An ancient repugnance crumbles: Same sex marriage is a right, in all 50 of the United States

Here's the NY Times headline: Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules, 5-4

"Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 decision. He was joined by the court’s four more liberal justices."

We're all a little more equal today.

But the close vote means that understanding repugnant transactions--transactions that some people would like to engage in, and others wish to prevent--is important.
**********

Here's a graphic graphic from the Times, on the one-step-forward-two-steps-back progress of this latest civil right:
Gay Marriage State by State: From a Few States to the Whole Nation

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Justice and Liberty are celebrating again...

School choice in Amsterdam goes to court over tie-breaking

Hessel Oosterbeek sends me this article in Dutch about the very current controversy playing out in Amsterdam over this year's school choice results:

Het beest in de Amsterdamse ouder is los,
which Google Translate renders as
The beast in Amsterdam's parent is loose

Some background to the current controversy can be found in a paper by Oosterbeek and his coauthors which was influential in the Amsterdam school choice design (which used student-proposing deferred acceptance with multiple tie-breaking):

"The performance of school assignment mechanisms in practice," by Monique de Haan, Pieter A. Gautier, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw.

Abstract: "Theory points to a potential trade-off between two main school assignment mechanisms; Boston and Deferred Acceptance (DA). While DA is strategyproof and gives a stable matching, Boston might outperform DA in terms of ex-ante efficiency. We quantify the (dis)advantages of the mechanisms by using information about actual choices under Boston complemented with survey data eliciting students’ school preferences. We find that under Boston around 8% of the students apply to another school than their most-preferred school. We compare allocations resulting from Boston with DA with single tie-breaking (one central lottery; DA-STB) and multiple tie-breaking (separate lottery per school; DA-MTB). DA-STB places more students in their top-n schools, for any n, than Boston and results in higher average welfare. We find a trade-off between DA-STB and DA-MTB. DA-STB places more students in their single most-preferred school than DA-MTB, but fewer in their top-n, for n ≥ 2. Finally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit most from a switch from Boston to any of the DA mechanisms"

The city of Amsterdam adopted multiple tie-breaking, with the consequence that some post-assignment trades now seem possible between students.  And this is where the beast in Amsterdam's parents (some of whom are lawyers) has been loosed. Here's Google Translate again, on the news story:

"Moreover, there is a side effect that parents can not stomach: a class can sit next to each other two children who are both disappointed in the school they were assigned, whereas if they would swap, both overjoyed to be made ​​with a spot on their favorite school. A child who is placed in a school where he really did not want it (tenth place on his preference list), through an exchange would nevertheless may still end up at No. 1. And yet you can not. There is, every year it again what in Amsterdam that the beast in the parent disconnect when it comes to the choice of school of the child.
...
"A father of a girl who wants to be very happy in music and dance, with a spot on the Geert Groot School, turned to Sprenkeling for an exchange. To facilitate this exchange, harnessed the lawyer with 32 other parents a lawsuit against the dome of high schools Osvo. The aim is to consider the new placement system this year as a test. Only next year should really not be exchanged. "

I understand from Hessel that a judge is expected to rule soon on whether families may exchange school places...

Unravelling of magnet school enrollment in Cincinnati: 16 days in a tent

Here's a story about a devoted dad in Cincinnati who slept outside of a school for 16 days, along with many other parents, to preserve his place in line for a kindergarten enrollment...

Waiting For Kindergarten
I slept outside for 16 days to enroll my son in Fairview-Clifton Elementary School

And some history:
"When there are more kids than spots in a popular school, how do you decide which kids get in?

CPS has tried to answer this question several times. In the 1990s, families enrolled in magnet programs via Super Saturday. CPS kept the enrollment locations (CPS schools) secret until the early morning on the last Saturday in January. After announcing the locations, lines formed quickly and schools accepted kids on a first-come, first-serve basis. Parents enlisted family and friends to patrol the city in cars so that the closest car could dash to the signup once revealed. Cars were manned in pairs, so that the passenger could get out and get in line without hunting for a parking spot. They communicated via pagers, walkie-talkies, and cellphones if they were lucky. There was more than a few fender benders in the process. Some families tried to guess the system, staking out schools for signs of “activity”, like building lights and cars.

Super Saturday ended sometime around 2000. For several years, parents enrolled their kids by taking a tour of the school and submitting a waiting list application up to 12 months before the first day of school. Your spot was not guaranteed however, and students were accepted partially on the basis of race and gender. Parents usually knew their result by December. Interestingly, this method was simple, straightforward and did not require waiting in line. However, due to demand from parents who wanted more control over their kids’ futures, as well as court decisions that outlawed the demographic basis of enrollment, CPS went to a first-come, first-serve enrollment around 2007. That first year, parents camped out in line for 24 hours.

To address the inherent unfairness in a totally first-come, first-serve enrollment method, CPS went to a hybrid system. Since 2011, 30% of open spots went to winners of a lottery system, with the rest still allocated via line. Families were eligible for the lottery only if their neighborhood school was underperforming."



HT: Pete Troyan

Peter Passell interviews me at the Milken Institute on Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

I had a busy day in Los Angeles Tuesday, which combined some academic meetings with some media events related to my new book.

Here's a video of an interview/conversation about the book, with Peter Passell,


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

Earlier in the day, I had a conversation on the air with Larry Mantel on his radio show Airtalk, at
NPR affilliate in Los Angeles: KPCC (you can hearthe talk at the link)

Incidentally, here's a radio talk I taped when I was in Boston but just aired, on NPR's affilliate for the Cape and the Islands: Listen here to the conversation with WCAI's Mindy Todd about Who Gets What and Why.

The repugnance of paying for your raw materials: journalists and news stories

The New York Times has an op-ed by Kelly McBride (described as a "media ethicist"): When It’s O.K. to Pay for a Story

"JOURNALISTS frown on paying sources. This decades-old principle stems from the belief that the tawdry practice corrupts the authenticity of information: If I pay you to tell me your story, you may distort its details to up the value.

"So last week, WikiLeaks disturbed many journalists with an initiative to crowd-source a $100,000 “bounty” on the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
...
"Setting a bounty on the treaty text turns journalistic mores on their head. In traditional newsrooms, the idea of offering a cash incentive for the leaking of confidential documents is anathema. But WikiLeaks, like other media disrupters, leaves us no choice but to reconsider this prohibition. If journalism organizations refuse to do so, they relegate themselves either to secondhand reporting on documents obtained by those outside journalism or to being left behind.
...
"In practice, there has long been a gray zone in the media industry. British tabloid newspapers have a long history of “checkbook journalism,” while some American TV news shows have often paid large sums for certain material..."

Talking about markets on Think Radio, and Radio New Zealand

Here's an NPR radio show, in which I was interviewed about Who Gets What and Why

Most economists study commodity markets, in which buyers and sellers find common ground in the price of goods. This hour, we’ll talk to Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth about matching markets ­­— like employment and college admission — in which money is only one factor in making a connection. Roth’s new book is Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

[Download MP3]
Their webpage is here, where you can listen to the conversation.

The webpage also has this picture, which must be what I look like on radio:)

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

And here you can hear what I sound like on Radio New Zealand:

Nobel Prize winner, Alvin Roth: "Who Gets What and Why"

Updated at 11:18 am on 22 June 2015

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Originally aired on Nine To Noon, Monday 22 June 2015

Professor Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for economics partly for his work helping match willing donors with those who need kidney transplants.

He has spent his career looking at markets of all kinds and how ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’ come together. In his new book, Who Gets What and Why, he argues we are surrounded by matching markets. From applying for a job, to asking someone out on a date, matching plays a crucial but invisible role in our lives.

Professor Roth says matching is why apps like uber and airbnb are so successful, but while he is an advocate of market forces, as he tells Kathryn Ryan, there must also be rules.

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Photo: Steve Castillo

Book talk video "Who Gets What and Why" at Noblis

Here's a video of a talk I gave last week when I was in the DC area, about my new book Who Gets What and Why, at Noblis. It's about 40 minutes including questions and answers. (I start off by talking about how economics is like gossip...)

Who Gets What and Why at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, June 23

This should be fun--I'll be interviewed Tuesday by Peter Passell, whose columns I used to read in the NY Times, about my new book  .( A bit more on Peter Passell at the end of this post...)

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

Alvin Roth, McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and Nobel laureate
Moderated by Peter Passell, editor of the Milken Institute Review

June 23, 2015

6:30pm - 8:00pm

Santa Monica

CAPITAL MARKETS, HEALTH, U.S. ECONOMY

Markets are about more than money. Price isn’t the crucial factor in matching aspirants with career opportunities, students with schools or bodily organs with transplant patients, yet these examples involve markets nonetheless. Alvin Roth, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of “Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design,” has created markets meant to lift the barriers that hinder the goals of individuals and society at large. Roth is an authority on the application of exchange dynamics to real-world problems, inventively adapting the tools of game theory and market design.

At this Milken Institute Forum, Roth will demonstrate that markets are ubiquitous, if even we don’t commonly recognize them, and how skillfully we navigate them can determine the most important events in our lives. Even the freest markets have rules, and Roth will delve into how unseen conditions drive outcomes. Those conditions can be modified to better serve the participants, he explains. From marriage to parking spaces, if the “buyers” and “sellers” can be matched more effectively, everyone wins.

“Alvin Roth guides us through the jungle of modern life, pointing to the many markets that are hidden in plain view all around us,” says behavioral economist and “Predictably Irrational” author Dan Ariely. “He teaches us how markets work—and fail—and how we can build better ones.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alvin Roth is the McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. Roth is one of the world’s leading experts in the fields of market design, game theory, and matching markets. He has designed several of those markets, including the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients, the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the New York City and Boston school choice systems.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Peter Passell is editor of the Milken Institute Review, the Institute's economic quarterly. A senior fellow, Passell was previously an economics columnist for the New York Times, a member of the Times' editorial board and an assistant professor at Columbia University's Graduate Department of Economics. Passell has written for publications including the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Nation, American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. Passell received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University.

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"Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" will be for sale after the Forum, and Roth will be available to sign copies. This event is open to the public, although registration is required. Reserved seating is available for Milken Institute Associates. If you are not currently a member of the Associates and would like to join or receive more information, click here. Parking is not available at the Institute. Free parking for 90 minutes is available in Public Parking Lot No. 1 on Fourth Street, adjacent to our building. This Forum is part of our effort to present multiple perspectives on current business and public policy issues. Videotaping, recording or photographing this event is prohibited without the prior approval of the Milken Institute. *********** A funny thing about this interview is that I recall reading Peter Passell's 'Economic Scene' column in the NY Times when he seemed to be one of the few economic journalists who was an actual economist. Here's the last of those columns he wrote for the Times, which still reads very well today. Economic Scene; Rich nation, poor nation. Is anyone even looking for a cure? By Peter Passell Published: August 13, 1998

Conference in honor of Sergiu Hart, June 21-24 in Jerusalem

Happy birthday Sergiu!

The conference website is here: http://www.ratio.huji.ac.il/conference_Hart 

Two interviews by the Minneapolis Fed with two Stanford economists: me -- and Raj Chetty

The Minneapolis Fed publishes a magazine called The Region that features long interviews with economists, accompanied by nice photos. Their current issue, just out, has an interview with me.

You can read the whole thing here:

Interview with Alvin Roth

Stanford economist on matching theory, kidney markets and the importance of coffee

Douglas Clement | Editor, The Region  Published June 15, 2015   |  June 2015 issue

Here's the final exchange, about Pittsburgh and coffee:

"Region: One last question, if I might. Many of your major breakthroughs occurred when you were at Pittsburgh. What was it about the research environment there that was so conducive to Nobel-winning work?

Roth: Well, Pittsburgh was a lot of fun. The living was easy. I walked to work. I’d walk with my kids to school and drop them off and walk on into work. My colleagues and I spent a lot of time drinking coffee and talking about economics.

The mathematician Alfréd Rényi is said to have said that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. Maybe economists turn decaf into models.

There were lots of people to talk to at Pittsburgh. It was a fruitful time. And it was a very good department. I think a lot of what makes a department a good place to work is that when you’re onto something you’re excited about and you walk out the door of your office and tell one of your colleagues about it, he’s excited to hear about it, too. He says “That’s great. Let’s go have a cup of coffee, and you can tell me about it.” So there’s the positive reinforcement you get just from having people think, “Isn’t that great you’re excited about something. You’re thinking about something interesting.” It makes places fun to work.

Here at Stanford, I try to organize regular coffees—I did this at Harvard and I do it here—regular coffees with students interested in different things. We have a Tuesday morning coffee for experimental economics and a Thursday morning coffee for market design. I think that a lot of intellectual interaction arises out of social interaction. You have to be talking to people before you’re talking about work.

Region: Wonderful. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you."

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

The December 2014 issue had an interview with an even better-looking economist

You can read it here:

Interview with Raj Chetty

Harvard economist explores work on income mobility, education, taxation and labor supply

Douglas Clement | Editor, The Region Published December 10, 2014   |  December 2014 issue

Raj and I were colleagues at Harvard, and if my experience moving to Stanford is any guide, he is going to have a fine time here at Stanford.

Welcome, Raj.

Maine hospital goes through with kidney donation despite donor raising funds online

Long story short: woman in need of kidney posts a sign on a car, seen by a stranger who agrees to donate and is compatible. Then he uses social media to raise some money to pay his expenses, and raises more than he anticipated. Hospital delays surgery, worrying that maybe he's breaking the law against getting "valuable consideration" for his donation, but eventually goes ahead. Both donor and recipientt are doing well.

Maine man sees plea on car window, to donate kidney to stranger
Maine donor says kidney transplant OK'd for next week
"Joshua Dall-Leighton of Windham said the surgery will take place June 16 at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Hospital spokeswoman Matt Paul confirmed on Monday that the living kidney donation is scheduled for that day.
 
"Dall-Leighton responded to the plea for a donor on South Portland resident Christine Royles' car. But the surgery was delayed by medical and legal hurdles, including crowdsourced donations to Dall-Leighton aimed at defraying his expenses. Paul said those concerns have been addressed.
...
"Hospital officials said in April they needed time to determine if the donation violated the National Organ Transplant Act, which forbids potential donors from profiting from a donation. A crowdfunding website set up for the donation has raised more than $49,000. Royles also organized fundraisers to pay bills and reimburse Dall-Leighton's time away from work.
 
"Paul said an external legal review confirmed that the transplant "will comply with federal laws that are designed to regulate organ transplants and protect living donors."
    ******************

From Bill of Health: Fundraising and the Delayed Kidney Transplantation: A Loophole in the Ban against Commercialization?
***************

And here's the happy ending
Car-window wish for kidney rewarded: Maine woman receives lifesaving transplant--Both patient and donor are reported to be doing well after surgery, capping an unusual story of strangers and sacrifice.

"Josh Dall-Leighton, 30, a corrections officer at the Southern Maine Re-entry Center in Alfred, saw the sign on Royles’ car last fall and immediately contacted her.

“He saw that sign and said, ‘I need to do this,’ ” his wife said.

Royles, whose kidney failure was caused by an autoimmune disease, was placed on a waiting list of more than 100,000 in need of kidney transplants in 2014, but decided to try to find a donor on her own.

The surgery was almost derailed after a GoFundMe effort raised nearly $50,000 for the couple. The account was set up by a friend of Josh Dall-Leighton with a goal of raising $6,000 to cover expenses for the six weeks he was expected to take off work to recover from the surgery.

But after a story about the transplant was published in the Press Herald and was widely picked up by other media outlets, the donations far exceeded the original goal.

Maine Medical Center put the potential transplant on hold until lawyers could sort out legal and ethical issues regarding the large sum of money. Federal and international laws prohibit the sale of organs, but hospital officials have said it was clear that there was no intent to profit from donating the organ.

Last week the hospital announced that the donation was not a legal impediment, and the surgery would go forward.

“If we didn’t have as strong a voice about this as we did, I don’t believe we would be here right now,” Ashley Dall-Leighton said.

She has said they are considering donating the money to a kidney foundation and the neonatal intensive care unit at Maine Med, where their twins were patients when they were born. They wanted to wait until after the surgery and recovery period to have a true accounting of their expenses – as opposed to an estimate – before determining how much and where to donate, she said."

Abraham Neyman's talk on Stochastic Games at the Conference in His Honor

I'm acutely aware that I'm missing two important conferences in Jerusalem during these days, in honor of Abraham Neyman, and Sergiu Hart.  The Neyman Conference is underway:

Here is Neyman's talk from the conference:

Yom Holedet Sameach, Abraham!  I'm sorry to have to miss the party.

NPR's Marketplace: Ryssdal interviews Dubner about his newest Freakonomics podcast--the four minute version

An algorithm that matches kidney patients and donors

The link above will take you to the four-minute version of the fifty minute Freakonomics podcast in which Dubner interviews me about my new book.

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BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GettyImages

Doctors from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, transplant a kidney. 

Interview by Kai Ryssdal, Interview with Stephen Dubner

Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - 14:49

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Matching markets are markets where money isn’t allowed to do what it usually does. For example, school admissions — colleges don’t just raise the tuition price until demand meets supply. Or how new M.D.’s get assigned to their residencies — they can’t just buy their way into the hospital they want. In each case, you have to find a way to match a candidate with an available slot.

You also can't buy a kidney, or pay for somebody's college education to get a kidney, or purchase a car for them in exchange of a kidney.

So how can you make a market for something that is indivisible and can’t put a price on? Al Roth, a professor of economics at Stanford, realized that this model could be adapted to help kidney patients find a potential donor.

"Let’s pretend you and I, Kai, we both need a kidney transplant. And that both of us have a relative who’s willing to donate one, but your relative is not a biological match for you and mine isn’t for me," says Stephen Dubner, author of "Freakonomics." "Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could enter all your data and all of the donor's data into some algorithm that could magically sort these data from all the transplant centers in the country and match up donors and patients?"

Roth’s algorithm has helped save a lot of lives. Ruthanne Leishman from the United Network for Organ Sharing says the United States has about 600 kidney paired donation transplants per year right now. In 2000, the U.S only had two.

Featured in: Marketplace for Wednesday, June 17, 2015

About the author

Kai Ryssdal is the host and senior editor of Marketplace, the most widely heard program on business and the economy in the country.

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Freakonomics podcast on Who Gets What and Why

Stephen Dubner came to visit me in Palo Alto to talk about my new book. He also interviewed some other people, including Ruthann Leishman who now manages one of the active kidney exchanges, at UNOS, but who I met when she helped launch the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. You'll also hear from an incompatible patient-donor pair who quickly found a match, and the nondirected donor who started the chain that worked for them..  We end the conversation over dinner...

(I haven't figured out how to embed the podcast itself, but you can listen to it if you click on the title below which will take you to the Freakonomics page for this show.)

Make Me a Match: A New Freakonomics Radio Episode

STEPHEN J. DUBNER
06/17/2015 | 11:00 pmPRODUCED BY: GREG ROSALSKY

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(Photo, cropped: Newtown Grafitti)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Make Me a Match.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

The gist of the episode: Sure, markets generally work well. But for some transactions — like school admissions and organ transplants — money alone can’t solve the problem. That’s when you need a market-design wizard like Al Roth.

Al Roth, an engineer by training, is a professor of economics at Stanford and won a Nobel in economics in 2012. (Roth shared the prize with Lloyd Shapley, whose research influenced Roth). What kind of work did Roth do to land the Nobel? It’s not the kind of thing that typically wins a Nobel. Roth has helped people who need a kidney transplant find a donor. He’s helped new doctors find their first jobs. He’s helped high-school students in New York City find the right high school – even though Roth himself, who grew up in New York City, dropped out of high school.

ROTH: I was, you know, a poor ungrateful student who didn’t appreciate what my teachers were trying to do for me. You should tell all your listeners they should complete high school.

Roth has also just published a very fine new book that is a great survey of his work — and his worldview, which is just as impressive. It’s called Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design In the podcast, I visit Stanford to speak with Roth about market design, what’s it’s like to get that middle-of-the-night Nobel phone call, and why the world needs an economist-engineer like him in the first place:

ROTH: Matching markets are markets where money, prices don’t do all the work. And some of the markets I’ve studied, we don’t let prices do any of the work. And I like to think of matching markets as markets where you can’t just choose what you want even if you can afford it — you also have to be chosen. So job markets are like that; getting into college is like that. Those things cost money, but money doesn’t decide who gets into Stanford. Stanford doesn’t raise the tuition until supply equals demand and just enough freshmen want to come to fill the seats. Stanford is expensive but it’s cheap enough that a lot of people would like to come to Stanford, and so Stanford has this whole other set of market institutions. Applications and admissions and you can’t just come to Stanford, you have to be admitted.

You’ll hear how Roth and others have revolutionized the organ-donor market, and we hear the amazing story of how one particularly selfless woman kicked off a donor chain that gave life to many others. And you’ll also hear Ruthanne Leishman, from the United Network For Organ Sharing, talk about  the organ-donor algorithm developed by Roth and his colleagues:

LEISHMAN: It’s saving a lot of lives. We have about 600 kidney-paired donation transplants a year right now in the United States. In 2000, we had 2. … We would have stayed doing 2 or 4 or 6 a year without the algorithm.  

The next time you hear someone say that economists are a bunch of selfish good-for-nothings, feel free to counter by telling them about the fine work of Al Roth.