I had the pleasure of hearing Lisa Vesterlund talk about her new book, The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart.
Friday, May 13, 2022
The No Club, by Babcock, Peyser, Vesterlund and Weingart
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Medical residents organize to bargain collectively
Medpage has the story:
A Tale of Two Hospitals: Resident Mistreatment and Exploitation— The pandemic has ignited a wave of resident unionization by Jessie Ge, MD, and Rayyan Kamal, MD
Stanford Health Care
"In December 2020, Stanford Health Care rolled out a COVID-19 vaccination plan that excluded nearly all 1,400-plus resident and fellow physicians from eligibility. For the residents and fellows who had been working tirelessly at the frontlines of the pandemic, this was the last straw. In our view, this didn't appear to be a one-time mistake of some algorithm, but a continued pattern of employer neglect and exploitation of our labor. That's when we knew we had to start organizing for real power.
"A little over a year later, on February 22, 2022, we had gathered supermajority support from our co-workers to unionize with the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR). However, our request for voluntary recognition from Stanford was denied. In the face of potential anti-union tactics from Stanford, we communicated through our own website and tweetorials, re-centering our mission for a meaningful voice and focusing on widespread support, not only from our own residents, but also from our local elected officials and other labor unions.
"The Stanford nurses were some of our biggest supporters -- we shared a need for better working conditions to deliver better patient care. They have been unionized for over 50 years, and their collective strength protected them from being stretched even thinner during the pandemic. ... Despite a tough employer campaign to defeat our union, we won our election 835 to 214 this week.
...
Greater Lawrence Family Health Center
"On March 15, 2022, we officially won our union. While the hospital's efforts did manage to turn a few who had initially supported the union, 72% of our unit voted in favor of CIR in an election where every single resident participated. A 100% turnout rate is unprecedented even in a small program. It speaks volumes to how connected we've become throughout this process. We are in solidarity with house staff everywhere going public, filing for unionization, and taking the next step toward social progress and justice for academic medicine.
"While we don't know where this new movement in resident unionization will ultimately lead, we know we're headed in the right direction. Doctors are people too and we must rehumanize medicine for everyone -- both our patients and the people who make hospitals run.
"Jessie Ge, MD, is a fourth-year urology resident at Stanford Health Care. Rayyan Kamal, MD, is a second-year family medicine resident at Greater Lawrence Family Health Center.
****************
Related:
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Surrogacy in wartime Ukraine
The NY Times follows the war-disrupted surrogacy market in Ukraine, where in addition to the normal surrogacy issues, surrogates have to decide whether to deliver in Ukraine or in Poland (where surrogacy isn't recognized), and parents have to decide whether to attend the birth in Lviv or wait for the baby in Poland. It's tough stuff, for both surrogates and parents. I'll just excerpt some of the background information on surrogacy.
"After a friend of hers worked as a surrogate, Maryna started considering the possibility. Ukrainian law required that women who would be hired as surrogates had already successfully given birth, and she had two healthy daughters. By helping another family, she hoped to buy a home, a goal that would otherwise have been a significant stretch for her and her husband, who worked on cars. On Aug. 21, she was impregnated with two embryos for a couple in North America. Surrogates for Delivering Dreams typically earn around $18,000 a year, but because she was pregnant with twins, she would be paid a bonus of several thousand more. In Ukraine, a typical schoolteacher would make less than a quarter of that over the course of a year.
...
"Delivering Dreams, Kersch-Kibler’s agency, celebrates, in its name, the meaningful benefit of surrogacy to both parties in the arrangement — for the parents, the gift of a biological child; for the surrogate mother, a potentially life-altering sum of money. That arrangement is also, however, a business contract, which entails, for the expectant women, a job — one with managers, rules, oversight and risks to their physical health.
"Even as reproductive technology has advanced, the number of countries that explicitly permit international paid surrogacy has dropped. Opponents of the practice argue that the transactional arrangement commodifies one of the most profound human experiences, the birth of a child. Feminists tend to divide on the ethical issue of surrogacy, with some seeing in the practice a means of financial autonomy, and others perceiving it, especially in less-developed countries, as a kind of reproductive coercion: Could a woman really be said to have choice in deciding to become a surrogate, if doing so was the only way to lift her family out of poverty?
"Concerns about trafficking and exploitation led India to pass a law in 2019 that officially shut down what was once, according to a 2012 estimate, a $2.3 billion surrogacy industry. Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal also once served as frequent destinations for foreigners seeking paid surrogates until those countries, too, legally restricted the practice.
"In those countries, as in many others, the only form of surrogacy allowed is among nationals, provided that no compensation is received. Altruistic surrogacy — in which only pregnancy-related expenses are covered — is legal in countries like England and the Netherlands; in heavily Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Spain, the intended parents of children born to surrogates often face challenges claiming their legal rights as parents, despite a European Court of Human Rights decision, finalized in 2019, that recognized children’s inherent right to belong to their biological families. In other countries, like Argentina and Albania, the law does not address the issue one way or another, diminishing the market for commercial surrogacy, as the ambiguity leaves all parties vulnerable in the event of a dispute. In the United States, legal protections vary state by state: Some states, like Illinois and California, allow surrogacy contracts; others do not recognize surrogacy contracts but do provide for judicial recognition of intended parents’ claims to children born with the help of a surrogate. In Michigan, paying a woman to be a surrogate is a felony.
...
"Since various countries have restricted international surrogacy, agencies have rushed in to take advantage of Ukraine’s relatively well regulated market. One Ukrainian embryologist has estimated that before the war, roughly 3,200 implantations were performed in the country each year — creating, through the fees and also the associated tourism, a new, thriving economic sector. Typically, parents who opt for surrogacy fly into the country and work with a local clinic, conceiving embryos that are subsequently implanted in the wombs of Ukrainian women whom they have interviewed (usually by video call) or chosen from descriptions the agency provides. In some, but not all, cases, the parents choose to build a relationship with the woman carrying their child, texting regularly, even flying in to visit her; almost always, the parents fly back into the country nine months later, either to be there for the birth, if all parties agree, or to receive their newborn and take the child back home.
"Even under the best of circumstances, the arrangement can be fraught. Now, Ukraine’s surrogates are working under the worst of circumstances, forcing everyone involved — agencies, intended parents and surrogates — to make decisions based on imperfect information regarding matters of life and death. The starkness of war has laid bare the many ethical tensions that exist in surrogacy arrangements, casting into bold relief the power dynamics that underlie a contract in which a woman signs over the whole of her physical self.
(Mis)Matching airmen to bases
The Military Times has this story, suggesting that the Air Force still has lots of room to improve it's internal matching procedures:
Air Force to end preferred basing for enlisted as it changes how airmen find new jobs. By Rachel S. Cohen
"The Air Force this month will suspend its 4-year-old “base of preference” program for airmen who are on at least their second enlistment contract, saying it fails to send most applicants to the installations they want.
"Stopping the initiative at the end of May can also offer the service more flexibility to move airmen around as military staffing needs dictate.
The change affects “career airmen,” or those who have reenlisted at least once. They previously needed to spend at least four years in their jobs before leaving for a preferred base.
...
"That success rate would have been way higher if we actually had a resource where your standard airman could easily see what bases had openings/low manning, without having to have your [senior enlisted leader] ask your [career field manager] (who probably gets pinged about that at least once a week from people all over the world),” Reddit user JustHangInThere wrote April 28."
**********
Here's a post from 2020 about a NAS report that offered some suggestions on how to improve Air Force matching of personnel to bases and jobs:
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Repugnance and market design in translation: video and transcript (en español, en argentina)
I recently was interviewed by Jorge Fontevecchia via Zoom in Argentina. Among other things, we spoke (in English) about how both markets and bans on markets need social support to work well. You can listen to the interview as it was broadcast on Argentine tv, in Spanish translation, with voice-over (i.e. you can only hear me vaguely in the background, and a Spanish speaking lady's voice conveys my answers...).
A Spanish transcript is here:
When I look at the result in Google Translate, the back-translation produces some unexpected results (as well as the expected result that "repugnance" comes back as "disgust." Here's an example of a funny Q&A involving the dual meanings of the Spanish word "tiempo":
How does the passage of time affect the markets?
“Weather affects markets in many ways..."
But here's a Q&A that back-translated well enough to get the gist (modulo some pronouns):
Do you think that whenever there is a transaction involving money, what is being exchanged automatically becomes an object or thing because there is money involved?
“I don't agree with that at all. He's probably getting paid to do this interview that he's doing, but his employer is paying him because he's an expert journalist and interviewer. And sadly, I'm not getting paid for this interview, but you and I are no less human. There is nothing about the transaction that you are not doing as part of your job, and I do it just for fun. Nothing in that transaction makes one of us more or less human. When I think of merchandise [commodities], I think of things that are not different from each other. If I were a baker and I wanted to buy wheat I could buy it at a commodity market, it has all sorts of descriptive terms, we make bread with number two hard red winter wheat, that's a complete description. I don't have to care which farmer you buy it from because it has been well described. But when you want to hire a baker in your bakery, you don't just hire a baker because they are not commodities. You have to find a particular person that you want to hire and you don't make an offer to the general market saying, I want 5 thousand bushels of wheat, but to a particular person saying, I want to hire you. That doesn't depersonalize the market at all."
***********
Update:
Here's a Portugese translation, on which Google translate also works reasonably well:
Monday, May 9, 2022
School choice with outside options , by Akbarpour, Kapor, Neilson, van Dijk, and Zimmerman in J.Pub.E.
One of the differences between market design and the theoretical mechanism design literature is that in mechanism design, the theorist creates the whole universe of strategies available to participants, while in practical market design, the marketplace being designed is part of some larger economic environment, which gives the participants potentially bigger strategy sets.
Here's a paper that takes that point of view with respect to school choice. In the empirical part of the paper, a switch from a manipulable immediate acceptance algorithm to a strategy proof deferred acceptance algorithm influences families with an outside option (a guaranteed continuation in the school where they are enrolled in pre-kindergarten) differently from families without that safe option. When the manipulable algorithm is used, families without an outside option often find it too risky to compete for scarce spaces in the most desirable schools, which they can safely do when the strategy proof algorithm is employed.
Centralized School choice with unequal outside options by Mohammad Akbarpour, Adam Kapor, Christopher Neilson, Winnie van Dijk, Seth Zimmerman, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 210, June 2022, 104644
Abstract: We study how market design choices exacerbate or mitigate pre-existing inequalities among participants. We introduce outside options in a well-known school choice model, and show that students always prefer manipulable over strategy-proof mechanisms if and only if they have an outside option. We test for the proposed relationship between outside options and manipulability in a setting where we can identify students’ outside options and observe applications under two mechanisms. Consistent with theory, students with an outside option are more likely to list popular, highly-rated schools under the Boston mechanism, and this gap disappears after switching to a Deferred Acceptance mechanism.
*******
Related earlier posts:
Monday, January 28, 2019
And here's a post about a paper that takes outside options seriously from a different point of view.
Monday, December 14, 2020
Sunday, May 8, 2022
Signaling for Otolaryngology residency programs
Here's a report on the use of signaling for residency positions, from the Oto match.
Pletcher, Steven, Chang, C.W., Thorne, Marc, MD, MPH & Malekzadeh, Sonya. (2022). The Otolaryngology Residency Program Preference Signaling Experience. Academic Medicine, 97, 664-668. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000004441
"The average applicant to Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery in the 2021 residency application cycle applied to more than 50% of otolaryngology programs nationwide, submitting 77 applications, 1 a 34% increase over 5 years. 2 This surge has made it difficult for residency programs to holistically review applications and has limited opportunities for applicants to stand out to programs of particular interest.
...
"A formal preference signaling process provides all applicants with access to a known and stable quantity of signals. Through this process, at the time of application submission, students send a signal to indicate to a defined number of residency programs their particular interest in those programs. Such signals allow students to stand out to their favored programs and allow programs to receive a list of highly interested applicants. To our knowledge, this approach has not been used previously in the residency application process. Yet, articles advocating for signaling exist in the otolaryngology literature, 5-7 and the methodology, rationale, and results of preference signaling for graduates of economics PhD programs applying for faculty positions have been described. 8
"An OPDO working group, comprising the 4 authors, drove the establishment of a signaling process. In the spring of 2020, we held a series of meetings and webinars to engage stakeholders in the development and implementation of a signaling process. We included students, program directors, and specialty societies, such as the Society of University Otolaryngologists and the Association of Academic Departments of Otolaryngology Otolaryngology Chairs Organization. Additional discussions with the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), and the National Resident Matching Program also took place.
"In hindsight, establishing consensus across stakeholders proved to be the most challenging hurdle to successful implementation of our signaling process. Stakeholders had to accept this change and the inherent risks of implementing a "never before in medicine" process. These discussions, however, also provided a critical opportunity to refine our proposal and create an educational ecosystem that accepted this signaling process.
...
"All otolaryngology residency programs attested to the code of conduct, and none opted out of the signaling process. By October 21, 2020, the date that applications were released to programs, 611 students had submitted applications to otolaryngology residency programs, 559 applicants had submitted a Match list including an otolaryngology program, and 558 applicants had participated in the signaling process. Of 119 non-military otolaryngology residency programs, 118 received at least 1 signal. The number of signals received per program ranged from 0 to 71 with a mean of 22 (standard deviation 17) and a median of 16
...
"Program directors most commonly reported using signals as a tiebreaker for similar applications and as part of an initial application review algorithm. One program required a signal to offer an applicant an interview.
...
"Applicants reported applying to a mean of 77 programs (standard deviation 21), including their 5 signaled programs. The rate of receiving an interview offer was significantly higher for signaled programs (58%, 670/1,150) compared with both nonsignaled programs (14%, 2,394/16,520; P < .001) and the comparative nonsignal program (23%, 53/230; P < .001; see Figure 2). To assess the impact of signaling across the spectrum of applicant competitiveness, we divided applicants into quartiles based on their overall likelihood of receiving an interview offer. Signals had a significant impact (P < .001) on interview offers across all quartiles (see Figure 3).
...
"The magnitude of signal impact we found likely represents both an increased rate of interview offers from signaled programs and a decreased rate of interview offers from nonsignaled programs. In contrast to our 5 signals, the American Economic Association provides 2 signals for graduates of economics PhD programs applying for faculty positions, suggesting that signal scarcity preserves its value and intent. 8 Decreasing the number of signals would force applicants to narrow their list of programs of primary interest and would disincentivize signaling "dream" programs. By increasing the number of signals, the lack of a signal becomes an indication of disinterest. If enough signals are provided, signaling could have a similar impact on the application process as an application cap. The ideal number of signals then must be explored.
"Our data demonstrated that signaling allowed applicants to influence their likelihood of receiving an interview offer from programs of particular interest. Given the distribution of signals received across programs, we believe that signaling also improved the distribution of interview offers among applicants, which could mitigate interview hoarding.
...
"While applicants appear to benefit significantly from signaling, they also bear the responsibility of targeting their signals appropriately.
...
"Multiple specialties have expressed interest in adopting a similar program. However, otolaryngology is not representative of all medical or surgical specialties. It is a small, competitive surgical subspecialty with a 63% Match rate and no unmatched residency slots in the 2021 cycle. While the impact of signaling may vary significantly outside of these parameters, we are optimistic that the benefits will carry over to other specialties. Incorporating a signaling option within ERAS would facilitate both wide adoption and further analysis of such a process."
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Streets of Gold, by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
Ran Abramitzky writes:
As
some of you know, I have a book coming out soon (with my long-time collaborator
Leah
Boustan) using big data to tell a new story about
immigration and the American Dream.
I’m
thrilled to announce that Streets of Gold:
America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success will
be published at the end of the month by PublicAffairs with preorders
(hardcover and Kindle) available now. Audio book is also coming soon.
Leah and I felt compelled to write this book because we believe that immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American public life. Most of the things that we believe about immigration – both on the left and on the right – are based largely in myth, not in facts.
In
setting out to establish the facts, we were like curious grandchildren
searching for our own family tree, but a million times over. We analyzed
millions of immigrant families in the past and today. What we found surprised
us, overturning many of our own preconceptions.
- Upward
Mobility: Children of immigrants from
nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better
economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has
held for more than a century.
- Rapid
Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of
assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually
assimilate fastest.
- Improved
Economy: Immigration changes the economy
in unexpected positive ways.
The
book is a fast read, and
we interweave the data with stories of immigrant
families.
I
would truly appreciate your help leading up to the book’s launch. If you are
interested in buying a copy, think about pre-ordering now.
Preorders are essential for raising the visibility of new books. Please also
share the word with other friends and family who are interested in America’s immigration
history.
Thank
you!
Ran
P.S. the book got some
great endorsements (pasting here shortened versions):
“This
wonderful and highly readable book sets the record straight about the
hot-button issue of immigration. A must-read for anyone who care about this
important issue.”
Daron Acemoglu, MIT, coauthor of Why
Nations Fail
“A
compelling story about how millions of immigrant families achieved the American
Dream that will help reshape the narrative about immigration and opportunity in
the United States.”
Raj Chetty, Harvard University
“Uplifting
in its message, engaging in its composition, and powerful in its significance,
Streets of Gold is A New World Symphony in words and numbers.”
Claudia Goldin, Harvard University
“Streets
of Gold has the facts about the amazing and often surprising history of
American immigration.”
Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate in
economics
“A
gem of a book, grounded in deep original research and made lively by moving
personal accounts”
Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureate in economics
“A
highly engaging book that separates fact and fiction and busts many of the
myths that pervade the current discussion on immigration policy.”
Guido Imbens,
Nobel Laureate in economics
“Unprecedented
data, empathetic personal histories, joyous writing, practical solutions and a
compelling counter-Zeitgeist narrative.”
David Laitin, Stanford University
“The
optimism that runs through Streets of Gold is based on rock
solid-evidence.”
Doug
Massey, Princeton University
“Armed
with reams of new data, elegantly written, and meticulously researched, Streets
of Gold is as timely as it is magisterial.”
Joel Mokyr, Northwestern
University
“Fascinating
and hard to put down history of American immigration, based on new sources of
data, and conveyed by powerful story-telling”
Alvin E. Roth, Nobel laureate in economics
“Pathbreaking.”
Andrew Selee, President, Migration Policy
Institute
“An
absolute treasure, the perfect book on immigration.”
Zack Weinersmith, New York Times
Bestselling author of Soonish
Drought, hunger, and early marriage in Ethiopia
Sometimes the problem is hunger, and early marriage is seen as the solution.
The Guardian has the story
"Three consecutive failed rainy seasons have brought hunger, malnutrition and mass displacement to millions of people in the Horn of Africa, including parts of Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti.
"Many girls in Ethiopia now face being married at a young age as their parents seek to find extra resources through dowries from the husband’s family, and hope their daughters will be fed and protected by wealthier families, warned Catherine Russell, Unicef’s executive director.
...
"In the East Hararghe zone, home to 2.7 million people, child marriage cases increased by 51%, from 70 recorded during a six-month period in 2020-21 to 106 in the same period a year later.
"It was just one of six drought-affected areas in Oromia to have seen a sharp rise in child marriages, Unicef said. Across those zones, cases have almost quadrupled. According to data received by Unicef this week, 672 cases of child marriage were recorded between February and August last year, whereas in the six months from last September to March this year, that number leapt to 2,282, local government figures showed.
"“We’re seeing increases in child marriage that are quite dramatic,” Russell said, noting that more than 600,000 children are thought to have dropped out of school as a result of the drought.
...
“These people [have their daughters married] because they’re desperate for one reason or another: they’re afraid of violence; they’re afraid for the safety of the girls; they need resources; they can’t afford to feed them,” Russell said.
...
"According to demographic data from 2016, 40% of girls in the east African country are married before the age of 18 and 14% are married before their 15th birthday.
...
"The drought is also pushing up the rates of severe acute malnutrition in the affected areas, with admission rates for children under five years old 15% higher in February this year than February last year."
Friday, May 6, 2022
Repugnant trade in (and study of) fossils
Who should be allowed to export, study and display important fossils?
Nature has the story:
How a Brazilian dinosaur sparked a movement to decolonize fossil science. Rather than excitement, the discovery of the species set off a Latin American movement to stop colonial palaeontology. by Mariana Lenharo & Meghie Rodrigues
"In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the palaeontology community1. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named Ubirajara jubatus — the first dinosaur found in the Southern Hemisphere to display what were probably precursors to modern feathers. The 110-million-year-old fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier — but no Brazilian palaeontologist had ever heard of it. The authors of the paper were from Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
"It was the latest instance of what some researchers now call palaeontological colonialism, in which scientists from wealthy nations obtain specimens from low- and middle-income countries without involving local researchers, and then store the fossils abroad. The practice can sometimes be illegal. For instance, according to Brazilian law, the country’s fossils belong to the state, although the authors of the Ubirajara paper say that they had a permit signed by a Brazilian mining official allowing them to export the specimen.
...
"The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontological Museum in Santana do Cariri, Brazil, near where U. jubatus was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”
...
"Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists, who is based in Edinburgh, UK, and has studied the illegal fossil trade in China, says that the scientific community has been aware of issues related to colonial palaeontology for some time — but the debate in the past few years has brought the discussion to a broader audience.
...
"In July, a panel will discuss scientific colonialism at the virtual Latin American Congress of Vertebrate Paleontology. The goal, according to Cisneros, is to promote true cooperation between palaeontologists. “We don’t want researchers from other countries to stop working here. What we hope for is that partnerships are more equitable and reciprocal. And that our laws are respected, as we respect the laws of other countries.”
...
"Minjin strongly advocates that fossils remain in their places of origin. “In Mongolia, fossils have been out of the country for the last 100 years,” she says. “Now we are facing an issue: how to find the next generation of scientists?” When children don’t grow up seeing fossils as part of their heritage and aren’t exposed to knowledge that excites them, she says, there is little motivation to become scientists."
************
I'm reminded of restrictions on the export of cultural treasures such as works of art. Here are some earlier posts...:
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Thursday, May 5, 2022
The Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, Led by Michael Kremer
Here's the announcement from Chicago:
The Becker Friedman Institute’s Development Economics Center is pleased to announce the launch of the Development Innovation Lab at UChicago. The launch will take place during Innovation and Development Week, to be held April 25-29 on the University of Chicago campus.
...
DIL’s team of professional researchers are actively engaged in cutting-edge research, including a new meta-analysis finding that water treatment reduces the odds of child mortality (death before age five) by about 30%. Drawing from this historic work, GiveWell recently announced its decision to recommend a grant of $64.7 million in new spending on water treatment, which could save thousands of lives.
“The University of Chicago’s commitment to development economics, through the launch of the Development Innovation Lab provides a tremendous opportunity to develop new knowledge on ways to address global poverty and ultimately to expand economic opportunity and improve lives,” said Kremer. “I look forward to helping build and grow the development economics community at UChicago and to advancing new research and experimentation to address a range of social and economic challenges.”
"Kremer was among the first economists to evaluate interventions in developing countries through randomized control trials. In 1998, he started a project on deworming in Kenya that has since improved the lives of millions of people. By randomizing treatments for intestinal worms at the school level, he and his collaborators found that their research initiative reduced student absenteeism by a quarter—and even carried positive outcomes to neighboring schools. Subsequent work also found that deworming had long-run impacts, leading to higher labor supply for men and more education for women.
"In addition to that research, Kremer helped develop the advance market commitment, proposing the idea of a contract that would guarantee a viable market for a costly product. Such commitments have stimulated private investment in vaccine research and the distribution of vaccines for diseases in the developing world."
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplants May 7, 2022 (online webinar hosted at U. Chicago)
Yesterday I posted about the increasing incidence and prevalence of end stage renal disease.
On Saturday I'll be taking part in a medical education webinar, open to the general public, on avenues to increase the availability of safe, ethical and legal kidney transplants. Some will find it controversial*, even repugnant, since one of the big topics is the ethics of compensating kidney donors. (I'll be talking about some of the incremental improvements that have been and can be pursued while that discussion goes on. Some of those have also had to overcome some opposition...)
There's an all-star cast of speakers.
The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplants
May 7, 2022; Virtual; Admission Is Free (join at the link above)
7AM-10 AM (PDT); 9AM-12Noon (CDT); 10AM-1PM (EDT)
Session 1: Ethics of Gifting or Compensation of Donors |
| |||
Topic |
Presenter (s) |
Comments | Time (mins.) | |
Item | Cu mul. | |||
Ethics of Compensating (“Rewarding”) Donors | Janet Radcliffe Richards | World renown philosopher/ethicist. (Oxford). Book: the ethics of transplants why careless thought costs lives |
30 |
30 |
Questions, Comments, and Recap Session 1 | CON: Asif Sharfuddin M.D. FASN FAST PRO: Sally Satel M.D. M.S. |
30 |
60 | |
Session 2: Living Donor Transplant Issues |
|
| ||
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Compensating (“Rewarding” Kidney Donors | Frank McCormick Ph.D. | How the Government Can End the Kidney Shortage and Save More than 40,000 Kidney Failure Patients Each Year by Compensating Living Kidney Donors. Total economic value to kidney recipients is $76B/yr. Net savings to the taxpayers is $7B/yr. |
15 |
75 |
Current Status and Future Developments in Kidney Exchange Programs | Alvin Roth, Ph.D. Nobel Laurette | Living donor organs are being increasingly allocated by paired and exchange organ programs; This is the only major technical improvement in transplantation in years; |
15 |
90 |
Session 2: Living Donor Transplant Issues Cont’d | ||||
Decreasing Barriers and Increasing Access for Living Donation | Cody Maynard; Independent Living Donor Advocate (NKDO) | Immediate actions we can take to increase the pool of living donors. |
10 |
100 |
Discussion and Recap of Session 2 (John Fung, M.D, Ph.D.) |
10 |
110 | ||
Break |
10 |
120 | ||
Session 3: More Living Donor Transplant Issues | ||||
Experiences of a Living Kidney Donor; | Martha Gershun, MBA | Author of a recent book with J.D. Lantos MD: Kidney to Share. |
10 |
130 |
U.S. Public Attitudes Towards Compensating Donors |
Thomas Peters M.D. | Two peer reviewed studies show that 70% of US population support compensating donors $50K. |
10 |
140 |
Risk and Safeguards for Living Donors | Arthur Matas, M.D., Ph.D. | Screening donors is essential. Risks are small but not zero. |
15 |
155 |
The Limits of Increased Counts of Deceased Donor Transplants | John P. Roberts M.D. | Ignorance is common: Increasing the Deceased Donor pool is constrained by the limits of brain- dead donors; <2% of U.S. deaths. |
10 |
165 |
WaitList Zero’s role in Living Donation | Josh Morrison J.D.; Founder of WaitList Zero | “Thanks for helping us, we were lost!” comment by a recipient, pointing to the need for education regarding living donors. | 10 | 175 |
Discussion and Recap Session 3 (Thomas Peters M.D.) |
10 |
185 | ||
Recap and Summary of the Symposium Glenn Chertow M.D., MPH |
20 |
205 | ||
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