Drought, hunger, and early marriage in Ethiopia

 Sometimes the problem is hunger, and early marriage is seen as the solution.

The Guardian has the story

Ethiopian drought leading to ‘dramatic’ increase in child marriage, Unicef warns. With hunger across Horn of Africa and 600,000 children out of school, ‘desperate’ parents push more girls into early marriage by Lizzy Davies

"Three consecutive failed rainy seasons have brought hunger, malnutrition and mass displacement to millions of people in the Horn of Africa, including parts of Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti.

"Many girls in Ethiopia now face being married at a young age as their parents seek to find extra resources through dowries from the husband’s family, and hope their daughters will be fed and protected by wealthier families, warned Catherine Russell, Unicef’s executive director.

...

"In the East Hararghe zone, home to 2.7 million people, child marriage cases increased by 51%, from 70 recorded during a six-month period in 2020-21 to 106 in the same period a year later.

"It was just one of six drought-affected areas in Oromia to have seen a sharp rise in child marriages, Unicef said. Across those zones, cases have almost quadrupled. According to data received by Unicef this week, 672 cases of child marriage were recorded between February and August last year, whereas in the six months from last September to March this year, that number leapt to 2,282, local government figures showed.

"“We’re seeing increases in child marriage that are quite dramatic,” Russell said, noting that more than 600,000 children are thought to have dropped out of school as a result of the drought.

...

“These people [have their daughters married] because they’re desperate for one reason or another: they’re afraid of violence; they’re afraid for the safety of the girls; they need resources; they can’t afford to feed them,” Russell said.

...

"According to demographic data from 2016, 40% of girls in the east African country are married before the age of 18 and 14% are married before their 15th birthday.

...

"The drought is also pushing up the rates of severe acute malnutrition in the affected areas, with admission rates for children under five years old 15% higher in February this year than February last year."

Repugnant trade in (and study of) fossils

 Who should be allowed to export, study and display important fossils?

Nature has the story:

How a Brazilian dinosaur sparked a movement to decolonize fossil science. Rather than excitement, the discovery of the species set off a Latin American movement to stop colonial palaeontology.  by Mariana Lenharo & Meghie Rodrigues

"In December 2020, a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research sent shock waves through the palaeontology community1. It described a dinosaur species that the authors named Ubirajara jubatus — the first dinosaur found in the Southern Hemisphere to display what were probably precursors to modern feathers. The 110-million-year-old fossil had been collected in Brazil decades earlier — but no Brazilian palaeontologist had ever heard of it. The authors of the paper were from Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

"It was the latest instance of what some researchers now call palaeontological colonialism, in which scientists from wealthy nations obtain specimens from low- and middle-income countries without involving local researchers, and then store the fossils abroad. The practice can sometimes be illegal. For instance, according to Brazilian law, the country’s fossils belong to the state, although the authors of the Ubirajara paper say that they had a permit signed by a Brazilian mining official allowing them to export the specimen.

...

"The practice can also deprive nations of knowledge and heritage, say researchers. “Fossils are special to us,” says Allysson Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Palaeontological Museum in Santana do Cariri, Brazil, near where U. jubatus was found. “We have literature, arts and crafts, and music based on them.”

...

"Jeff Liston, president of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists, who is based in Edinburgh, UK, and has studied the illegal fossil trade in China, says that the scientific community has been aware of issues related to colonial palaeontology for some time — but the debate in the past few years has brought the discussion to a broader audience.

...

"In July, a panel will discuss scientific colonialism at the virtual Latin American Congress of Vertebrate Paleontology. The goal, according to Cisneros, is to promote true cooperation between palaeontologists. “We don’t want researchers from other countries to stop working here. What we hope for is that partnerships are more equitable and reciprocal. And that our laws are respected, as we respect the laws of other countries.”

...

"Minjin strongly advocates that fossils remain in their places of origin. “In Mongolia, fossils have been out of the country for the last 100 years,” she says. “Now we are facing an issue: how to find the next generation of scientists?” When children don’t grow up seeing fossils as part of their heritage and aren’t exposed to knowledge that excites them, she says, there is little motivation to become scientists."

************

I'm reminded of restrictions on the export of cultural treasures such as works of art. Here are some earlier posts...:

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Repugnance watch: Wedgwood vase could be saved from export after culture minister intervenes

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Market for (smuggled) cultural treasures

The Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, Led by Michael Kremer

 Here's the announcement from Chicago:

The Development Innovation Lab Launches at the University of Chicago, Led by Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer

The Becker Friedman Institute’s Development Economics Center is pleased to announce the launch of the Development Innovation Lab at UChicago. The launch will take place during Innovation and Development Week, to be held April 25-29 on the University of Chicago campus.

.

...

DIL’s team of professional researchers are actively engaged in cutting-edge research, including a new meta-analysis finding that water treatment reduces the odds of child mortality (death before age five) by about 30%. Drawing from this historic work, GiveWell recently announced its decision to recommend a grant of $64.7 million in new spending on water treatment, which could save thousands of lives.

“The University of Chicago’s commitment to development economics, through the launch of the Development Innovation Lab provides a tremendous opportunity to develop new knowledge on ways to address global poverty and ultimately to expand economic opportunity and improve lives,” said Kremer. “I look forward to helping build and grow the development economics community at UChicago and to advancing new research and experimentation to address a range of social and economic challenges.”

"Kremer was among the first economists to evaluate interventions in developing countries through randomized control trials. In 1998, he started a project on deworming in Kenya that has since improved the lives of millions of people. By randomizing treatments for intestinal worms at the school level, he and his collaborators found that their research initiative reduced student absenteeism by a quarter—and even carried positive outcomes to neighboring schools. Subsequent work also found that deworming had long-run impacts, leading to higher labor supply for men and more education for women.

"In addition to that research, Kremer helped develop the advance market commitment, proposing the idea of a contract that would guarantee a viable market for a costly product. Such commitments have stimulated private investment in vaccine research and the distribution of vaccines for diseases in the developing world."

The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplants May 7, 2022 (online webinar hosted at U. Chicago)

Yesterday I posted about the increasing incidence and prevalence of end stage renal disease. 

On Saturday I'll be taking part in a medical education webinar, open to the general public, on avenues to increase the availability of safe, ethical and legal kidney transplants.  Some will find it controversial*, even repugnant, since one of the big topics is the ethics of compensating kidney donors. (I'll be talking about some  of the incremental improvements that have been and can be pursued while that discussion goes on. Some of those have also had to overcome some opposition...)

There's an all-star cast of speakers.

The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplants

May 7, 2022; Virtual; Admission Is Free (join at the link above)

7AM-10 AM (PDT); 9AM-12Noon (CDT); 10AM-1PM (EDT)

Session 1: Ethics of Gifting or Compensation of Donors
Topic	Presenter (s)	Comments	Time (mins.)
			Item	Cu mul.
Ethics of Compensating (“Rewarding”) Donors	Janet Radcliffe Richards	World renown philosopher/ethicist. (Oxford). Book: the ethics of transplants why careless thought costs lives	30	30
Questions, Comments, and Recap Session 1	CON: Asif Sharfuddin M.D. FASN FAST PRO: Sally Satel M.D. M.S.		30	60
Session 2: Living Donor Transplant Issues
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Compensating (“Rewarding” Kidney Donors	Frank McCormick Ph.D.	How the Government Can End the Kidney Shortage and Save More than 40,000 Kidney Failure Patients Each Year by Compensating Living Kidney Donors. Total economic value to kidney recipients is $76B/yr. Net savings to the taxpayers is $7B/yr.	15	75
Current Status and Future Developments in Kidney Exchange Programs	Alvin Roth, Ph.D. Nobel Laurette	Living donor organs are being increasingly allocated by paired and exchange organ programs; This is the only major technical improvement in transplantation in years;	15	90

Session 2: Living Donor Transplant Issues Cont’d
Decreasing Barriers and Increasing Access for Living Donation	Cody Maynard; Independent Living Donor Advocate (NKDO)	Immediate actions we can take to increase the pool of living donors.	10	100
Discussion and Recap of Session 2 (John Fung, M.D, Ph.D.)			10	110
Break			10	120
Session 3: More Living Donor Transplant Issues
Experiences of a Living Kidney Donor;	Martha Gershun, MBA	Author of a recent book with J.D. Lantos MD: Kidney to Share.	10	130
U.S. Public Attitudes Towards Compensating Donors	Thomas Peters M.D.	Two peer reviewed studies show that 70% of US population support compensating donors $50K.	10	140
Risk and Safeguards for Living Donors	Arthur Matas, M.D., Ph.D.	Screening donors is essential. Risks are small but not zero.	15	155
The Limits of Increased Counts of Deceased Donor Transplants	John P. Roberts M.D.	Ignorance is common: Increasing the Deceased Donor pool is constrained by the limits of brain- dead donors; <2% of U.S. deaths.	10	165
WaitList Zero’s role in Living Donation	Josh Morrison J.D.; Founder of WaitList Zero	“Thanks for helping us, we were lost!” comment by a recipient, pointing to the need for education regarding living donors.	10	175
Discussion and Recap Session 3 (Thomas Peters M.D.)			10	185
Recap and Summary of the Symposium Glenn Chertow M.D., MPH			20	205

* Part of the controversy is that some advertisements for the webinar were deleted, here are some tweets on the subject:

End-stage Kidney Disease in the U.S. has doubled since 2000

 Kidney disease is on the rise in the U.S. Transplantation is the treatment of choice, but doesn't begin to meet the need.

JAMA has the story:

End-stage Kidney Disease Doubles  by Bridget M. Kuehn, MSJ, JAMA. 2022;327(16):1540. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.5342

"The number of people living with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) more than doubled between 2000 and 2019—from 358 247 to 783 594—according to an analysis of data from the United States Renal Data System (USRDS). A 41.8% increase in new cases also occurred during the study period, from 92 660 cases to 131 422 cases. Hypertension and diabetes were driving factors.

"Substantial racial and ethnic disparities in ESKD rates remain a concern. Among Asian people, new ESKD cases increased from 2507 cases in 2000 to 6256 cases in 2019—a 149.5% increase that was the largest in any racial or ethnic group. During the study period, new cases increased from 25 917 to 33 700 among Black people, from 11 297 to 20 790 among Hispanic people, from 742 to 1458 among Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander people, and from 51 156 to 67 919 among White people.

...

"They note that in 2019 alone, Medicare spent $37.3 billion or 7% of all claims on ESKD, according to USRDS data."

***************

Update: Here's the USRDS 2021 Annual Data Report, and 

here's End Stage Renal Disease: Chapter 1: Incidence, Prevalence, Patient Characteristics, and Treatment Modalities

Highlights:

• In 2019, 134,608 individuals were newly diagnosed with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), representing an increase of 2.7% from the previous year and 15.8% from a decade ago (Figure 1.1). However, the adjusted incidence fell from a peak of 431 per million population (pmp) in 2006 to 386 pmp in 2019.
• In 2019, 85% of those with incident ESRD initiated in-center hemodialysis (HD) (Figure 1.2). This represents a decrease from 91% in 2009. Over the past decade, the percentage initiating kidney replacement therapy with peritoneal dialysis (PD) nearly doubled, from 6% to 11%. The percentage who received a preemptive kidney transplant remained unchanged over the decade at about 3%.
• Adjusted ESRD incidence increased as age increased: among individuals aged 0-17 years, the adjusted incidence in 2019 was 12 pmp; among individuals aged 65-74 years, 1,307 pmp; and among individuals aged ≥75 years 1,587 pmp (Figure 1.4).
• Between 2009 and 2019, adjusted ESRD incidence in Black individuals decreased by 17.5%, in Native American individuals by 14.1%, in Hispanic individuals by 12.1%, in Asian individuals by 5.2%, and in White individuals by 2.4% (Figure 1.4). However, in all individuals except for Whites, adjusted incidence increased between 2018 and 2019.
• The prevalent count of individuals with ESRD reached 809,103 in 2019, an increase of 41.0% from 2009 (Figure 1.5). Adjusted ESRD prevalence also increased to an all-time high of 2302 cases pmp in 2019. 
• At the end of 2019, 492,096 individuals were receiving in-center HD, up 1.7% from 2018 and 34.5% from 2009 (Figure 1.6). There were 12,243 patients performing home HD at year’s end, an increase of 20.1% over the preceding year. The number of individuals receiving PD increased to 62,275, representing 8.5% growth in a single year.
• Adjusted ESRD prevalence in Black individuals was far higher, at 6423 pmp, than in other racial and ethnic groups; adjusted prevalence in Black individuals was 78.6% higher than in the next-highest group, Native Americans, and more than fourfold higher than in White individuals (Figure 1.8).
• The percentage of patients with prevalent ESRD who had a functioning kidney transplant was highest among White (36%) and lowest among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (18%) individuals. Conversely, White individuals had the lowest percentage receiving in-center HD (54%), and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander individuals had the highest (73%) (Figure 1.10).
• White (73%), Asian (72%), and Native American (72%) individuals were much more likely to have received pre-ESRD care compared with Black (64%), Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (62%), and Hispanic (61%) individuals (Figure 1.11). 
• In 2019, 39% of patients had an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) ≥10 mL/min/1.73 m² at ESRD onset (Figure 1.14). The mean eGFR at initiation of kidney replacement therapy was 9.6 mL/min/1.73m2 (Table 1.3). Overall, 60.6% of incident patients with ESRD had diabetes mellitus (DM), 28.4% heart failure (HF), and 20.8% other cardiac disease (Figure 1.18). Fully 77.5% of Native American individuals had DM, compared with 57.8% of White individuals.
• Cardiovascular disease (CVD) was present in 77.3% of patients receiving HD, 66.4% of patients receiving PD, and 54.8% of patients with a kidney transplant.

The search for tennis talent is unraveling

 It used to be that 11 year old professional tennis players were rare, but it looks like that's not the case any more. The NYT has the story:

Are the Next Global Tennis Stars Among These Tweens? The search for elite players is so competitive that IMG, the agency that once ruled tennis, is cultivating preteens to find the next prodigy  By Matthew Futterman

"The race to find the sport’s next stars has come to this: With eight-figure fortunes potentially at stake, agents and scouts are evaluating and cultivating players even younger than 10 who are just getting started in serious competition.

...

“Nobody wants to have a tournament for 11- and 12-year-olds,” said Max Eisenbud, who leads the company’s tennis division. “I’d rather wait, but the competition forced us into this situation.”

"For years, IMG’s agents collected future stars in two ways: Tweens and young teens (Maria Sharapova for example) either showed up at its academy in Bradenton, Fla., once the premier training ground in the sport, looking for one of the plentiful scholarships; or the agents showed up in Tarbes, France, for Les Petit As, the world’s premier tournament for players younger than 14. 

...

"in recent years, when Eisenbud and his colleagues made their annual trips to Les Petit As, they found that nearly all the most promising players had already signed contracts with other management companies, many of them well-funded boutique operations that were offering generous financial guarantees, sometimes stretching well beyond covering the roughly $50,000 annual cost for coaching and travel on the junior circuit.

"And so, in a sign of cutthroat times in tennis, IMG is aiming younger, even if prospecting preteen talent can be nearly impossible and highly fraught, risking increasing the pressure on children who already put plenty on themselves and, in some cases, carry the financial responsibilities for their struggling families.

...

"Eisenbud famously signed Sharapova when she was 11 years old after watching her hit for 45 minutes with an intensity and flawlessness he had never before seen. Carlos Alcaraz, who turns 19 on Thursday and is already the hottest young player in the men’s game, was deemed worthy of investment as a can’t-miss 11-year-old, too. Then again, Eisenbud was sure the first player he signed, Horia Tecau of Romania, was destined for greatness. Tecau became a top doubles specialist but never cracked the top 300 in singles.

...

 "Finding a future top 50 player from a country or a demographic group that has never produced a tennis star could be groundbreaking and incredibly lucrative."

Beyond vaccines: Bill Gates on drug development for the next pandemic

 In the NYT:

Bill Gates: How to Develop Life-Saving Drugs Much Faster

"The Covid-19 pandemic would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner. The death rates are likely to have been far lower, and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did.

...

"We’re lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn’t, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population. This is especially true if you need two or more doses for full and continued protection. If the pathogen is especially transmissible and deadly, a therapeutic drug could save tens of thousands or more.

"Even once there is a vaccine, we’ll still need good therapeutics. As we’ve seen with Covid, not everyone who can take a vaccine will choose to do so. And, along with non-pharmaceutical interventions, therapeutics can reduce the strain on hospitals, which would prevent the overcrowding that ultimately means that some patients die who otherwise wouldn’t.

...

"All of which is to say: Therapeutics are fundamentally important in an outbreak. To understand what caused the delay in drugs and how we can avoid such delays in the future, we need to take a tour through the world of therapeutics: what they are, how they get from the lab to the market, why they didn’t fare better early in this pandemic and how innovation can set the stage for a better response in the future.

...

"One of the keys to ensuring that health care workers have better treatment options in the next big outbreak than they did for Covid will be investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens. Some of these libraries exist already, but the world needs more. We need libraries that cover many types of drugs, but the most promising, in my view, are those known as pan-family and broad-spectrum therapies — either antibodies or drugs that can treat a wide range of viral infections, especially those that are likely to cause a pandemic."

Opioid deaths are behind increases in deceased organ donation

 Medpage Today warns us not to take credit for increases in organ donation that are due to rising numbers of opioid overdose deaths. 

'Shocking Mismanagement' in Our Organ Donation System Is Causing Needless Death— OPTN and OPOs are mischaracterizing organ donation data to block system reform  by DJ Patil, PhD, Greg Segal, Ebony Hilton, MD, and Lachlan Forrow, MD

"The magnitude of the opioid crisis shows no signs of peaking. New data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics show that deaths from the opioid epidemic soared by 50% from October 2019 to October 2021, some of which reflected second-order effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, alcohol-related deaths, according to recent CDC reports, were also up by a shocking 25% in 2020, from an average increase of 3.6% per year from 1999-2019.

"What does this have to do with organ donation? Drug overdoses and alcohol-related deaths fall into the subset of deaths that allow for organ donation to occur, so this sharp rise in opioid deaths has driven record-breaking organ donation numbers. That might sound like a silver lining to a very dark cloud, but as is often the case with public health data, the picture is much more complex.

"The government contractors in charge of organ donation -- both organ procurement organizations (OPOs), which oversee local organ recovery, and the organ procurement transplantation network (OPTN), which manages the system -- are hiding behind increases in these deaths of despair to deflect criticism from what the House Oversight Committee has characterized as "shocking mismanagement" in organ procurement.

"In fact, HHS has deemed the majority of OPOs to be failing key performance metrics, contributing to 33 Americans dying every day for lack of an organ transplant. And the Senate Finance Committee is investigating the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the OPTN contractor, over "serious concerns related to [its] role in overseeing our nation's OPOs, which have been severely underperforming for decades."

...

"We have more organ donors in America not because we have a strong -- or even remotely adequate -- organ procurement system, but because on a per capita basis among wealthy nations, we have many times more deaths in those subsets of deaths that allow for organ donation to occur. This includes 20 to 30 times more opioid deaths, 25 times as many gun deaths, the highest suicides rates, and more than twice as many fatal car accidents -- a number that spiked again precipitously last year."

More on NYC school choice lotteries

 Following my recent post on random numbers in the NYC school choice system(s) for high school and middle school, Amélie Marian writes to me from Rutgers, where she is a professor of computer science and a close observer of school choice.

She writes:

"I just read your blog post about the NYC school lottery system glitch and I found the comparison to plumbing extremely adequate to describe what has been happening with the NYC school admission system these past few years. 

...

"One of the most major recent change is that most admissions are now decided solely by lottery numbers; most schools don't rank students anymore***. The random number, originally designed as a tie-breaker, is now the main deciding factor. With this in mind, I, along with parent advocacy groups, pushed the DOE to provide students with their lottery numbers so that families could adjust their expectations and strategize their lists to avoid being unmatched; in one Manhattan district last year, 18% of students did not receive an offer to a school on their list. I have been working on explaining the system to parents, and on crowdsourcing data to help parents estimate their student's odds of admissions at various schools:

 * Part 1 on the random numbers: https://medium.com/p/bae7148e337d  

* Part 2 on their impacts on strategy: https://medium.com/p/42dd9a98b115

"*** MS admissions is purely lottery-based but geographically limited by district. HS admissions is city-wide. Some HS are allowed to screen students, but the screening is very coarse; this year 63% of students qualify in the top screening group, within the group admissions are decided by lottery numbers.

 "Of course, every modification in the system has had unintended consequences. The "glitch" reported by the NYPost was likely due to the DOE system assigning random numbers to applications and not to students, which was a reasonable approach as long as the numbers were not shared with families. And, as you pointed out in previous blog posts, the addition of waitlists has had repercussions as well. In fact, the DOE has changed the way it processes waitlists yearly since their inception, most likely to fix the problems that the previous iteration created. The latest version unfortunately introduces an incentive to strategize for waitlists in the original choice ranked list. "

Venture capital and crypto academics join forces to build a lab

 The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as "a16z") has recruited a star-studded list of academic researchers to brainstorm about blockchain computer science and economics:

Announcing a16z crypto research

"There is an opportunity for an industrial research lab to help bridge the worlds of academic theory with industry practice, and to help shape crypto and web3 as a formal area of study by bringing together the very best research talent from the various disciplines that are relevant to the space. 

"Today, we’re excited to announce the creation of a16z crypto research, a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that will work closely with our portfolio and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet. 

******

And here is the leadership and founding team:

"Tim Roughgarden 

"For twenty years, as a researcher and computer science professor at Stanford and Columbia, Tim has led the development of Algorithmic Game Theory, a field that brings together ideas from Computer Science and Economics to solve real-world computing problems. He wrote the definitive textbooks and courses on the field. 

"In recent years, Tim has increasingly focused on research problems in web3. That is no surprise, given how fundamental questions about incentives are in the space. For example, prompted by discussions with Vitalik Buterin and other members of the Ethereum community, Tim published the first formal analysis of the (initially polarizing) fee mechanism that was proposed in EIP-1559. The report helped the community get comfortable with the proposal, and it was subsequently deployed to the Ethereum mainnet in August of last year.

"Besides Tim’s brilliance as a researcher, he’s also a great teacher. The YouTube lectures for his crypto and blockchain course at Columbia, for example, are one of the best and most popular introductions to the space.

"Getting to know Tim over the course of over a year has left us with no doubt that he’s the perfect person to lead a16z crypto research full time. We’re thrilled to announce that Tim has joined us as Head of Research.

"Dan Boneh

"Dan is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he leads the Applied Cryptography, the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research (CBR), and the Computer Security Lab. He is one of the most distinguished cryptographers and computer security researchers in the world, wrote the definitive textbook on applied cryptography, and is also a renowned educator and entrepreneur.

"In recent years, Dan’s work has focused on cryptographic tools for blockchain applications. He co-developed the concept of a verifiable delay function (VDF), and has designed several other cryptographic constructions (like BLS signatures) that have since been widely adopted in web3. His cryptography MOOC, which is free and open to the public, is a popular way to get started with cryptography. 

"For the past four years, Dan has worked closely with us and our portfolio as a Research Advisor. With the creation of a16z crypto research, we’re excited to promote Dan to Senior Research Advisor. His work with us will be integral to setting the direction for the team, while continuing to provide support for founders in our portfolio.

##

"Both Dan and Tim have made countless contributions to their fields, but great researchers never work alone.

"The founding team

"Under Tim’s leadership, we’re bringing onboard a multidisciplinary, all-star founding team of Research Partners. Each member is a leader in their field, has made outstanding research contributions to web3, and has worked toward deploying those contributions in the real world.

"Joseph Bonneau wrote the (text)book on cryptocurrency technologies, and he’s also published work on social networking privacy, cryptographic protocols, side-channel attacks, software obfuscation, and reverse engineering. He has taught cryptocurrency courses at the University of Melbourne, NYU, Stanford, and Princeton, and received a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge and BS/MS degrees from Stanford.

"Benedikt Bünz is the Chief Scientist of Espresso Systems and is finishing up his PhD in Dan Boneh’s applied cryptography group at Stanford. His research is focused on the science of blockchains using tools from applied cryptography, game theory, and consensus, and has already had a huge impact in the industry. His work includes Bulletproofs, one of the most widely used zero-knowledge proofs today; and verifiable delay functions, which are a fundamental component of ‘green’ blockchain consensus. 

"Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. He’s one of the best market design scholars in the world, and also advises a number of companies on real-world marketplace and incentive design, such as building reputation-based systems. He holds a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard.

"Valeria Nikolaenko joins from Novi at Meta, where she was a research scientist and cryptographer for the Diem blockchain, started by Facebook in 2019 as Libra. She specializes in modern cryptography, computer and web security, post-quantum cryptography, and is one of the world’s experts in proof-of-stake blockchain design. She has worked extensively on Schnorr signatures — including half-aggregation, threshold deterministic signing, and study of cryptographic libraries — and long-range attacks on proof-of-stake blockchains. She received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, advised by Dan Boneh."

David Zuckerman defends his dissertation

 David Zuckerman defended his dissertation yesterday.

Here are the papers he defended:

Preferences for Compensatory and Retributive Justice

I experimentally investigate third-party preferences for victim compensation and offender punishment when one party has harmed another. I find that if the harm is intentional, third parties not only display an increased demand for punishment, but also an increased demand for compensation. I refer to these additional demands for punishment and compensation as the demand for retributive justice and compensatory justice, respectively. Demand for retributive justice is positively correlated with demand for compensatory justice. However, third parties do not treat the two types of justice as substitutes or complements. Moreover, I generally find that these types of justices do not take victim knowledge of offender punishment nor offender knowledge of victim compensation into account. I then extend my investigation to a risky setting, where the offender's action may or may not end up harming the victim. I find that for both compensation and punishment, not only does the intent behind the action matter, but the consequences of the action as well. However, this is primarily driven by third-party distributional preferences; the outcome does not seem to affect the demand for retributive or compensatory justice.

A Theory of Chosen Preferences

(with B. Douglas Bernheim, Luca Braghieri, and Alejandro Martínez) [Online Appendix] [2019 Working Paper Version]

American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 2 (February 2021), pages 720-754

We propose and develop a theory of preference formation based on the idea that people evaluate their lives according to worldviews that provide accounts of success and failure, and that they choose those worldviews subject to feasibility constraints. Our framework highlights the role of mindset ï¬,exibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision maker places on her current and anticipated worldviews when evaluating future outcomes. We show that our theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, thereby illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential accounts for a variety of observed phenomena.

Unseen Preferences: Homophily in Friendship Networks

Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Homophily is typically measured using a single dimension to define groups. However, people generally display preferences over multiple dimensions. I develop a simple model that characterizes agents both by a (discrete) "type" and a (continuous) "personality" value. Agents have preferences-for-similarity over both dimensions, but homophily is only measured with respect to type. I identify sufficient conditions on preferences such that a strongly stable matching exists, and show via simulations that the friendship patterns generated by these matchings qualitatively line up with several patterns noted in the data. The matchings can be calculated via an algorithm where agents "search" through utility space for friends. Increasing costs to friendship cause both within-group and systematic across-group heterogeneity in the extent of students' search through utility space. Majority-group "outliers" - those who must search an extensive amount in utility space for friends - form a disproportionate number of cross-group friendships. These outliers are the key reason why mid-sized groups exhibit the highest levels of homophily bias, a distinctive feature noted in prior literature.

Mazel tov, David.  Welcome to the club.

High prices and moral outrage, by Elias, Lacetera, and Macis

 Is Uber-style surge pricing immoral, or efficient?  How about price rises during a pandemic? Does discussion of the economic consequences change the assessments of morality? Here's a new NBER paper:

Is the Price Right? The Role of Morals, Ideology, and Tradeoff Thinking in Explaining Reactions to Price Surges  by Julio J. Elias, Nicola Lacetera & Mario Macis, NBER WORKING PAPER 29963, DOI 10.3386/w29963, April 2022

Abstract: "Price surges often generate social disapproval and requests for regulation and price controls, but these interventions may cause inefficiencies and shortages. To study how individuals perceive and reason about sudden price increases for different products under different policy regimes, we conduct a survey experiment with Canadian and U.S. residents. Econometric and textual analyses indicate that prices are not seen just as signals of scarcity; they cause widespread opposition and strong and polarized moral reactions. However, acceptance of unregulated prices is higher when potential economic tradeoffs between unregulated and controlled prices are salient and when higher production costs contribute to the price increases. The salience of tradeoffs also reduces the polarization of moral judgments between supporters and opponents of unregulated pricing. In part, the acceptance of free price adjustments is driven by people’s overall attitudes about the function of markets and the government in society. These findings are corroborated by a donation experiment, and they suggest that awareness of the causes and potential consequences of price increases may induce less extreme views about the role of market institutions in governing the economy."

From the conclusions:

"Our findings support the claim that people do not perceive prices as only signals of relative scarcity, but they attribute moral valence to them. Consistent with prior studies, price spikes in response to demand increases receive widespread opposition and generates moral aversion, mainly out of concerns for fairness toward and exploitation of consumers. Moreover, underlying ideological positions about the role of the market (and the government) in society significantly affect the perceptions and acceptance of price surges. However, when made explicit, economic or tradeoff considerations substantially increase the public’s acceptance of price increases in response to demand surges. The reaction to these economic considerations also concerns moral judgments; tradeoff salience increases people’s acceptance of price surges and changes their moral reactions to these increases. When individuals are prompted to consider the economic consequences of freely adjusting prices versus price controls, their moral judgments are less radical and less different from one another. 

...

"Despite the large positive impact of explicit cost-benefit considerations on the acceptance of the free price mechanism to organize markets, most respondents, even when assigned to scenarios with salient tradeoffs, did not support a “laissez faire” solution to price surges. This suggests that this opposition is rooted in strong beliefs and norms whose violation could represent a cost to society. Policy choices and organizational practices that reduce the likelihood of price spikes may therefore be supported by the public."

Kim Krawiec interviews Sally Satel about kidneys

 Kim's podcast Taboo Trades adds a new interview and reminds you of two previous interviews, with kidney donors:

April 17, 2022

Kidneys with Sally Satel

I discuss what it's like to need (and receive) a life-saving kidney transplant with AEI's Sally Satel (a two-time kidney transplant patient) and UVA 3L, Caitlyn Stollings, who co-hosts this episode.

Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the staff psychiatrist at a local methadone clinic in Washington D.C. She was also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993 and remains a lecturer at Yale.

Importantly for our purposes, she is a two-time kidney transplant patient and has written widely about that experience. Dr. Satel is also the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors

 

This episode features a kidney recipient, but we've also done two episodes featuring Good Samaritan donors, here:

and here:

Posted by Kim Krawiec at 10:46 AM in Taboo Trades | Permalink