Perils of podcasting

 I had a stimulating 3 hour discussion with famed podcaster Lawrence Krauss a few days ago, about my forthcoming book Moral Economics.  Almost immediately after we concluded, it turned out that neither of us had recorded it. (We did a  shorter makeup later.)

 Here's his tweet on that:

Lawrence M. Krauss   @LKrauss1

Today my podcast worst nightmare happened.  

I did a 3 hour  @OriginsProject podcast with Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth on his wonderful new book, Moral Economics, that I thought was one of the best podcasts I have recorded. Except I forgot to hit record! Lost it all! With amazing grace and perseverence, he agreed to redo it 2 hours later. What resulted may have been even better. My colleague and friend @slsatel at AEI (who will do an event with him there May 14 ) told me he was a mensch. And boy was she right. I cannot believe his kindness. Thank you Al! And your book is truly inspiring. Hope to release the podcast next week. Watch it and then buy the book! Or buy the book and then watch it. :)

 

Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Dr. Vikas Shah about Moral Economics (on Thought Economics)

 Dr. Vikas Shah has published a post on his site Thought Economics, devoted to my imminently forthcoming book Moral Economics.  The long transcript combines a conversation we had together, interspersed with bits of the book itself, paraphrased to appear as part of the live conversation.

Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Professor Alvin Roth· by Dr. Vikas Shah 

"Roth’s new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work (Basic Venture, 2026), is a tour through what he calls repugnant transactions — exchanges that consenting parties want to make but that others believe should be forbidden, often on moral or religious grounds. The territory ranges from sex, surrogacy and adoption to alcohol, drugs, blood plasma, vaccine challenge trials, kidney transplants and medical aid in dying. Roth’s central argument is bracing in its calm: most contested markets cannot really be abolished, only relocated — driven underground, exported across borders, or left to operate informally and dangerously. The honest question is therefore not whether to permit such markets, but how to design and regulate them so that they command sufficient social support to work, and so that the costs and benefits fall in places we can defend. Markets, in his view, are tools to help decide who gets what; the work of moral economics is to keep asking, with evidence rather than absolutes, how those tools should be built. I spoke with him about the philosophical architecture of the book, the everyday paradoxes of repugnance, the lessons of kidney exchange, the controversies around vaccine challenge trials and assisted dying, and what new frontiers of moral contention the next generation of technologies — from CRISPR to artificial intelligence — will force us to confront." 

It’s time to carefully but urgently rethink payments to kidney donors. My op-ed in the Washington Post

 This morning the Washington Post published my op-ed online (which is scheduled to appear in the print edition on Sunday). 800 words is hardly enough to explain why I think what I do...I could write a whole book about that.

But here's the op-ed: 

Why paying people to donate kidneys is a good idea

With 90,000 patients waiting for a kidney, compensating living donors would save lives.

May 8, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

 

By Alvin E. Roth

Alvin E. Roth is an economics professor at Stanford University and co-recipient, with Lloyd Shapley, of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics. This article was adapted from his new book, "Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work."

It’s time to carefully but urgently rethink payments to kidney donors.

There are approximately 130,000 new cases of kidney failure annually in the United States. It is disproportionately a disease of the poor, and is four times as likely to affect Black people as White people. Kidney failure costs Medicare alone more than $55 billion per year, mostly for dialysis. More than 500,000 people are presently on dialysis, about half of whom will die within five years of beginning treatment. The best treatment for kidney failure is transplantation, but in 2025 fewer than 30,000 people in the United States received kidney transplants. So most people who could benefit from a lifesaving transplant will die without one.

 About 90,000 people are registered on the national waiting list to receive a deceased-donor kidney, and many more would be, if there were enough transplants for all who need them. Thousands die each year while waiting, and thousands more are removed from the waiting list when they become too sick to undergo transplant surgery.

The law in the U.S. and most of the world says kidneys must be gifts; their price must be zero. So, any attempt to raise the supply of kidneys by compensating donors would have to overcome the almost worldwide repugnance for payment.

About three-quarters of kidneys transplanted in the U.S. come from deceased donors, and the rest come from living donors: Healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one. But sometimes potential donors can’t donate to the person they love, because kidneys have to be medically compatible with the recipient. It’s a challenge even within families. For example, often a mother can’t receive a kidney from her spouse or children because during pregnancy, her immune system developed antibodies to some of their proteins.

 

 For the last quarter-century, living-donor transplants have also been arranged through kidney exchange, in which each patient receives a compatible kidney from another patient’s intended donor. Some of these transplants take place in long chains initiated by a nondirected donor, who donates a kidney, anonymously, to anyone who needs one. That begins a chain of donations in which each recipient’s intended donor passes the gift forward. Kidney exchange has made possible thousands of additional transplants, without payments to donors.  

Nevertheless, kidneys for transplant remain in tragically short supply. So it is past time to consider amending the 1984 law that prohibits giving “valuable consideration” for a kidney for transplant.

This would have to be done with care, because there are good reasons that the phrase “payments for kidneys” arouses repugnance. We wouldn’t want inappropriate donors to be unduly influenced to give up a kidney. (This is something already considered when screening the thousands of people who donate one of their kidneys each year without payment.) Another concern is that we wouldn’t want to live in a world in which only rich people could get kidneys, by buying them from poor people.

In the United States, we might think about letting individual states experiment with different regulations. Or we could explore a national system in which only the federal government could buy kidneys — from carefully qualified donors, after a significant period devoted to medical and psychological screening, and having obtained carefully informed consent. Those kidneys could then be allocated without regard to patients’ income, much as we presently allocate deceased-donor kidneys, which are treated as a national resource. 

 

It would be financially feasible to pay donors quite generously without requiring recipients to pay anything at all. Donors could be paid entirely from the savings to the health care system by taking patients off dialysis.

There is a long history of thoughtful arguments in favor of allowing kidney donors to be legally paid or compensated in some way, with carefully considered precautions. These include a current proposal called the End Kidney Deaths Act, which would establish a limited pilot program for a tax credit to nondirected kidney donors.

To be clear, we should keep trying for big long-term goals, such as vastly reducing the incidence of kidney disease by preventing or curing diabetes, hypertension and other causes. We should keep trying to expand deceased donation (perhaps by offering funeral benefits in gratitude to the next of kin who allow it). We should keep exploring cures that don’t require transplants of human organs. But we can save many lives now by being more generous to living donors, and it makes sense to start experimenting with ways to do this legally, ethically and equitably."

############

And here's the picture they chose to accompany the op-ed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Right to Choose to Die. Alvin Roth interviewed by Tim Phillips 1 May 2026 (VoxTalks Economics)

 Disputes about medical aid in dying are as contentious in Britain as in the US. Here's some discussion on VoxTalks Economics, in connection with my (imminently) forthcoming Moral Economics.*

The Right to Choose to Die      Alvin Roth interviewed by Tim Phillips 1 May 2026 
"Content note: this episode discusses assisted dying, end-of-life choices, and suicide. Some listeners may find the content distressing. 

 ...

"This week Tim Phillips talks to Al Roth of Stanford University about how economics can contribute to the debate on medical aid in dying (MAID). Roth, a Nobel Prize laureate, has written a new book that argues this, and similar debates, often miss the key insight: the binary choice of “allow” versus “ban” rarely reflects reality. For example, in the United States, he explains that physicians in jurisdictions where assisted dying is illegal are familiar with the practice of administering doses of drugs that will relieve pain, but also end life.

Roth's argument is not that assisted dying is always right. It is that a moral position that ignores the costs of a ban is not more ethical — it is less honest. Economists, he says, bring one specific thing to this debate: the insistence that trade-offs be made explicit. " 

 The right to choose to die Season 9 Episode 27  May 1

And here's the (automatically generated) transcript...

####

The UK version of Moral Economics is here. 

Peter Rousseau comments on our field experiment involving the Econ job market, in PNAS

 My post yesterday was about the experiment about social media and the job market for economists.  I only noticed later that the PNAS also posted a comment on our article, by Professor Peter Rousseau, the secretary of the American Economic Association, who has a long and intimate familiarity with that job market, which the AEA has played a giant role in organizing.

 Improving the job market in economics (and beyond…) by Peter L. Rousseau  PNAS   May 4, 2026  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2609971123

Here is the part of his comment directly connected to our paper:

" the authors make a welcome and useful contribution to the market design literature with a fascinating experiment designed to substitute for and even improve upon the informal information channels lost to the economics job market in the new postpandemic normal. Given that some job candidates are less active self-promoters than others and that, conversely, excessive self-promotion can in some cases be viewed as a negative by prospective recruiters, the authors’ proposed mechanism offers serious promise for leveling the playing field, even if just modestly, for economics job candidates in terms of their visibilities, and perhaps even for expanding the number of jobs actually filled over the course of a recruiting season.
 

"In the experiment, an AI-based algorithm, supplemented with some human checking and reassignments, matched selected economists on social media (i.e., the “influencers”) with willing job candidates based on the closeness of their research. About 43 percent of willing candidates were selected for this treatment. The key to the experiment lies in the matches themselves, which were assigned in a manner that did not take the relative prominence or institutional ranking of an influencer directly into account. All candidate participants were invited to post a tweet about their job market papers on a social media site created for this purpose, and the influencers were asked to post neutral quote-tweets about the members of the treatment group to which they had been assigned. If executed according to design, recruiters viewing the quote-tweets receive information about the closeness of a given candidate’s research interests to those of the influencer. This may function as a partial substitute for the painstaking process of deducing such information across the hundreds of application packets that recruiters receive with only a brief period for making initial decisions. Knowing that a candidate’s research is close to that of Professor “X” is a tangible signal that could make that candidate more likely to be interviewed or receive a campus flyout or job offer from an institution seeking an entry-level economist like Professor X. The experiment indicates that individuals in the treatment group did indeed receive more campus visits and job offers than candidates assigned to the control group, and that the effect on job offers was especially strong for women. It also finds, however, that these effects were more pronounced for candidates matched to influencers with relatively higher citation counts than for those matched to influencers with relatively more followers, as these two measures of prominence in the profession are not that highly correlated. 

" The question of scalability then becomes paramount. Considering the experiment’s positive findings, it is natural to assume that, if universally available, all job candidates would choose to participate and receive the treatment. The process would otherwise go on as stated with perhaps additional influencers being selected by the organizers to serve the larger pool of candidates. Two observations seem reasonable at this point: first, in such a setup, better information about matches could lead to more open positions being filled, which would be a better aggregate outcome; and second, the treatment might in practice benefit candidates from outside the very top departments the most. This is because candidates from the highest ranked departments, who are often perceived by recruiters as having a higher probability of eventually becoming a star, will typically receive more interviews, campus visits, and offers, but in the end can still only accept one offer. With an enlarged set of viable matches, this means that some candidates who may have been otherwise overlooked will find jobs. Of course, the job market may take longer to clear under this mechanism as candidates will have more options to consider before departments go to second or third rounds of offers.
 

"Casual observations of the job market among economics departments and their chairs do suggest that a number of recruiters are unable to fill positions they have posted. The AEA does not currently collect information on just how many, but the very existence of the “AEA Job Market Scramble,” where recruiters and unmatched candidates can post their availabilities on an online message board each March, is indicative of the challenge (3). The design of a job signaling mechanism by the AEA and its implementation in December of each year (4), where job candidates can list two departments to which they would like to express interest in an interview, is another such intervention aimed at easing the congestion.
Another interesting result is that women appear to benefit most from the treatment, while this benefit does not extend to members of other groups traditionally underrepresented in economics. The authors point to existing evidence indicating that women on average tend to be less active promoters of their own research on social media than others and suggest that the additional visibility provided by the quote-tweets could be leading to more job offers. This potential channel, of course, could also be viable for any candidate with a tendency to self-promote less. To explain a special advantage for women, one could note the possibility of forces in the 2022–2023 job market where departments seeking to improve the gender balances of their faculties became aware of candidates through the mechanism who they may have otherwise overlooked. If this is the case, the next question to ask is why does the effect not carry over for members of other underrepresented groups? The answer, though no doubt a speculative one, may lie in the preexistence of other mechanisms and informal channels for promoting such candidates, rendering the marginal effects of the authors’ particular intervention not statistically significant.
Finally, while having the potential to increase the number of matches and raise their average quality, the effects of the authors’ intervention will be subject to some randomness based on the assignment of a given candidate’s influencer. For example, when any influencer posts a quote-tweet about a candidate who has been independently and objectively determined to have close research interests, that candidate’s post tends to receive more views and likes on X than those in the control group, and the extent of this visibility correlates with the size of the influencer’s following. Yet these effects do not seem to transfer downstream to job outcomes, where candidates receiving quote-tweets from highly cited influencers are the ones tending to see more offers. In a real sense, the adage “all publicity is good publicity,” often applied to economics research, may not be always true. The assignment of influencers to candidates, even if randomized, will matter for individual outcomes even though the aggregate effects of the intervention are positive. Given the potential individual benefits compared to nontreatment, however, job candidates would likely embrace the residual uncertainty and participate in the mechanism.
 

"The intervention designed by Qiu et al. may hold even greater promise outside of the economics discipline. In the natural sciences, for example, recruiting for scarce academic postdoctoral positions among new PhDs at a similar career stage, which are markets typically saturated with candidates, often moves directly to a very limited allocation of campus visits based in no small part on letters and other communications from mentors, some of whom could be less than ideally matched with their students or less well known than would-be assigned influencers. These cases are ones in which an enhanced visibility of candidates, when coupled with independent information about the closeness of their work to what senior researchers and their groups might be seeking, could lead to the greater advancement of science more generally.
 : 
"Competing interests P.L.R. has served since 2012 as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Economic Association, a 501(c)(3) non-profit deeply committed to improving the job market for new Ph.D. economists, and for which one of the companion article’s co-authors (A. E. Roth) served as President in 2017.

#######

 Peter's comment and our paper appeared online, but won't appear in print until next week in the May 12, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 19 issue of PNAS.

 

Yesterday's post: 

Tuesday, May 5, 2026  Social media, job market outcomes, and ethics of field experiments, by Qiu, Chen, Cohn and Roth in PNAS

 

Social media, job market outcomes, and ethics of field experiments, by Qiu, Chen, Cohn and Roth in PNAS

 One of the fun things about our paper published in today's PNAS is that, as a working paper, it prompted a vigorous discussion of the ethics of doing field experiments in economics.  We discuss this more fully in the published version, below:

J. Qiu, Y. Chen, A. Cohn, & A.E. Roth, Social media promotion improves job market outcomes, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (19) e2528289123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2528289123 (2026). 

Abstract: Social media has transformed how academics disseminate research, but its effect on academic job outcomes remains unclear. Previous research has shown correlations between social media exposure and metrics like citation counts, but these relationships may be confounded by unobserved factors such as researcher quality or access to professional networks. We examine whether social media promotion causally affects job market outcomes in economics through a field experiment on Twitter (now X). We first collect tweets about job market papers from 519 candidates and post them from a dedicated account. We then randomize half of the posts to be quote-tweeted by established economists in the candidates’ fields, and measure the effects on both online visibility and hiring outcomes. We find that posts in the treatment group receive 441% more views and 303% more likes than those in the control group. Candidates whose posts were assigned to be quote-tweeted receive one additional flyout invitation compared to the control group average of 5.4 flyouts. Furthermore, women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers than women in the control group, who receive 3 offers on average. Exploring mechanisms, we find that academic reputation drives these results, with stronger effects for quote-tweets from highly cited scholars and for candidates from top institutions. Our findings suggest social media promotion causally increases research visibility and improves academic job market outcomes.

 

  ...

"Ethical considerations.
"After the release of our working paper on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) on May 20, 2024, a vigorous discussion arose on both social and mainstream media, particularly on Twitter, about the ethics of our experiment and of field experiments more generally (e.g., ref. 30). The main concern suggested that job markets are essentially constant sum, so that randomly promoting some candidates through having their JMPs quote-tweeted by influencers would necessarily (and unethically) disadvantage both those who were in the control condition of the experiment and those who did not participate in the experiment.
 

"We understand the importance of considering the ethical implications of any experiment and that ethicality is connected to the underlying economics of the job market. In this latter respect, given the information friction and congestion in the interview process, job markets are unlikely to be constant sum. Aside from the possibility of welfare gains from improved match quality, we note that, typically in matching markets, many employers fail to fill all their positions while at the same time qualified candidates fail to find one, so that welfare can also be improved by filling more positions. [In the 2022–2023 job market, the total number of jobs listed on JOE was 3,608, including 933 (1,083) full-time academic jobs in (outside) the United States and 718 full-time nonacademic jobs (any location). On the supply side, 1,386 Ph.D. students and postdocs applied to at least one job through JOE from August to December 2022 (31).] In economics, the job market often has unfilled positions by the end of February, leading to a scramble round each year starting in March. Similarly, the annual National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) for new physicians in the United States also leads to some positions being unfilled, despite having far more applicants than available positions. [For example, in 2024, 38,494 positions were offered to 44,853 active applicants and 2,510 positions were unfilled (6.5%), at the end of both the main match (a deferred acceptance algorithm, see ref. 32) and a centralized postmatch scramble called the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (33).]
 

"The phenomenon of unfilled positions in a thick labor market may reflect congestion in the interview process. In such a market, since many positions receive more applications than the number of candidates who can feasibly be interviewed, the matching of interviews to jobs may be imperfect in the sense that an employer can find that none of the people interviewed can be successfully hired, but could have filled the position if more appropriate interviewees had been chosen. To mitigate this issue, signaling mechanisms have been introduced in both the economics and medical markets to facilitate a better matching of interviewees and employers (29, 34). In our context, the quote-tweeting of JMPs may similarly serve to help employers find better matches with their selection of interviewees who can be hired.
 

"We also propose that highlighting suitable candidates from underrepresented groups for a position could potentially expand the overall number of job openings. A notable example is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, implemented across multiple institutions including the University of Michigan and the University of California system. This program seeks to recruit future faculty members “with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their nontraditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.” (See, e.g., https://presidentspostdoc.umich.edu/, retrieved on August 29, 2025.)
 

"Finally, we consider trends in the broader context of job search in evaluating the ethical considerations related to our study. Social media has become a common channel for academics to advertise the JMPs of their students. Thus, we are not introducing a new channel for candidate promotion, nor are we excluding others outside of our experiment from availing themselves of this channel. Our goal is to understand the extent to which this channel may create visibility or improve outcomes for job candidates, especially since not all candidates may have equal access. Our paper belongs to the class of natural field experiment (35), a class that has seen a growing number of studies in which field experiments are used to assess the effects of market interventions. [A natural field experiment is one “where the subjects do not know that they are in an experiment” (35). In our context, participants were told only that we would arrange for their JMPs to be tweeted, but not that there would be a quote-tweet treatment.] One of the main benefits of conducting a natural field experiment is that it minimizes possible Hawthorne effects (36). These studies are widely accepted and even recognized, with the 2019 Nobel Prize for experiments in development economics. If it is ethical for economists to use experiments to evaluate interventions in other markets, it should also be ethical for economists to study the market for economists. And if it is ethical to promote students who are on the job market, then it should be ethical to study the effects of such promotion.
 

"In sum, from a normative perspective (should scholars promote candidates?), we argue that such promotion can reduce information friction and job market congestion, potentially leading to more efficient matching. From a positive perspective (does promotion matter?), we demonstrate in Results that it increases candidate visibility and improves job market outcomes, especially for women who are traditionally underrepresented in economics." 

#############

Earlier (a blog post about reference 30, above): 

Saturday, June 8, 2024  The ethics of field experiments in Economics, in the Financial Times

 

The Cannabis Industry’s New Best Friend? President Trump

It's a sign of the times that this sensible administrative initiative makes me ask:  Has the Trump organization just invested in marijuana?

The NYT has the story:

The Cannabis Industry’s New Best Friend? President Trump
The administration’s decision to relax federal regulations on medical marijuana comes with big tax breaks for many cannabis companies, and could drive new investment in the budding sector.    By Ashley Southall

"By some measures, the legal cannabis industry is flowering. It has grown to around $30 billion today from less than $20 billion just six years ago. But investors have remained wary of its high taxes, marijuana’s illicit status at the federal level and the operational costs of complying with a patchwork of state regulations.

"Now the Trump administration is pushing major policy changes that could hand marijuana companies a huge windfall and unlock new investment in the industry.

"Last week, the government relaxed federal controls on medical marijuana. While that does not make medical marijuana legal under federal law, it moves the product from a class of highly addictive drugs, such as heroin, to a category of lower-risk medicines, like prescription Tylenol, that are overseen by the D.E.A. The Trump administration has also started a process to reclassify cannabis more broadly."

Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Halts Abortion Pill Access by Mail, Appeal to SCOTUS

 Is the state of Louisiana harmed if women living there can receive abortion pills by mail?

Federal Appeals Court Temporarily Halts Abortion Pill Access by Mail  The court order, in a lawsuit by the state of Louisiana, pauses a Food and Drug Administration regulation that greatly expanded access to the abortion pill mifepristone. 
By Pam Belluck

"A federal appeals court issued a ruling on Friday temporarily halting the ability of abortion providers to prescribe pills using telemedicine and send them to patients by mail, blocking what has become a major avenue for women seeking abortions in recent years.

"The order comes in a case in which the state of Louisiana is suing the Food and Drug Administration, seeking to sharply curtail access to the abortion pill mifepristone. In the order, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted Louisiana’s request for a temporary stay of the F.D.A.’s decision several years ago to remove a requirement that patients see a medical provider in person before the pills could be prescribed.

"The court order, citing Louisiana’s claims that making pills available by mail has allowed patients there to access the medication despite the state’s near-total abortion ban, said that “Louisiana has shown that it is irreparably harmed without a stay.”

"In April, a Federal District Court in Louisiana had declined to pause the availability of pills by mail, instead saying that the proceedings should be delayed until the F.D.A. completes a safety review of mifepristone that is underway and is expected to take until late this year."

#######

And here's the NYT on the appeal by pharma companies to the Supreme Court:

Supreme Court Asked to Restore Access to Abortion Pill by Mail  By Ann E. Marimow and Pam Belluck

 "Administration officials recently told The New York Times that the review would not be finished until the end of this year, a time frame that would fall after the midterm elections.

"The mifepristone case puts the Trump administration in a politically tricky position, given that many of President Trump’s supporters oppose abortion."

Amazon's list of best non-fiction books coming out in May

 Here is Amazon's list of  Best Nonfiction books of May. 

(You have to scroll to the right to see Moral Economics, but I'm still glad to see that it's there:)

Publication day is May 12, just over a week away. 

 

Introduction to market design and medicine: video of my public lecture in Taiwan

 Here's a video of the talk I gave in Taiwan on Markets, marketplaces and medicine. My talk begins at around minute 9:35, after introductions and photographs, and the camera focuses on me rather than on my slides, but I think you can follow the talk well even without seeing the slides.  A Q&A session begins at around minute 59:45, with the first question being about marriage (in which I get to quote Claudia Goldin on dads versus duds:)*

 ###########

* See, earlier

Tuesday, September 23, 2025  The Downside of Fertility by Claudia Goldin---Dads versus duds

 

Australia has more unpaid beekeepers than blood donors

 If only there were some way for Australia to become self-sufficient in blood plasma, so it could stop having to buy it from the US...

The Financial Times has the story:

Australia’s drive to get more blood flowing
The country has more recreational beekeepers than regular donors and is forced to rely on imports  by Nic Fildes 

" Australia needs 100,000 new donors every year to meet its need for blood and plasma. But there are more recreational beekeepers in Australia than people who have actively donated their blood three times or more.

"This is not only an Australian challenge. Most countries have a supply gap. One problem is that the legion of older donors that has kept donations flowing for decades is dwindling and younger generations are not donating or do not return after they’ve tried it once. 

...

"The situation is particularly acute for plasma — the yellow-coloured component of blood sometimes called liquid gold — which is a vital ingredient for 18 different life-saving procedures ranging from immune deficiency treatment to heart surgery. 

Australia supplies only 38 per cent of its own plasma and spends about A$600mn a year to import it — more than double what was spent a decade ago. A report published by the state of New South Wales suggests imports needed could rise to 66 per cent of the total by 2030, meaning taxpayers are set to foot an even larger plasma bill.

For now, Australia relies on the US, where people earn up to $70 per donation, which supplies about 70 per cent of the world’s plasma."

 

Stanford celebrates Ran Abramitzky's studies of immigration

 The Stanford Daily interviews Ran Abramitzky, on the occasion of his winning a Guggenheim fellowship:

Guggenheim fellow Ran Abramitzky sees the American Dream as an ‘intergenerational story’  By Angikar Ghosal

"TSD: Your research program combines economic history, big linked microdata and policy relevance. Where do you see the next frontier for this kind of long-run, data-driven immigration research?

RA: A key frontier is linking together large-scale datasets to follow individuals and families over time and across space.

Much of my work relies on linking millions of individuals across U.S. censuses to study mobility across generations. The next step is to connect these data to other sources — such as college records, administrative data, and historical archives — to better understand how specific institutions shape economic outcomes.

For example, we are digitizing and linking records for millions of college students and faculty from over 100 institutions and connecting them to census data to study how socioeconomic background shapes access to higher education and elite professions.

Another frontier is using new tools, including AI and large language models, to systematically analyze large bodies of text — such as congressional speeches — to better understand how policies and public narratives around immigration evolve over time.

TSD: Given the current political moment around immigration policy, what do you most wish the public understood from the historical evidence?

RA: A key lesson from the historical evidence is that immigrant mobility is a long-term, often intergenerational process.

Many immigrants initially work in manual or low-paying jobs and do not move quickly from poverty to prosperity. However, their children often experience substantial upward mobility despite a challenging start.

What I think is often missing in today’s policy debate is this long-term perspective. Discussions tend to focus on newly arrived immigrants and their short-run outcomes. But historically, much of the economic success of immigrant families has occurred in the next generation.

A more long-term view would recognize these patterns and the contributions of immigrants and their children, and could lead to policies that are more supportive of immigrant integration and opportunity." 

 

 

Moral Economics: a brief review in the Sunday Times ("fascinating and very different":)

 A column (on unemployment) in the Sunday Times by it's economics editor  David Smith, ends with a brief review of Moral Economics, as a postscript:

 PS
"A lot of economics books cross my desk, but a new one, by the Nobel prize-winning economist Alvin Roth, grabbed my attention. Called Moral Economics: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work, to be published soon by Basic Books, it is not a title designed to send it racing off the shelves.

However, it starts in an arresting way with a story I had not heard before of another celebrated Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, known to many for his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Two years ago, he celebrated his 90th birthday with family in Paris before flying to Zurich and ending his life in an assisted suicide clinic. “Danny,” Roth recalls, “was still in relatively good health, but he wanted to avoid the prospect of a long, disabling decline.”

...

It is a fascinating and very different economics book, from which I may bring you more as I find it."

Thumbs-up pictures in Taiwan, and kidney notes

 Photographers in Taiwan often ask their subjects to raise their thumbs (see all our thumbs below), just as American photographers ask for smiles.  One of the hosts in our recent visit suggested that this custom may have become solidified during Covid, when everyone wore masks, so that smiles couldn't be seen.

 

 

 I came away from Taiwan thinking that kidney exchange (which is now legal there) does not seem to be occurring with any regularity. This is a missed opportunity so far, since Taiwan has a very high incidence of kidney failure and dialysis. And (like everywhere else) there's a dire shortage of transplants: around 8500 people are on the waiting list, but the total annual number of transplants is below 500.

 But there's certainly hope for the future: as the I Ching says,* the universe progresses persistently:) 

 

*"Heaven keeps moving forward vigorously" (天行健, tiān xíng jiàn) is a foundational tenet from the I Ching (Book of Changes), specifically the Daxiang Zhuan (Commentary on the Images) regarding the Qian (Creative) hexagram. It signifies that the universe is robust and unceasing in its operation, urging humans to model this by constantly striving for self-improvement and diligence"

 (A friend, seeing this photo, says "Whoa, super deep life lessons, and yummy snacks in the background...)

Night markets in Taiwan

Night markets in Taiwan are like open-air food courts in which each seller sells a single food preparation.

 

 

 

 

This last photo, of a selection of freshly made breads that look like brains, reminded me of the old joke about why economists' brains are so expensive per ounce.
 

Playing dirty on Polymarket--Insider trading on information, and on manipulation

Here are news reports on two kinds of insider trading on prediction markets: predicting what you are (or someone close to you is) going to do, or predicting a measurement you can control.

From the NYT:

Soldier Used Classified Information to Bet on Maduro’s Ouster, U.S. Says
Federal prosecutors say that Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the operation to oust Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, used the information to place bets on a prediction market. By Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich
 

"A U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has been charged with using classified information to bet on the mission on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace, federal authorities said on Thursday.

"The soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation, federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. said. "

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And from the WSJ: 

Unusual weather bets on Polymarket spur French investigation by Alexander Osipovich, Sam Schechner 

 "France’s national weather service is investigating irregularities at a monitoring station at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport after it reported anomalous temperature spikes. The spikes led to lucrative payoffs for some traders on Polymarket, the crypto-based betting platform.

...

"Every day, Polymarket lists contracts that allow its users to bet on the maximum temperature in dozens of cities worldwide. Its Paris contract is based on the reading at Charles de Gaulle airport, as reported by Weather Underground, an online weather data provider.

"On April 15, the temperature in Paris had reached 18 degrees Celsius in the afternoon and was cooling down in the evening when the airport gauge showed a brief, unexplained jump, hitting 22 degrees Celsius at 9:30 p.m. local time, Weather Underground data shows. Other nearby weather stations didn’t show a similar spike. 

"Just before the anomaly, xX25Xx placed cheap, long-shot bets on Polymarket that the maximum temperature in Paris that day wouldn’t be 18 degrees Celsius, when other bettors were more than 99% sure that the day’s top temperature would remain at that level.

"The airport weather station also registered a temperature spike around 7 p.m. on April 6. That day, a Polymarket account with username “Hoaqin” made nearly $14,000 in profit by betting that Paris temperatures would peak at 21 degrees Celsius, Polymarket data shows. Temperatures at Charles de Gaulle had been hovering at around 18 degrees in the late afternoon, according to Weather Underground data. 

... 

"In March, an Israeli journalist said he had received death threats from Polymarket bettors demanding that he revise his article about an Iranian missile strike on March 10. The details of his article were used to settle bets on whether Iran had carried out a missile, drone or airstrike that day.

"Soon after the incident, Polymarket explicitly prohibited insider trading and market manipulation on its international platform for the first time. The amended rules state that Polymarket users can’t trade contracts where they can influence the outcome of the underlying event.

"A similar prohibition is in place in regulated prediction markets such as Polymarket’s main competitor, Kalshi, as well as at Polymarket’s new U.S. platform. "

Organ donation after euthanasia in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, not only is it legal to receive medical aid in dying (MAID), but  a growing number of MAID patients are able to successfully achieve their desire to become deceased organ donors.

 From the American Journal of Transplantation:

 Wijbenga, N., Gan, C.T., Ruigrok, D., Berg, E.M., Hagenaars, J.A.M., Siregar, S., van der Kaaij, N.P., Mathot, B.J., van Pel, R., Seghers, L. and Manintveld, O.C., 2026. The Increasing Contribution of Organ Donation after Euthanasia to the Lung Transplantation Donor Pool in the Netherlands. American Journal of Transplantation. 

 "Abstract: The number of organ donation after euthanasia (ODE) procedures in the Netherlands has grown substantially, yet their contribution to the lung-donor pool remains unclear. There is no clinical consensus on how these potential ODE lung-donors should be assessed. We aimed to describe the total contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool in the Netherlands and describe the assessment of potential ODE lung-donors.
We collected data from all ODE procedures performed between 2012-2024 in the Netherlands. We assessed the number of ODE-lungs offered, rejected, accepted, and transplanted, comparing characteristics of discarded and transplanted lungs.
Of 1166 lung-donor, 664(60%) were DCD donors of which 154(23%) were ODE lung-donors. The total proportion of donor lungs from ODE lung-donors acceptable to offer for lung transplantation was 117 of which 104 (89%) were transplanted. Evaluation prior to donation was highly variable, with medical history and chest CT most affecting acceptance decisions. Short-term outcomes were excellent, with 1-year survival of 84%.
Our findings indicate that ODE lung donors are increasingly important in the Netherlands, with high acceptance rates, despite highly variable evaluation methods. Standardizing the assessment of potential ODE lung donors could further improve acceptance rates and enhance the contribution of ODE to the lung-donor pool."

Moral Economics, on the Passion Struck podcast

In the run up to the May publication date, I've been interviewed on a variety of podcasts about my book Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.  Here's one from the podcast Passion Struck: Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth: How Incentives Shape Your Life | EP 757

 

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Earlier:

Wednesday, April 22, 2026   Moral Economics, on the Armchair Expert podcast

Below is a one minute bit excerpted from the Armchair Expert interview, on why it's easy to buy drugs, but hard to hire a hitman: 

The Difference Between Hitmen and Dealers

 

Moral Economics, on the Armchair Expert podcast

At the Armchair Expert podcast, Dax Shepard interviewed me in anticipation of the May publication of my book Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work  

 

Here's the video (which was recorded last month at their studio in LA): 

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Market Design and Kidney Exchange at NTHU: Public Lecture in Taiwan (video)

 Here is a video of a public lecture I gave at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan.

It begins at around 13:40 (and if I've done it right, the version below should start around there), and the Q&A starts around 1:15:00