Thursday, April 9, 2026

Zhang Xuefeng (1984-2026), guided Chinese families through the college admissions process

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 A Chinese college-admissions influencer has died, who helped families choose which colleges and majors to rank, after they received the res...
Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Open Letter to President Trump on Iran Strategy From a Group of Concerned Economists

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  Yesterday, just hours before President Trump's announced deadline for widespread destruction of power plants and bridges in Iran, a gr...

Multi-pair kidney exchange comes to Karnataka

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 Sophisticated kidney exchange is coming to more Indian States. The Indian Express has the story from Karnataka: Kidney donation to become e...
Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Could A.I. be good for scientists but bad for science?

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  There has been recent attention to using LLMs to generate novel (and often correct) mathematical proofs, prompted by plain English prompts...
Monday, April 6, 2026

Moral Economics: Al Roth and Ray Fisman at Cambridge Public Library, Monday May 11

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 Here's the invitation to a discussion I'll have in May with Ray Fisman , about Moral Economics. Some of my Boston/Cambridge friend...
Saturday, April 4, 2026

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever (New Republic)

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 As an author with a forthcoming non-fiction book , it's both depressing to read that non-fiction book sales are down, but inspiring to...
Friday, April 3, 2026

Stanford remembers John Roberts (1945-2026)

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  Economist John Roberts, leader in organizational research, dies at 80 The Stanford professor’s work brought game theory to management prac...
Thursday, April 2, 2026

How to revive science in America by Harvey V. Fineberg, in PNAS

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 Here's a paper in the latest PNAS that begins with this epigraph:   “Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend ...
Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Freedom Festival

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 Passover is the Freedom Festival. The word of the day is LIBERTY (in all it's complications) A happy and safe Passover to all who celeb...
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 ...