"Abortion as a moral good" Opinion piece in the Lancet

The Lancet recently ran the following opinion piece, by a bioethicist at Northwestern University's medical school. It gives a sympathetic account of both the pro- and anti- abortion arguments, as she presents them to her medical students.

Abortion as a moral good
Katie Watson
PERSPECTIVES|THE ART OF MEDICINE| VOLUME 393, ISSUE 10177, P1196-1197, MARCH 23, 2019

Here's the first paragraph:

"My medical students first hear from a family physician who describes himself as pro-life. He's Christian, and his faith is “a large part of the reason” he refuses to perform abortions. “Christ says things like do to others what you want them to do to you, or love your neighbour as yourself, and when I'm in the room with a pregnant patient I think I have two neighbours in there”, he tells the second years. Then they hear from an obstetrician who specialises in abortion care. She too is a Christian, and some students look surprised when she says her religious beliefs are one reason she sought fellowship training in abortion. “Do unto others as you want done to you, always take care of your fellow man. When a woman needs help, I want to help her. So I take those sayings and teachings to mean that God would be very proud of me”, she explains. These two physicians then take questions together, interacting in a friendly way as each commends the other's deep commitment to patient care. Once they leave, I use the case studies they provided to focus attention on the medical ethics of conscientious refusal and conscientious provision of health care."

Adoption, interracial adoption, and repugnance

The Washington Post looks back on the history of adoption. (Even adoption can arouse repugnance...):

A white couple, a mixed-race baby and a forbidden adoption
In 1966 in the nation’s capital, what Kara and Frank Speltz wanted to do simply wasn’t allowed.

"Longing for a child, the white couple, who were involved in the city’s civil rights struggles, began to research how they could adopt an African American child instead. A year after their wedding, they contacted D.C.’s Department of Public Welfare and Junior Village, the city’s overcrowded home for orphaned and destitute children. Both organizations turned them down, saying it was against their policies to allow adoptions between whites and blacks.
...
"In segregated, post-World War II America, children of color and mixed-race children were considered “hard to place” in adoption agency parlance. Most agencies at the time used a policy of “matching,” which required that children be placed with families who looked like them or came from the same racial, religious or ethnic backgrounds, according to Matine T. Spence, professor of history at the University of Iowa.

"Some white couples adopted Asian or Native American children, but whites officially adopting African American children were much rarer, Spence said. The first recorded case occurred in 1948 in Minnesota.

“Originally, the main impulse behind race matching in adoption was a white-supremacist, segregationist impulse,” Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy said in a 2003 Harvard Magazine interview.

"At the time, many states had miscegenation laws barring interracial marriage. Maryland even had a law until 1957 that said it was illegal for “a white woman to bear a child fathered by a negro.”

"Still, formal statewide bans on interracial adoption were rare, Kennedy told the magazine: “It was thought to be beyond discussion — it was so obviously wrong that there was no need for a law.”

"The District did not have an official law on the books. either. But because interracial adoption was considered so taboo, private and public agencies and judges, which had the authority to approve or reject adoptions, enforced an unwritten policy to bar it, Spence said.
...
"n 1969, there were 4,336 black children placed for adoption in the United States, with 1,447 of them placed with white families. In 1971, 7,420 African American children were adopted, with 2,574 placed with white families.

Interracial adoption was — and remains — controversial in the United States.
In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers asserted that such arrangements constituted a form of “cultural genocide.”

“With that condemnation, the number of white-black adoptions quickly plummeted, according to Kennedy’s 2003 book, “Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption.”
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What can museums do with their excess art?

The NY Times has the story:
Clean House to Survive? Museums Confront Their Crowded Basements

"Fueled by philanthropic zeal, lucrative tax deductions and the prestige of seeing their works in esteemed settings, wealthy art owners have for decades given museums everything from their Rembrandts to their bedroom slippers.

"It all had to go somewhere. So now, many American museums are bulging with stuff — so much stuff that some house thousands of objects that have never been displayed but are preserved, at considerable cost, in climate-controlled storage spaces.
...
"“There is this inevitable march where you have to build more storage, more storage, more storage,” said Charles L. Venable, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. “I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

"His museum was so jammed with undisplayed artwork that it was about to spend about $14 million to double its storage space until he abruptly canceled the plan.

"Instead, it embarked on an ambitious effort to rank each of the 54,000 items in its collection with letter grades. Twenty percent of the items received a D, making them ripe to be sold or given to another institution.
...
"Part of the problem is that acquiring new things is far easier, and more glamorous, than getting rid of old ones. Deaccessioning, the formal term for disposing of an art object, is a careful, cumbersome process, requiring several levels of curatorial, administrative and board approval. Museum directors who try to clean out their basements often confront restrictive donor agreements and industry guidelines that treat collections as public trusts."
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Earlier related posts:

Sunday, January 7, 2018

More on the repugnance of selling art, if you're an art museum

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Why don't museums sell art (except to buy more art)?

Federal government contests safe injection facility in Philadelphia, where the overdose rate is four times the homicide rate

When will they ever learn? The Washington Post updates us on Federal efforts to prevent exploration of ways to cut down on drug overdose deaths.

Philadelphia plans to open supervised opioid injection facility despite federal lawsuit

"Though the plan for what is known as a safe injection site has garnered local support, the city now finds itself in the middle of a major legal fight with the federal government.

"The Justice Department sued the nonprofit Safehouse in February, arguing that opening the facility in Philadelphia — the first supervised consumption facility in the United States — would violate federal law. Likening the idea to a crack house, federal officials say allowing the use of illicit drugs with impunity enables and exacerbates the in­trac­table opioid problem; the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania argued that opening Safehouse would violate the Controlled Substances Act, which makes it illegal to open or run a place where illegal drugs are knowingly used.
...
"The overdose rate in Philadelphia is four times the homicide rate; were the statistics reversed “there’d be absolute citizen outcry, they’d have National Guard in the streets,” said former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who is on the Safehouse board and said the organization plans to move forward even with federal opposition."
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see earlier posts

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Philly and Feds at odds over reducing opioid overdoses

Sunday, September 2, 2018

The DOJ argues against harm reduction measures for drug addicts

An Israeli gay couple recount their American surrogacy experience

Twins, no less, after a journey through U.S. surrogacy by a gay Israeli couple, from Haaretz:

Two for the Price of One: An Israeli Gay Couple's American Journey to Fatherhood By Hilo Glazer

"From the moment surrogacy for Israeli gay men swung away from Asia and landed in the American kingdom of capitalism, having a baby became a complex spreadsheet in which every row carries a price tag.
...
"We continued shopping in the most experienced agency in the gay fathers’ realm in Israel, which was founded by a marketing man. He mentioned two options: an American route and a Canadian route. The Canadian path is at least 100,000 shekels cheaper because there’s no need to pay the surrogate mother. How so? In Canada, surrogacy is, by law, completely altruistic, the marketing man explained, and the women are good Christians who want “to grant people the right to raise a family.” He added, with a thin smile, that these surrogate mothers receive “enlarged reimbursement of expenses,” and hinted that this was a way to get around the Canadian ban on paid surrogacy.
...
"The first step is to find an egg donor. In this field, America really is the land of opportunity – with a price range to match. We paid the low rate ($8,000) because we made do with the database of candidates that’s attached to the clinic and for which there’s “no charge” to access. It’s a pretty limited database, with about 15 candidates at any given moment.

"But hey, this is America, so there’s no upgrade that money can’t buy. An additional payment of $8,500 to $20,000 provides access to premium databases. There’s one consisting of donors who are models (they call it “donors who look like you,” and you can select the desirable physical qualities), while there’s another of donors who are Ivy League graduates. Unfortunately, there’s no overlap between the databases. An egg from a Jewish donor will cost more – around $20,000 (half to the agency, half to the donor). All told, if you go with the select databases, the cost of the egg donation can reach $35,000.
...
"The next stage, then, is to find the surrogate. The clinic put us in touch with five agencies for surrogates, each of which controls a different region of the country.

Because demand for surrogate mothers exceeds supply, hooking up with an agency doesn’t ensure an available woman when the contract is signed. The average waiting time is between four months and a year and a half. We were ready to pay in order not to lose momentum, and we went for the fastest option. The supply of surrogates available in Oregon, where the clinic was situated, had run out, so we had to expand into new territory...
...
"After two weeks, we were informed that a suitable candidate had been found...24, married and the mother of an 18-month-old girl, a part-time preschool teacher living in Oklahoma City. (Motherhood is a condition for surrogacy so that there are no known complications preventing the woman from giving birth.) Oklahoma is considered part of the Bible Belt, but Tiffany, for one, wasn’t put off by the fact that we were a gay couple.
...
"Spreading out the surrogate’s salary over nine months is liable to cause a conflict of interest with her. The classic dilemma is whether to have amniocentesis (generally performed at the start of the second trimester). It’s the most reliable indicator of the embryo’s health but also increases the risk of a miscarriage – a scenario we would obviously not want, but one more fraught with problems for the woman. She, after all, would have endured a rigorous selection process, taken medications, undergone invasive medical procedures, and in the case of a miscarriage, would be rewarded for only a few weeks of work.
...
"American agencies now customarily offer clients a “guarantee to baby” option: In return for a fixed price, the clinic undertakes “to provide” a baby, no matter how many attempts this entails. The deal is also valid for unsuccessful embryo transfer and in case of a miscarriage. Guided by fear of failure and of the need to make a double payment, we – and pretty much all the other couples who face a similar dilemma – opted for the “all inclusive” rate.
...
"The bonus of the visit to Portland was a meeting with the egg donor ...
Into the room came a delicate young woman of 21...accompanied by her fiancé ... She’s a nursing student, he’s starting med school, and both aspire to do volunteer work in plague-ridden regions of Africa.
...
[The surrogate] Tiffany’s life story, which we heard about during her hospitalization, raised a host of ethical questions that had been pushed aside once we’d opted for First World surrogacy over one in India.
... Was her economic plight fundamentally different from the distress of an imagined Indian surrogate mother? Wasn’t the medical risk she took the same? Could we be certain that she had volunteered for the process and not been pushed into it by a relative? Wasn’t her basic salary – about $30,000 – too small compared with the payments received by the doctors and the mediators?  "
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Here's a subsequent story from Haaretz (not related to the particular couple above):

Jewish Agency offers loans to staff seeking surrogacy abroad
For the first time in history, a state entity is offering its employees support for the extremely expensive procedure, which is denied to gay men in Israel by law

Upcoming market design conferences in May and July, in Switzerland and Russia

Here are announcements to two conferences:

MATCH-UP 2019
5th International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences
Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland
26-29 May 2019

MATCH-UP 2019, the 5th International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences, will be held in the Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland from Sunday 26 May – Wednesday 29 May 2019. It is the fifth in the series of interdisciplinary and international workshops on matching under preferences.

Matching problems with preferences occur in widespread applications such as the assignment of school-leavers to universities, junior doctors to hospitals, students to campus housing, children to schools, kidney transplant patients to donors and so on. The common thread is that individuals have preference lists over the possible outcomes and the task is to find a matching of the participants that is in some sense optimal with respect to these preferences.

The remit of this workshop is to explore matching problems with preferences from the perspective of algorithms and complexity, discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization, game theory, mechanism design and economics, and thus a key objective is to bring together the research communities of the related areas."

**********

Economic Design and Algorithms in St. Petersburg (July 8-10, 2019)

"We are pleased to announce the international conference Economic Design and Algorithms in St. Petersburgorganized by the International Laboratory of Game Theory and Decision Making of Higher School of Economics, Russia.

OVERVIEW
The conference will bring together economists and computer scientists. It will focus on design problems where the methodologies of these two communities interact successfully, including but not limited to:
●    Market design
●    Matching and assignment
●    Voting rules
●    Fair division
●    Information design
●    Auctions
●    Networks
The conference will be preceded by a 2-days Summer School(July 5-6, 2019) which will be announced soon."

Deceased organ donation: comparison of opt-in versus opt-out countries

From Kidney International

Article in Press

Comparison of organ donation and transplantation rates between opt-out and opt-in systems

Adam Arshad1

,

Benjamin Anderson2

,

Adnan Sharif2,3,∗,Correspondence information about the author Adnan SharifEmail the author Adnan Sharif

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.kint.2019.01.036

Article Info

• Abstract

• Full Text

• Images
• References
• Supplemental Materials

Article Outline

1. Results
   1. Opt-out versus opt-in country stratification
   2. Differences between opt-out versus opt-in country profiles
   3. Organ donation rates (all figures per million population)
   4. Organ-specific solid organ transplantation activity (all figures per million population)
   5. Multivariate analysis
   6. Sensitivity analysis (all figures per million population)
2. Discussion
3. Methods
   1. Country selection
   2. Variables and data sources
   3. Ethics and transparency
   4. Statistical analysis
4. Disclosure
5. Supplementary Material
6. References

Studies comparing opt-out and opt-in approaches to organ donation have generally suggested higher donation and transplantation rates in countries with an opt-out strategy. We compared organ donation and transplantation rates between countries with opt-out versus opt-in systems to investigate possible differences in the contemporary era. Data were nalysed for 35 countries registered with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (17 countries classified as opt-out, 18 classified as opt-in) and obtained organ donation and transplantation rates for 2016 from the Global Observatory for Donation and Transplantation. Compared to opt-in countries, opt-out countries had fewer living donors per million population (4.8 versus 15.7, respectively) with no significant difference in deceased donors (20.3 versus 15.4, respectively). Overall, no significant difference was observed in rates of kidney (35.2 versus 42.3 respectively), non-renal (28.7 versus 20.9, respectively), or total solid organ transplantation (63.6 versus 61.7, respectively). In a multivariate linear regression model, an opt-out system was independently predictive of fewer living donors but was not associated with the number of deceased donors or with transplantation rates. Apart from the observed difference in the rates of living donation, our data demonstrate no significant difference in deceased donation or solid organ transplantation activity between opt-out versus opt-in countries. This suggests that other barriers to organ donation must be addressed, even in settings where consent for donation is presumed.

Repugnance watch: romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students

Forty plus years ago, I met and married my wife when I was an assistant professor and she was a graduate student in another department. Since then I've paid attention to changes in norms that might have made our relationship illicit, such as this recent change of policies at Princeton.

Princeton updates its policy regarding sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students
by the Office of Communications
"Princeton University has strengthened its policy regarding sexual and romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students.

"During the Faculty Meeting on Monday, April 1, faculty voted to approve a policy that prohibits all faculty from initiating or engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with graduate students. Previously, faculty were prohibited only from initiating or engaging in romantic or sexual relationships with graduate students over whom they had advising, instruction or supervisory responsibilities. The new policy includes exemptions for pre-existing relationships.

...

"Existing University policy already prohibits all romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and undergraduates.

“It is important to note that this prohibition, and therefore any disciplinary consequences, fall entirely on the faculty. That is, this policy change will not result in any disciplinary consequences for graduate students,” Dean of the Graduate School Sarah-Jane Leslie said in a statement emailed to graduate students.
*************

Here is the relevant paragraph from
Rules and Procedures of the Faculty of Princeton University and Other Provisions of Concern to the Faculty
As of 2019-04-03

"1. Prohibition of Consensual Relations with Students: Faculty members shall not initiate or engage in romantic or sexual behavior with undergraduate or graduate students. This prohibition encompasses both enrolled and prospective students, and includes students from other institutions who come to Princeton for pre-baccalaureate, post-baccalaureate, visiting, summer, or other programs or courses of study. For purposes of this policy, faculty members include members of the University community whose primary appointment is one of the following: tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, nstructors, all ranks of lecturers, and visiting faculty. "

A new repugnant use of DNA information--'clarifying' Who is a Jew

The Jerusalem Post has the story:
CHIEF RABBINATE ADMITS USING DNA TESTS TO HELP DETERMINE JEWISH STATUS
Orthodox organizations denounce the use of DNA testing as contrary to Jewish law

"Chief Rabbi David Lau has admitted for the first time that the Chief Rabbinate and the state Rabbinical Courts use DNA testing in certain circumstances to help determine whether a person is Jewish.

The admission is likely to generate outrage among mainstream religious-Zionist and Modern Orthodox groups, given that Jewish law does not recognize the validity of DNA testing to prove Jewishness."

Brioni Legendary Minds: interviews and suits, and economists as clothing models

Brioni, the men's suit maker, has a series of video interviews called Legendary Minds, of unusually well dressed men. The videos are a bit unusual too, as the camera lingers on the suit at least as much as the speaker. You can watch me below:




The interview is also here:
https://www.brioni.com/us/legendary-minds-alvin-roth_section.

 Here are some of the accompanying stills:

********************
And here is the full set of Brioni Legendary Minds interviews to date:
https://www.brioni.com/us/legendary-minds_section

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As you might imagine, econ profs do fashion shoots all the time. Here are the stills from a slightly different one, involving clothing crafted by and for Stanford students, organized by Nina Buchmann, and featuring Muriel Niederle and myself, and Doug Bernheim.

Podcast on non-directed kidney donation as an act of effective altruism

Here's a very personal discussion  about becoming a non-directed donor.

The Neoliberal Podcast

Donating a Kidney with Dylan Matthews

"Jeremiah sits down with Dylan Matthews of Vox.com to discuss his decision to donate a kidney to a stranger, and Jeremiah's plans to do the same.  While our previous episode with Nobel prize winner Alvin Roth explored the economics of kidney markets and the details of kidney policy, this episode dives more deeply into the medical and personal side of deciding to donate a kidney."
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Dylan Matthews has his own podcast, called Future Perfect.

Stanford Urology Grand Rounds

I'll be speaking this evening at the medical school, to urologists, about kidney exchange.

Headlines that could be dated April 1

Green-haired turtle that breathes through its genitals added to endangered list
With its punky green mohican the striking Mary river turtle joins a new ZSL list of the world’s most vulnerable reptiles

***********

Clipping Study of Male Organ Size
Professor halts study on link between size and self-esteem, saying publicity hurt her effort.

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Sorry, Dutch Pastafarians, but you still can’t wear a colander on your government ID ... yet

"De Wilde, 32, is a Dutch law student who subscribes to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism. But this week, the Netherlands' Council of State determined that her belief system doesn’t count as religion and thus rejected request to keep the pasta strainer on her head in her government ID photos."
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Maine officials say getting lobsters stoned with marijuana before killing them is illegal
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Florida gas station owner’s microwave sign: ‘Do not warm urine’
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Indian airport police told to cut down on smiling
"They will move from a "broad smile system" to a "sufficient smile system", the Indian Express says."
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10 stomachs, 32 brains and 18 testicles – a day inside the UK's only leech farm
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US troops drink Iceland capital’s entire beer supply in one weekend
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Woman ticketed for not holding escalator handrail to be heard by Supreme Court [Canada]
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Blind creature that buries head in sand named after Donald Trump
"A newly discovered blind and burrowing amphibian is to be officially named Dermophis donaldtrumpi, in recognition of the US president’s climate change denial."
*****************

Tesla Model 3 driver again dies in crash with trailer, Autopilot not yet ruled out
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A Doping Scandal In Bridge? The World's Top Player Fails Drug Test
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French couple barred from calling son Griezmann Mbappe after football heroes
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World’s Most Expensive Perfume Available for US$1.3 Million
"Dubbed SHUMUKH (meaning “deserving the highest” in Arabic), the unisex perfume sits in a bottle adorned with 3,571 diamonds (totaling 38.55 carats) and other pieces of gold, silver, pearls, and topaz, and it can be customized with even further jewels, according to the company.
The perfume is currently on display at The Dubai Mall through March 30."

Repugnance in the runup to elections

Primary elections give political hopefuls a chance to try out their views on many things, including controversial transactions and markets, that some find repugnant.  The many potential Democratic candidates should give us an opportunity to hear about some of those (although none of them are likely to be part of platforms in the general election...)

Here's a CNN headline that cuts to the chase:

Drugs, sex work and gambling embraced by 2020 hopefuls
"A Democrat wants to legalize sex work. A Republican governor is trying to legalize sports betting in his state. The vast majority of Democrats running for President want to legalize marijuana.
...
"The effort led by Sen. Cory Booker to legalize marijuana doesn't really even feel that controversial. Not all of his potential rivals for the Democratic primary have signed on, but most have.
...
"Sen. Kamala Harris supports legalizing sex work, which she discussed with the website The Root, complaining that current law ends up hurting women more than johns and pimps who can benefit from prostitution.
"When you're talking about consenting adults, you know, yes, we should consider that we can't criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed," she said."
...

"A 2018 Supreme Court decision cleared the way and among those pushing for sports betting is Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican successful in a blue state and who has publicly teased a primary challenge to Trump.

"The odds are good that we're going to have sports betting," Hogan joked in January."

Memorial service for Martin Shubik today at Yale

I'm in New Orleans today, which I think Martin would have enjoyed, but if you are in New Haven, here's the Yale announcement:

Memorial service for economist Martin Shubik to be held March 30

"A service honoring the life of the late economist Martin Shubik will be held on Saturday, March 30 at 11:30 a.m., at the Graduate Club at 155 Elm St.  

Shubik, who died on Aug. 22 at the age of 92, was the Seymour H. Knox Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Institutional Economics at the Yale School of Management. He had been on the Yale faculty since 1963, specializing in game theory, defense analysis, and the theory of money and financial institutions.

Memories and photographs of Shubik can be posted here for display at the memorial service.

Donations in Shubik’s memory may be made to the Inclusion Body Myositis Registry at Yale. "

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

Here is a brief July 2018 "Apologia" that Martin apparently wrote shortly before  his death in August:

APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA: THE VANISHING OF THE WHITE WHALE IN THE MISTS
Martin Shubik, July 2018

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Here is my earlier post:

Thursday, August 23, 2018  Martin Shubik, 1926-2018

Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) 2019 in New Orleans, March 28-30

As the last stop on a lecture tour at four Southern locations this week, I'm looking forward to participating this afternoon and tomorrow in the PPE 2019 conference.

I hope to both hear about familiar topics from unfamiliar angles, and to hear about new and wonderful things in the intersection of P,P and E.

Here is the whole program, and here are some Friday and Saturday sessions I'm already looking forward to (airline arrivals permitting...):

Friday
2pm
Fairness in Voluntary Exchanges
Eric MacGilvray, Moderator
Participants:
“Bargaining Based Fairness,” Ben Ferguson
“Exploitation and Unfair Pricing,” Matthew Zwolinski
“Democratic Exchange,” Thomas Christiano
Room: Storyville I

4pm
Political Philosophy Meets Experimental Philosophy
Nick Cowan, Moderator
Participants:
“Gender Equality in the Australian Workplace,” Holly Lawford-Smith
“Feasibility and Normative Encroachment,” Nicholas Southwood
“The Social Epistemology of Political Discourse: A Case Study Using Twitter
Activity,” Mark Alfano
Room: Storyville I

Saturday
9am
Matching Mechanisms and Algorithmic Fairness in Policy Design
Alex Schaefer, Moderator
Participants: “Unenviable Matches, Priorities, and Preferences: A Case Study of Matching Mechanisms,” Zoe Hitzig
“Preferential Mistreatment: Against Group Preference-Based Algorithmic Fairness,”
Lily Hu“Bridging the ‘Normative Gap’: Matching Mechanisms and Social Justice,” Kate Vredenburgh
Room: Buddy Bolden 28

2pm

Repugnant Markets

Ann Cudd, Moderator

Participants: “Does Paid Plasma Crowd-out Unpaid Blood Donations?” Peter Jaworski andWilliam English

“Paying for Plasma: Commodification, Exploitation, and Profit,” Vida Panitch and L. Chad Horne

“Paying for Kidneys? A Randomized Survey and Choice Experiment,” Nicola Lacetera

Room: Mahalia B

and here's my talk, just before drinks:

6-7 Repugnant Transactions and Forbidden Markets

Al Roth, Keynote Speaker

Room: Storyville I/II 

"My evolution as an economist," at Trinity University in San Antonio

I'll be speaking at Trinity University today. Here's the announcement:

NOBEL ECONOMIST LECTURE: ALVIN E. ROTH, 
THU MAR 28,  7:30PM,  ​TRINITY UNIVERSITY

And here's an accompanying news story by by Danyal Tahseen ‘19.

Nobel Prize Economist to Discuss Stable Allocations and Market Design
Alvin E. Roth to present at Trinity’s Nobel Economist Lecture Series

"Alvin E. Roth is the co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics along with his colleague, Lloyd S. Shapley. As part of Trinity University’s Nobel Economist Lecture Series, Roth will speak on Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 7:30 p.m. in the Stieren Theater, located in the Ruth Taylor Theater Building. Seating is on a first-come, first-seated basis; tickets or reservations are not required.

"His free and public presentation is a continuation of Trinity’s ongoing Nobel Economist Lecture Series, “My Evolution as an Economist.” The series was started in 1984 by the late E.M. Stevens Distinguished Professor of Economics William Breit."
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In connection with the lecture, I'll be contributing an essay to the 7th edition of the MIT Press volume Lives of the Laureates, Edited by Roger W. Spencer and David A. Macpherson.

David Kaserman Memorial Lecture at Auburn University

Today I'll present a lecture in honor of David Kaserman, an Auburn U. economist who fought a long struggle with kidney disease, and who also wrote about the shortage of transplantable kidneys, and about how this was related to the legal ban on compensation for donors.


Kaserman Memorial Lecture in Economics

"On Wednesday, March 27th, the Department of Economics will present the David Kaserman Memorial Lecture, a program in honor of Professor Dave Kaserman. The annual lecture is sponsored by an endowment established in Professor Kaserman's memory. This year our speaker is one of the world’s leading intellectuals, Harvard and Stanford professor Al Roth, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2012. The lecture is at 2 PM in the auditorium of the JCS Museum, and is open to the public.  Roth will speak on his work on the kidney shortage..."

Congratulations to Claudia Goldin: BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

Here are the first two paragraphs of the announcement...

The BBVA Foundation recognizes Claudia Goldin for pioneering economic analysis of the gender gap
"The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category has gone in this eleventh edition to the American economic historian Claudia Goldin “for her groundbreaking contributions to the historical analysis of the role of women in the economy, and for her analysis of the reasons behind gender inequality.”

"Goldin “is credited with founding the field of empirical analysis of the gender gap,” remarked the committee on announcing its decision, starting with her seminal 1990 publication Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. This hugely influential book examined the roots of wage inequality between men and women, questioning the conventional explanations.

Game theory symposium at Kennesaw State

I'll be speaking at Kennesaw State University in Georgia this morning (and spending this week giving a set of lectures elsewhere in the South). Here's a link:

Symposium on the Foundations and Applications of Game Theory with Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth
Organized by the Bagwell Center for the Study of Markets and Economic Opportunity
Tuesday, March 26, 2019, Kennesaw State University, Prillaman Hall 1000

Speakers:

James Boudreau, Assistant Professor of Economics, Kennesaw State University
Sean Ellermeyer, Professor of Mathematics, Kennesaw State University
Brett Katzman, Professor of Economics, Kennesaw State University
Timothy Mathews, Professor of Economics, Kennesaw State University
Alvin Roth, Professor of Economics, Stanford University

Presentations:

“Overview of Game Theory”
"Solution Concepts for Non-Cooperative Games"
"Repeated Non-Cooperative Games"
"A Case Study in Cooperative Game Theory: The Stable Matching Problem"
“Who Gets What – And Why”

Schedule:

• Session I  8:45am - 9:15am 
  
• Session II 9:30am - 10:45am 
  
• Session III 11:00am - 12:15pm