Gale and Shapley '62, “College admissions and the stability of marriage” at 60

 Time really flies, doesn't it? 

Here's a paper whose title didn't give away what it was about:

Bipartite choices, by Marco LiCalzi, Decisions in Economics and Finance (2022)

 Abstract This piece in the Milestones series is dedicated to the paper coauthored by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley and published in 1962 under the title “College admissions and the stability of marriage” on the American Mathematical Monthly.

LiCalzi's history of events since Gale and Shapley '62 is easy to read, and touches on many papers that will be familiar to readers of this blog.

He ends, however, with a long quote I had never seen before from  The Poverty of Historicism by Karl Popper (1957), which he suggests captures the spirit of much of market design:

“Just as the main task of the physical engineer is to design machines and to remodel and service them, the task of the piecemeal social engineer is to design social institutions, and to reconstruct and run those already in existence. The piecemeal technologist or engineer recognizes that only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed while the vast majority have just ‘grown’, as the undesigned results of human actions. [...] The technologist should study the differences as well as the similarities, expressing his results in the form of hypotheses. And indeed, it is not difficult to formulate hypotheses about institutions in technological form as is shown by the following example: “You cannot construct foolproof institutions, that is to say, institutions whose functioning does not very largely depend upon persons: institutions, at best, can reduce the uncertainty of the personal element, by assisting those who work for the aims for which the institutions are designed, and on whose personal initiative and knowledge success largely depends. (Institutions are like fortresses. They must be well designed and properly manned.)”