KENNETH ARROW’S LAST THEOREM by Paul Milgrom

 Here's a fitting tribute to Ken Arrow, who died in 2017, in the special issue of the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design in Hono(u)r of (the still very much alive) Vince Crawford, edited by Alex Tetylboym

KENNETH ARROW’S LAST THEOREM  by Paul Milgrom, in The Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design 9, no. 1 (2024): 7-11.

ABSTRACT: In Kenneth Arrow’s last week of life at age 95, he reported that “I began my research career with an impossibility theorem. If I had time now, my last theorem would be an impossibility theorem about social choice for environmental policy.” This paper completes the formalization, proof, and discussion of the theorem that Arrow then described. 

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Some earlier tributes to Ken:

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Ken Arrow (1921-2017)

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Tributes to Ken Arrow

Monday, October 9, 2017

Celebration of Ken Arrow at Stanford

Friday, October 13, 2017

Pictures from the celebration of Ken Arrow

 

 

 

 

A medically aided death in New Jersey: Pat Koch Thaler

 Following a full life, a peaceful end.

Pat Koch Thaler, Sister to a Famed Mayor, Chose to Die on a Saturday
Ms. Thaler, a former dean at N.Y.U., used her last interview to reminisce about her brother, Ed, and to publicize the alternatives to prolonging pain and suffering. By Sam Roberts

"After 22 years of fending off cancer, Ms. Thaler had run out of miracles. Twice the disease had gone into remission, only to return. One kidney had been removed. She had been bombarded by radiation, chemotherapy and ablation. Finally, the tumors had been declared inoperable.

“My mother died in agony,” Ms. Thaler recalled. Her mother was 62, misdiagnosed and undergoing an operation to remove her gall bladder when surgeons found her body was riddled with cancer.

"Of her own experience, Ms. Thaler said she had been offered a drug that “would slow things down, but would have some serious side effects.”

“And I decided, I’m 92 and a half years old, I have lived a very, very rich life, a very happy life, and I didn’t want to torture myself anymore,” she said. “I did what I could, and knowing that the law is on my side, I decided to take advantage.”

"A New Jersey law that took effect in 2019 allows a mentally alert adult — whose prognosis of having less than six months to live has been certified by two doctors — to self-administer a lethal prescription. The powdery medication is mixed with three ounces of juice, must be consumed within two minutes, immediately induces sleep and, within hours, causes death.

...

"Ms. Thaler spent her last few days paying bills, disposing of her furniture, distributing her artwork to her children and grandchildren, and confirming the funeral arrangements

...

"She chose Saturday, she said, because her children worked, and she wanted a time that would be most convenient. Wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and loose black pants in her apartment, surrounded by her family, she took the powdered medication mixed in apple juice under a doctor’s supervision at 11 a.m.

"At 4:58 p.m., she was pronounced dead."

Remembering Jim Simons

 Here's the memorial page from the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

Remembering Jim Simons

HT: Vijay Vazirani

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Earlier:

Saturday, May 11, 2024

Jim Simons (1938-2024)

Danny Kahneman, remembered by Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

 Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: Nobel Prize Winner & CASBS Legend

"Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, and among the most distinguished and consequential cognitive and behavioral scientists of the past half-century, passed away on March 27, 2024. He was 90.

"Daniel Kahneman was a CASBS fellow during the 1977-78 academic year, occupying office (called “studies” at CASBS) #6. (Notably, this remarkable class included two other future Nobel Prize winners – Oliver Williamson (2009) and Robert B. Wilson (2020) – as well as future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

"Kahneman’s 1977-78 year is legendary for two reasons. First, it is here, at CASBS, where Kahneman and his principal collaborator of nearly a decade, Amos Tversky – who had a visiting appointment at Stanford University’s psychology department that year[1] – completed a paper they painstakingly had been working on for years: “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” The paper, published in March 1979 in the journal Econometrica, is a landmark in the annals of the social sciences. The paper presents a direct challenge to standard expected utility theory through the concept of loss aversion, describing how economic agents assess prospective losses and gains in an asymmetric manner. In other words, people frame transactions or outcomes in their minds subjectively, affecting the value (or utility) they expect to receive.

...

"Though Kahneman himself had expressed it in various ways over the years, he put it crisply in 2016:

"CASBS is where behavioral economics took shape. When Richard Thaler heard that Amos Tversky and I would be in Stanford, he finagled a visiting appointment down the hill to spend time with us. We spent a lot of time walking around the Center and became lifelong friends. Those long conversations that Dick had with Amos and me helped him construct his then heretical (and now well-established) view of economics, by using psychological observations to explain violations of standard economic theory.[5]

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Earlier:

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Danny Kahneman (1934-2024)

YingHua He 何 英华 has died.

 Yan Chen passes on the devastating news that YingHua He 何 英华 passed away on Tuesday night, after struggling with kidney cancer.

May his memory be a blessing.

He graduated from college in China in 2001, got an MA at Peking University, received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 2011, taught in Toulouse, and was an associate professor at Rice University when he died.

Here's his CV, and here is his Google Scholar page.  He did important work on market design, including on school choice and kidney exchange.

He was one of the pioneers of empirical market design, combining econometrics with matching theory. 

He had many friends, and I was lucky to be among them. Here's a photo I took of him giving a seminar at Stanford, when he was a visiting scholar in 2014-15

Yinghua He at Stanford, January 2015

Here are some of my blog posts on his work:

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Multiple offer mechanisms in school choice, when information gathering is costly

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Limiting congestion by limiting applications, or making them costly

Sunday, September 13, 2020

A proposal for non-simultaneous kidney exchange in pairs and chains and with deceased donors...

Friday, May 24, 2019

Matching early when information is costly, by Grenet, He, and Kübler

Frans de Waal (1948-2024)

 The eminent primatologist Frans de Waal has passed away. Here's a memoriam from Emory University:

Emory primatologist Frans de Waal remembered for bringing apes ‘a little closer to humans’

I sometimes show the video below about his experiment with monkeys on fairness (and being treated unfairly) to my class on experimental economics (typically when I'm about to talk about the ultimatum game).

"Two capuchins were situated in enclosures next to one another. A researcher would ask them to do a task and if they succeeded give them a treat. The catch was one monkey was always rewarded with a piece of cucumber while the other monkey sometimes got a piece of cucumber and sometimes got a grape — a preferred treat among capuchin monkeys.

"A video de Waal filmed of one of the experiments created a media sensation.

Unequal pay for equal work: When the first monkey gives the researcher a rock, she is rewarded with a cucumber slice. But watch what happens when the first monkey sees the second monkey hand the researcher a rock — and get a much tastier grape instead.

"A monkey that received only cucumber appears perfectly happy until she sees her companion receive a grape. Then her behavior changes. She accepts the next piece of cucumber only to throw it back at the researcher, pounding the surface in front of the enclosure and shaking its Plexiglas walls.

“That video struck home with a lot of people,” Brosnan says. “Who hasn’t felt like that monkey that’s only getting cucumbers? Our research showed something about the evolution of the sense of human fairness.”

Richard Slayman: first recipient of pig kidney transplant dies after two months. (RIP)

 Here's the story from the Guardian:

Pig kidney ‘xenotransplant’ patient dies two months later. No indication that Richard ‘Rick’ Slayman’s receipt of genetically modified kidney caused his death, says Massachusetts transplant team

"The first recipient of a genetically modified pig kidney transplant has died about two months later, with the hospital that performed the surgery saying it did not have any indication the transplant was the cause.

...

"In a statement, Slayman’s family thanked his doctors. “Their enormous efforts leading the xenotransplant gave our family seven more weeks with Rick, and our memories made during that time will remain in our minds and hearts,” the statement said.

"They said Slayman underwent the surgery in part to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive. “Rick accomplished that goal and his hope and optimism will endure forever.”

"In April, New Jersey woman Lisa Pisano also received a genetically modified pig kidney as well as a mechanical pump to keep her heart beating.

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I'm not aware of any medical journal reports so far on these transplants--reporting has just been by press release...

Jim Simons (1938-2024)

 Jim Simons, the great investor and philanthropist of math and computer science, died yesterday.

Here's the announcement from the Simons Foundation.

Simons Foundation Co-Founder, Mathematician and Investor Jim Simons Dies at 86

And here's the NYT:

Jim Simons, Math Genius Who Conquered Wall Street, Dies at 86. Using advanced computers, he went from M.I.T. professor to multibillionaire. His Medallion fund had 66 percent average annual returns for decades.

Danny Kahneman (1934-2024)

 Danny Kahneman passed away today.

Here's the Washington Post obituary:

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90. He found that people rely on shortcuts that often lead them to make wrongheaded decisions that go against their own best interest  By Chris Powe

"Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and best-selling author whose Nobel Prize-winning research upended economics — as well as fields ranging from sports to public health — by demonstrating the extent to which people abandon logic and leap to conclusions, died March 27. He was 90.

"His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died.

...

"Dr. Kahneman took a dim view of people’s ability to think their way through a problem. “Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions,” he wrote in his popular 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” “They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”

"Dr. Kahneman spent much of his career working alongside psychologist Amos Tversky, who he said deserved much of the credit for their prizewinning work. But Tversky died in 1996, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously.

"Both men were atheist grandsons of Lithuanian rabbis, and both had studied and lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their three-decade friendship and close collaboration, chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2016 book “The Undoing Project,” was a study in opposites.

"According to Lewis, Tversky was the life of the party; Dr. Kahneman never even went. Tversky had a mechanical pencil on his desk and nothing else; Dr. Kahneman’s office was full of books and articles he never finished. Still, Dr. Kahneman said, at times it was as if “we were sharing a mind.” They worked so closely together that they tossed a coin to decide whose name would go first on an article or a book.

"Their research helped establish the field of behavioral economics, which applies psychological insights to the study of economic decision-making, but also had a far-reaching effect outside the academy. "

Dr. Guy Alexandre (1934-2024), gave birth to brain death in deceased organ transplantation

 The father of brain death has died.

Here's the NYT obit.

Guy Alexandre, Transplant Surgeon Who Redefined Death, Dies at 89. His willingness to remove kidneys from brain-dead patients increased the organs’ viability while challenging the line between living and dead.  By Clay Risen

"Guy Alexandre, a Belgian transplant surgeon who in the 1960s risked professional censure by removing kidneys from brain-dead patients whose hearts were still beating — a procedure that greatly improved organ viability while challenging the medical definition of death itself — died on Feb. 14 at his home in Brussels. He was 89.

...

"Dr. Alexandre was just 29 and fresh off a yearlong fellowship at Harvard Medical School when, in June 1963, a young patient was wheeled into the hospital where he worked in Louvain, Belgium. She had sustained a traumatic head injury in a traffic accident, and despite extensive neurosurgery, doctors pronounced her brain dead, though her heart continued to beat.

"He knew that in another part of the hospital, a patient was suffering from renal failure. He had assisted on kidney transplants at Harvard, and he understood that the organs began to lose viability soon after the heart stops beating.

"Dr. Alexandre pulled the chief surgeon, Jean Morelle, aside and made his case. Brain death, he said, is death. Machines can keep a heart beating for a long time with no hope of reviving a patient. His argument went against centuries of assumptions about the line between life and death, but Dr. Morelle was persuaded.

...

"Over the next two years, Dr. Alexandre and Dr. Morelle quietly performed several more kidney transplants using the same procedure. Finally, at a medical conference in London in 1965, Dr. Alexandre announced what he had been doing.

...

"In 1968, the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee, a group of medical experts, largely adopted Dr. Alexandre’s criteria when it declared that an irreversible coma should be understood as the equivalent of death, whether the heart continues to beat or not.

"Today, Dr. Alexandre’s perspective is widely shared in the medical community, and removing organs from brain-dead patients has become an accepted practice.

“The greatness of Alexandre’s insight was that he was able to see the insignificance of the beating heart,” Robert Berman, an organ-donation activist and journalist, wrote in Tablet magazine in 2019.

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And here's the story from Tablet magazine, interesting in a number of respects:

The Man Who Remade Death. Guy Alexandre was the first surgeon to remove organs from a patient with a beating heart. His colleagues thought him a murderer; Alexandre disagreed and revolutionized our understanding of death.  BY ROBBY BERMAN, Feb 4, 2019

"I met Alexandre a few months ago in his home in an upscale suburb of Brussels. The octogenarian is charming, affable and avuncular but he does not mince words: The physicians who accused him of murder “were hypocrites. They viewed their brain dead patients as alive yet they had no qualms about turning off the ventilator to get the heart to stop beating before they removed kidneys. In addition to ‘killing’ the patient, they were giving the recipients damaged kidneys that suffered ischemia … oxygen deprivation. The kidneys did not work well; they did not last long.”

"Given that brain death was not well known by the public in 1963, I asked Alexandre how he succeeded in getting consent from families to donate the organs. “It was simple. I didn’t ask. I told the families the situation was grim and I removed the organs in the middle of the night. When the family returned the next morning I told them their loved one had died during the night.”

"In 1961, Alexandre was in his third year of surgical training. He left Brussels for Boston to attend Harvard Medical School where he studied under professor Joseph Murray, the surgeon famous for performing the first successful kidney transplant between twins in 1954. After Alexandre successfully executed a number of kidney transplants between dogs in the laboratory, he was invited by Murray to join him in the operating room to operate on humans. It was there that Alexandre noticed a curious phenomenon.

"Murray turned off the ventilator in order to cause the heart to stop beating and only then did he extract the organs. Alexandre felt there was no need to damage the kidneys by depriving them of oxygen. He believed when looking at a human body with a dead brain that he was looking at a corpse that was suffering from a bizarre medical condition: a beating heart. In other words, the organism was dead but the organs remained alive."

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Earlier:

Friday, January 18, 2019

Fifty years of "brain death"

The year in passings

Another year, more memories and memorials:

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Paul David (1935-2023)

Monday, January 30, 2023

Tonya Ingram (1991-2022), health activist, died while waiting for a kidney

Monday, March 20, 2023

Victor Elias (1937-2023)

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Leo Hurwicz (1917-2008), biography

Monday, June 26, 2023

Harry Markowitz (1927-2023)

Friday, June 30, 2023

Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) Centennial

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Vic Fuchs (1924-2023)

Friday, December 15, 2023

Who Shall Live? (3rd edition) by Victor R. Fuchs and Karen Eggleston

NY Times, Dec. 21

Robert M. Solow, Groundbreaking Economist and Nobelist, Dies at 99

Who Shall Live? (3rd edition) by Victor R. Fuchs and Karen Eggleston

Shortly before he passed away in September at the age of 99, Vic Fuchs finished the third edition of his book Who Shall Live?, now with a coauthor, Karen Eggleston.

It just came out now, in time for his 100th birthday next month.

********

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Vic Fuchs (1924-2023)

Saturday, November 25, 2023

Memorial service for Vic Fuchs

Memorial service for Vic Fuchs

 Yesterday, at Etz Chayim Synagogue,  Palo Alto.

Here is my brief eulogy:

Vic was the patriarch of a clan, and a man of wide and old friendships. He was, by the way, also a brilliant, erudite, compassionate economist.

Emilie and I were among his new friends. In 2013 we bought a house down the hill from Vic, and held an open house; he came over, carrying his own chair-back, and was the life of the party.  In those days he used to reply to questions about how he was doing with a joke: “I’m in perfect health—my psychiatrist says it’s all in my body.”

That joke got less funny as his body continued to betray him, and after a while he stopped telling it.

When he joined us for dinner, he and Emilie would negotiate the menu. (He was a fussy eater, who liked his food very plain).

In 2016, when Vic joined us to watch one of the debates among Democratic primary candidates for president, he couldn’t contain himself when they discussed health care, and I gave him a lift home before the debate concluded, so he could write an op-ed. He was still in the game.

During Covid, he stopped leaving his house except to go to the doctor. As his mobility declined, our visits migrated from his patio, to the downstairs living room, and eventually up the half flight of stairs to his office.

Vic’s mind remained sharp. We were able to visit him until about a month before he passed away. He was worried about the world, but still eager to hear jokes, and to tell them.

He was a role model, and a pleasure to spend time with.  

Vic was a man of many parts, and his life was full of accomplishments, admirers, family and friends for whom his memory will be a blessing.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Vic Fuchs (1924-2023)

Vic Fuchs (1924-2023)

My friend and neighbor Vic Fuchs, the dean of American health economists, passed away on Friday.  

He was just a few months short of 100, but in the last year he finished revising the third edition of his 1975 book,  Who Shall Live? Health, Economics, and Social Choice.

He bravely bore some physical ailments, but his mind remained sharp, and he was always a pleasure to talk to. (He used to joke "I'm in perfect health: my psychiatrist says its all in my body.")

He kept abreast of current events, and remained informed and concerned about the state of the health care system in the U.S., and democracy.

Vic Fuchs speaking at the memorial conference for Ken Arrow, Oct. 9, 2017

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Update: here's a Stanford obit:

Victor Fuchs, pioneer of health care economics, has died

Fuchs’ influence and tireless devotion to the field of health care economics and the Stanford community spanned decades.

September 18, 2023 | Krysten Crawford

Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) Centennial

 Lloyd Harlow Shapley was born in 1923: he would be (and I guess is) 100 years old this year.  His family is assembling a website honoring his centennial. (It's part of a family of web pages devoted to the life and work of Lloyd's dad, the astronomer Harlow Shapley.)

Here's the page for the Lloyd Shapley Centennial

It appears to be a work in progress, with many links. It begins this way:

"Lloyd Shapley (1923-2016) was a Nobel prizewinning mathematician. Shapley’s "intellectual life and career ... was among the most fertile of the 20th century." For the Centennial of Lloyd’s birth the Harlow Shapley Project offers this easy-access guide to Lloyd's WORK, his favorite GAME Kriegspiel, personal STORIES not published before and his four PRIZES.

"Lloyd Shapley was one of the founding giants of game theory. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics for his seminal work with the late David Gale on stable matching – situations in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts. But "he could have won a Nobel for any of a number of his papers that initiated whole literatures,” wrote Alvin E. Roth, Lloyd’s Nobel co-winner (right).

"Mathematical giant John von Neumann (right) invited Lloyd to leave RAND for Princeton on the basis of a two-page paper Lloyd sent him. After getting his Princeton PhD Lloyd returned to RAND full-time. He was a very productive member of the fabled Mathematics Division. Lloyd was almost unbeatable in the Division’s lunchtime Kriegspiel matches. 

"The Work page has summaries of Lloyd’s main contributions prepared by Dr. Bruce E. Krell, a game theorist who was a colleague of Lloyd’s at RAND. The Work page also offers a bibliography of selected descriptions of his work. The Work includes the 1962 “marriage problem” paper with David Gale (right), which won the Nobel."

Harry Markowitz (1927-2023)

 Harry Markowitz, who invented modern portfolio theory, and did much beside, has died.

Here's his NYT obituary, which was apparently prepared long in advance.

Harry Markowitz, Nobel-Winning Pioneer of Modern Portfolio Theory, Dies at 95. He overturned the traditional approach to buying stocks by examining the relationship between risk and reward. By Robert D. Hershey Jr.

“I’m not a one-shot Nobel laureate — only doing one thing,” Dr. Markowitz said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. Although he was 87 at the time, he was embarked on a monumental analysis of securities risk and return."

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PORTFOLIO SELECTION, by Harry Markowitz, The Journal of Finance Volume 7, Issue 1 p. 77-91 First published: March 1952  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1952.tb01525.x

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Here's the beginning of the 1990 Nobel Prize press release:

16 October 1990

THIS YEAR’S LAUREATES ARE PIONEERS IN THE THEORY OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS AND CORPORATE FINANCE

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1990 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with one third each, to

Professor Harry Markowitz, City University of New York, USA,
Professor Merton Miller, University of Chicago, USA,
Professor William Sharpe, Stanford University, USA,

for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics.

Harry Markowitz is awarded the Prize for having developed the theory of portfolio choice;
William Sharpe, for his contributions to the theory of price formation for financial assets, the so-called, Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM); and
Merton Miller, for his fundamental contributions to the theory of corporate finance.

********

Here's the citation for the 1989 von Neumann theory prize in operations research:

"1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize:  

"Harry M. Markowitz received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize. Dr. Markowitz, presenter Ellis Johnson noted, contributed ground-breaking work in three areas: portfolio selection, mathematical programming, and simulation.

"Harry Markowitz is the Marvin Speiser Distinguished Professor of Finance and Economics at Baruch College, NYC. He developed the portfolio selection model in his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago. First published in 1952, today his model is one of the most widely used quantitative tools for investment analysis.

"During the late 50s Markowitz worked on mathematical programming at the RAND Corp. and also did his ground-breaking work on factoring bases and maintaining sparsity in the course of solving linear programs, in effect introducing the triangularization or LU factorization in place of inversion of the basis. His selection criterion for reducing fill-in when forming basis factors is the well-known Markowitz criterion and is still used in state-of-the-art codes for both LU and Cholesky factorizations. Markowitz's third main area of activity involved codifying the underlying notions of simulation by defining a world view composed of entities having attributes and belonging to sets that have defined relationships with each other. The state of the world changes through events, which are triggered by time. Based on this, in the 60s he developed a high-level simulation language, SIMSCRIPT, and in the 80s has collaborated with IBM researchers to develop EAS-E, an integrated data base, modeling and applications development language.

Dr. Markowitz told OR/MS Today that the award was a great honor and a reflection of the influence of von Neumann on portfolio theory."

Leo Hurwicz (1917-2008), biography

 Here's a web site devoted to the biography of Leo Hurwicz, by his son Michael: Leonid Hurwicz: Intelligent Designer

Victor Elias (1937-2023)

Victor Elias died last week, at 85.  He had a strong influence on academic economics in Argentina, not least through the many influential Argentine economists he helped inspire to study in the U.S., particularly at the University of Chicago, where he got his Ph.D. in 1969.

Here's the funeral notice published yesterday in La Nacion:

"Victor Elias, RIP. It is with deep regret that we bid farewell to a great talent and person, with countless  disciples, admirers and friends, economists scattered throughout the world. We accompany the entire community of Tucuman economists, the UNT and especially his children, grandchildren and great-grandson. Signed by: Fernando Alvarez, Hugo Hopenhayn, Rody Manuelli, Juan Pablo Nicolini, Alvin Roth, Silvana Tenreyro, Iván Werning."

Here's the obit from La Gaceta

Murió el economista tucumano Víctor Elías. Tuvo una reconocida trayectoria como académico en la UNT. Tenía 85 años.[Tucuman economist Víctor Elías died. He had a recognized career as an academic at UNT. He was 85 years old.]

"The renowned Tucuman economist and academic Víctor Elías passed away at the age of 85, leaving an enormous legacy that has marked several generations of Tucumans who studied Economics at the National University of Tucumán. 

"The son of Syrian immigrants, he was born in the capital of Tucumán on July 21, 1937 and due to his ancestry he received the nickname "Turk", as he was known inside and outside academic circles. "

Victor Elias and Al Roth, Tucuman, November 2016, photo by Ivan Werning

 

Tonya Ingram (1991-2022), health activist, died while waiting for a kidney

 Tonya Ingram, a poet and health activist who testified in Congress about the long waiting list for kidney transplants, died last month while still waiting.  Saturday's New York Times had a moving column about her activism, her struggle and her long wait.

Tonya Ingram Feared the Organ Donation System Would Kill Her. It Did. By Kendall Ciesemier (Ms. Ciesemier is a writer, a producer and an organ recipient.) Jan. 28, 2023

Here's her obit in the LA Times:

Tonya Ingram, an inspiring L.A. poet and ‘lupus warrior,’ died waiting for a kidney by Jireh Deng, JAN. 23, 2023

Market design isn't only about trying to allocate scarce resources effectively, it's also about working to make them less scarce.

Paul David (1935-2023)

 My Stanford colleague Paul David has died. He was an exceptional, iconic economic historian.

Gavin Wright has written this obit:

Professor Paul David died at the age of 87

"Always an economic historian, Paul soon extended his horizons in diverse and seemingly disparate ways.  He became a strong advocate of the view that historical research should be fundamental to the economics discipline; in brief; “history matters.”  The essence of the argument was captured by Paul’s incisive account of the persistence of the QWERTY typewriter keyboard despite its technical disadvantages, one of the most cited articles in all of economics (AER 1985).  “History Matters” is the title of a festschrift presented by a group of Paul’s former students in 2004, in which the editors write: “No scholar has more forcefully and influentially argued the case for making economics a truly historical social science – one that, like evolutionary biology, gives past events a central role in understanding the present.” 

"A continuing focus throughout Paul’s career was the diffusion of new technologies.  An important early paper considered the adoption of the mechanical reaper in the American Midwest.  Invention occurred in the 1830s, yet the first wave of adoption occurred only in the 1850s.  The twenty-year delay, according to Paul, was explained by the fact that a minimum scale was required to cover the fixed costs of purchasing the reaper.  Only when farms size passed this “threshold” did mechanization make economic sense.  Specialists have debated the specifics ever since, but the basic form of Paul’s diffusion model has been highly influential.  In many respects it formalized the accounts of delayed diffusion presented by our late colleague Nate Rosenberg, and thus became something of a “Stanford school” of thought in this area.  Scrolling forward to 1990, the era of the “Solow paradox,” Paul offered an analogy between the delayed productivity effects of computer technology and a similar lag in the impact of electrification between the 1880s and the 1920s.  With the IT-driven productivity surge of the late 1990s, this article also attained iconic status (AER 1990)."