Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers (1943-2026)

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 Pinker writes about how Trivers introduced game-theoretic ideas into evolutionary biology (with genes as the players, and selection into su...
Monday, March 30, 2026

The danger to democracy: some quantitative measures (Martin Wolf in the Financial Times)

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  Read it and weep. We must not underestimate the peril for democracy Donald Trump’s America is a world leader in democratic decline   by Ma...
Sunday, March 29, 2026

Alex Chan on deceased organ donation

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 The Harvard Gazette points to this interview with HBS professor Alex Chan : Designing Incentives That Matter—Even After Death: Interview wi...
Saturday, March 28, 2026

Tim O'Reilly on market design in the age of A.I.

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 Tim O'Reilly, one of the OG commentators/facilitators/cheerleaders of the internet revolution, has some thoughts on the infrastructure ...
Friday, March 27, 2026

Germany legalizes kidney exchange !!

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 Axel Ockenfels forwards the good news.  He writes: "It passed! The Bundestag voted today to permit kidney exchange in Germany. The ...
Thursday, March 26, 2026

Abundant, the movie about nondirected kidney donors, is now available for streaming.

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 Abundant, the movie about (mostly) non-directed (mostly) kidney donors (but also some livers), is now available for streaming. You can get ...

An unbalanced and congested marriage market afflicting some groups of religious Jews

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 Here's an article about the "shidduch" (matchmaking) crisis being experienced in some parts of the orthodox Jewish community....
Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Kidney exchange now has a broad literature across multiple disciplines

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  One pleasure of following an area of research for a long time is getting to see how its academic literature becomes both deeper and broade...
Tuesday, March 24, 2026

The American demand for guns (and for non-lethal firearms), by Alsan, Schwartzstein, and Stantcheva

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 The American market for guns is among the most complex of controversial markets, since gun purchases are regarded by many Americans as repu...
Monday, March 23, 2026

The innovative supply chain of illegal drugs--even in prisons

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 Strategy sets are big, so we’re not going to be able to end illegal drug use by spraying defoliants on fields of poppies, or arresting deal...
Sunday, March 22, 2026

Paid plasma donations are becoming more middle-class

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  The NYT has the story: The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By.  Across the United States, plasma centers are ...
Saturday, March 21, 2026

The States as the laboratory of democracy: helping organ donors

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News from the States: Pa. senators mull inheritance tax cut, deductions for organ donors  "While employers across the state are allowed...
Friday, March 20, 2026

PS 205: A brief address to my elementary school alma mater, about science in grade school

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 A few weeks ago I was surprised to receive this email from a teacher at the elementary school that I attended, PS 205 , in the New York Ci...
Thursday, March 19, 2026

The Faroe Islands are moving to end their ban on abortion

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 Some controversies are familiar all over the world. The NYT has the story: The Faroe Islands Are Changing Some of Europe’s Strictest Aborti...
Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly

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Another small adventure in publishing:)  Here's the pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly . " TL;D...
Monday, March 16, 2026

International statistics on plasma donation show that it is quite safe

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 Peter Jaworski collects the statistics from Europe and North America: Plasma donation is safe And commercial plasma donation is not less s...
Sunday, March 15, 2026

Congestion in signing your kid up for summer camp

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 The WSJ has the story: Welcome to the ‘Hunger Games’ of Parenting: Summer Camp Sign-Up Parents set up command centers and practice checking...
Saturday, March 14, 2026

How safe is plasma donation?

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 Here's a story from the NYT, about the recent regularization of paid plasma donation in (some provinces of) Canada. How Safe Is Plasma ...
Friday, March 13, 2026

My academic career to date, in two word clouds (covering 1974-1999 and 2000-2025)

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 Here's a website that will make a word cloud based on your Google Scholar page: Scholar Goggler .  I used it to create a kind of data-g...
Thursday, March 12, 2026

Citizen historians, preserving records before they are censored (shades of 1984)

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 Citizen historians are documenting history as displayed e.g. in signs at national museums and monuments, as those are censored, so that the...