overseas students for the next academic year."

Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, vol 1, number 1 2016

The first issue of the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design is now online here: http://www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v001-1/jMID-vol1(1)-01.pdf

Restaurants without tipping

The NY Times has the story: Year of Upheaval for Restaurants That Ended Tipping

"A rational system is exactly what he was hoping for when Huertas joined several restaurants in Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group — Maialino, Marta, the Modern, North End Grill and (as of last week) Gramercy Tavern and the newly reopened Union Square Café — that have stopped accepting tips. The switch is part of an effort to bring the nation’s roughly $800 billion restaurant business, with its frequently chaotic and unprofessional practices and traditions, in line with modern workplace standards.

Continue reading the main st

Instead of expecting customers to tip the people who wait on them, tip-free restaurants pay all employees wages that reflect their skill and seniority. The customer pays a fixed amount, stated in writing (in menu prices), as in virtually every other kind of consumer business, from Nordstrom to Netflix to The New York Times.

This service-included system — also called gratuity-free, tipless and, within the Union Square group, Hospitality Included — has been in place for several years at expensive restaurants like Per Se and the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. But this year, influential restaurants up and down the price scale and around the country signed on, including Le Pigeon and Park Kitchen in Portland, Ore.; Dahlia Lounge and Canlis in Seattle; and Comal, Cala and Petit Crenn in the Bay Area.

It is too soon to tell whether the no-tipping model will become the standard, or simply an option for a few restaurants that can make it work. What is clear after about a year is that it has forced a number of unforeseen changes, large and small, in the places that have embraced it.

...

"Mr. Adler of Huertas, and others, say that one big reason to end tipping is the need for more equity between those who work in kitchens, who earn straight wages, and those who work in dining rooms, who receive tips.

A more immediate motivation, local restaurateurs said, was the approach of the $15 minimum wage in 2018, proceeding in New York City on Dec. 31 with a raise to $11 an hour (from $9) for nontipped workers. “Labor is just going to cost more and more, and all restaurants will need to rethink how their people get paid,” Mr. Lavorini said.

As the dining business, especially at the high end, attracts more educated and skilled workers, there is increased pressure to treat them fairly, professionally and predictably.

With tipping, chaos is a consequence. Servers compete ruthlessly for Saturday night shifts, when tips run high, but many are no-shows for Monday lunch. An experienced line cook who carries $40,000 in debt from years of culinary school earns $12 an hour, while a new server can reap three times that much.

...

"The “automatic service charge” imposed at many restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Alinea in Chicago, can redistribute money the same way a no-tipping policy does, although states treat that revenue in different ways.

Tips are also handled differently in different states, but in New York, by law, they can be pooled and distributed only to “front of house” employees: those who work in the dining room, like waiters, bartenders and backwaiters (formerly known as busboys).

...

"One clear lesson: “There are certain fixed items — a glass of wine, a bar snack, a cup of coffee — that affect how guests experience the welcome of the restaurant,” Mr. Lavorini said. The prices of those items stayed where they were, even as others, including those for many bottles of wine, rose by as much as 20 percent.

...

"From 2015 to 2016, the payroll for the Modern’s two dozen front-of-house employees’ hourly wages rose to as much as $30 an hour from $5, through a combination of the rising tipped minimum wage, paid overtime and revenue sharing.

Also, restaurants pay taxes on their revenue, but not on income from tips. When service is folded into the price of the meal, the restaurant is taxed on that “additional” revenue.

...

“It took hundreds of years to build up the traditions of how things are done in restaurants,” he said. “We can’t expect to change all of that in one year.”

Making repugnance great again

In an article about President Trump's possible nominations to the Supreme Court, the NY Times discusses Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the federal appeals court in Atlanta, who "is a former Alabama attorney general, a graduate of Tulane’s law school and an outspoken opponent of abortion and gay rights."
...
"Representing Alabama, Mr. Pryor in 2003 filed a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold a Texas law that made gay sex a crime. The position of the gay men challenging the law, Mr. Pryor wrote, “must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia.”

“The states should not be required to accept, as a matter of constitutional doctrine, that homosexual activity is harmless and does not expose both the individual and the public to deleterious spiritual and physical consequences,” Mr. Pryor wrote in the brief.

At his 2003 confirmation hearing, he stood by an earlier statement that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, was “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

“I believe that not only is the case unsupported by the text and structure of the Constitution, but it had led to a morally wrong result,” Mr. Pryor told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “It has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children.”

Two California surrogacy stories from Europe, and a (pretty sad) one from Italy via Russia

Here's a late breaking story about an Italian couple that enlisted a surrogate in Russia, had the child taken from them by Italian authorities, and has just lost their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

ECHR rules in surrogate case--Court overrules its previous verdict
 "(ANSA) - Strasbourg, January 24 - The European Court of Human Rights said in a ruling Tuesday that Italy had not breached the rights of a couple after taking away a child born to a surrogate mother in Russia with whom they had no biological ties. The child was taken away from the couple after they returned from Russia following DNA testing showed that neither the man or the woman were its biological parent, even though a Russian birth certificate put them as parents.
    Tuesday's ruling overrides a previous decision made by the Strasbourg court in January 2015. "The Court considered that the contested measures had pursued the legitimate aims of preventing disorder and protecting the rights and freedoms of others," the ECHR said. "On this last point, it regarded as legitimate the Italian authorities' wish to reaffirm the State's exclusive competence to recognise a legal parent-child relationship - and this solely in the case of a biological tie or lawful adoption - with a view to protecting children".
    The child has been adopted by another family."

"PARADISO-CAMPANELLI VERSUS ITALY"
Surrogate motherhood: stopped by the European Court for Human Rights. The Chambre supports the Italian Court
"(Strasbourg) “The Court rules that the relationship between the applicants and the child is not part of family life”: this has been ruled by the Grande Chambre of the European Court of Human Rights, issued today about “Paradiso-Campanelli versus Italy”. The case is about an Italian couple living in the province of Campobasso, who went to Russia in 2011: through a private organisation, the married couple had had a child from a “surrogate mother” who has no biological relationship with the couple. Under Russian law, the couple could record the child as their own child, but, once back in Italy, the Court refused to record the child as the couple’s child and, after finding there was no biological relationship, it ruled that the child should be taken away from the applicants (the child was about eight months old back then) and then adopted by a different family. Today’s ruling overturns a ruling issued by the Court in January 2015: it claimed that taking the child away from the first couple breached article no. 8 of the Convention on Human Rights (right to private and family life), regardless of the child’s interest. The new ruling states, instead, that the Italian Court had actually ruled in the child’s interest and also stopped surrogate motherhood."

HT: Dorothea Kuebler
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Here are two earlier stories, set in England and Italy, from the blog Above the Law. about surrogacy as a repugnant transaction (at home) and the resulting fertility tourism (to California):

1."British aristocrats, the Viscountess and Viscount Weymouth... welcomed their second son on December 30, 2016. In what is likely a first for the British aristocracy, the child was born via surrogate.

The baby boy is the second grandson of the 7^th Marquess of Bath. I’ll just assume this is kind of a big deal in England. Lady Weymouth suffers from medical complications that made a second pregnancy too dangerous. So the couple turned to a California surrogate. To their credit, they are reportedly* sharing their story to help remove some of the stigma associated with surrogacy. Welcome and all hail the Right Honourable Henry Thynn. No typo. Honorable is spelled that way on purpose."

*They explain the differences between surrogacy in California and Britain as follows:

"Ceawlin explains that the US state has the most advanced legal system for the procedure. 
For example, it allows money to be exchanged, while Britain insists no more than expenses can be paid to the woman who will carry the child.
‘Obviously, we would have preferred to do it closer to home, but the legal system in Britain has not evolved with medical technology, so any contract with a surrogate is not binding,’ he says. 
‘Even if the baby is 100 per cent yours (ie the sperm and egg) the surrogate still has the right to keep the baby. California has the most evolved legal system in the world [for surrogacy].’ 

2. "Italy Is Not A Great Place To Be Gay. The parents of the twins are a gay Italian couple. While the U.S. made the move to permit gay marriage in 2015, Italy still denies same-sex couples the right to marry. Italy also denies gay couples the right to adopt children. Italian same-sex couples can’t even adopt their own family members through kinship adoptions. And, unsurprisingly, there is no same-sex step-parent adoption since gays can’t marry in the first place.

Having limited family-building options, the couple turned to an egg donor and California surrogate to conceive their children, and complete the family they dreamed of. Two embryos were transferred to the same surrogate. One was a donor egg fertilized with sperm from dad 1; the second was a donor egg, but this time fertilized with sperm from dad 2. The twins are biologically half-siblings with the same birthday. The conditions for an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito situation probably couldn’t have been set any higher.

This Is What Partial A Victory Looks Like. The fathers returned from the United States to Italy with their twins in tow. But the Italian government initially refused to recognize the children as (1) sons of the fathers, and 2) eligible for Italian citizenship. The fathers’ appealed, and were able to obtain what many consider a victory.

The court determined that despite the children being born to a gay couple (strike 1), using donor eggs (strike 2 – donating eggs and/or sperm is illegal in Italy) and to a surrogate (strike 3 – surrogacy is also illegal in Italy), it would be in the children’s best interest for Italy to recognize the parent-child relationship. The court awarded parental rights of each individual twin to the genetically related father."  

(NB: the two twins aren't legally related in Italy...)

"It Could Have Been Much Worse. While this was not a complete victory, it was a step forward for Italy. In prior cases, an Italian court has denied parentage to both parents — or even taken away a surrogate-born child from the parents and made the child a ward of the state! In an infamous case from 2014, an infertile couple in their 50s — who had been turned down for adoption three times — turned to surrogacy. They paid a Ukrainian surrogate €25,000 to carry a child conceived with donated genetic material. When they brought the child back to Italy, the government refused to register the child as theirs and charged them with fraud. Sadly, the court went further, ruling that the child, whose genetic and surrogate parents were unknown, was a “child of no one.” Despite even an Italian prosecutor advising that the child be allowed to stay with the intended parents, the court ruled that the child must become a ward of the state and put up for adoption. Heartbreaking.

Europe’s Anti-Surrogate Tendencies. Italy is not an anomaly. Most of Western Europe (including France, Spain, and Germany, among others) bans surrogacy. This has led to a number of troubling cases when Europeans go elsewhere for surrogacy and then try to bring their children home. In France, for instance, several surrogacy cases have involved French courts denying parental rights. But couples have had success appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. There, a child’s right to his or her parents has prevailed over French domestic law."

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Lifesharers has shut down:

With a whimper rather than a bang (I just noticed it recently), the valiant, Quixotic attempt to introduce--via a private club--priority for deceased donation to those who were registered donors themselves, has ended.
(see my post from 2008: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 Lifesharers: organ donation as a club good rather than a public good

Here's the lifesharers final anouncment:

Monday, March 21, 2016

LifeSharers has shut down.

"If your durable power of attorney for healthcare mentions your agreement to donate your organs through LifeSharers, you should change it.

If you have told your family and/or your doctors that you want to donate your organs through LifeSharers, you should let them know that's no longer possible."

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It was an interesting but doomed attempt to do privately something very much like what has been done publicly in Israel -- here are my posts on priority donation in Israel.

Judd Kessler and I proposed a model which distinguished between the effective Israeli approach and the well-intentioned but inefficacious Lifesharers approach as follows. In Israel, those who register for donation gain priority for the already existing pool of deceased donors, while in Lifesharers the initial members only gain priority for each other. So, if there is even a small cost of joining, there is an equilibrium at which no one joins lifesharers, and indeed, unfortunately, it seems that Lifesharers never gained enough members to facilitate even a single transplant.

Contrast the difficulty of getting mutual donation going (with each death leading to only a very low probability of making a donation possible), with the easier task faced by the 19 Century Society for Mutual Autopsy