JOE Job Openings for Economists: 2023 versus the past 4 years

 Here's the latest note on the job market from the AEA's  Committee on the Job Market.  It reflects a tight job market (but may also reflect that fewer than 100% of available jobs are published in the JOE, and this may be in flux). The full memo is at the link below, and I'm summarizing here some of the highlights (trigger warning:(

JOE Job Openings by Sector, 2023 versus the past 4 years 

"To: Members of the American Economic Association

From: AEA Committee on the Job Market: John Cawley (chair), Matt Gentzkow, Brooke Helppie-McFall, Al Roth, Peter Rousseau, and Wendy Stock  Date: December 8, 2023

This memo reports the cumulative number of unique job openings on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), by sector and week, compared to the same week in recent years.

Some clarifications on the data and graphs in this memo:

• ...

• The data described in this memo cover ISO weeks 1 through 48, which in 2023 ended December 3.

• The counts that are graphed and discussed are the number of job openings. To clarify, it is not the number of job listings; a listing may include multiple openings.

• ...

• On each graph, the year-to-date cumulative number of job openings is listed for the past five years separately: 2019-2023. The graphs are shown below, overall and by sector. 

Figure 1 (on p. 3) shows the total number of job openings in 2023, compared to recent years. As of the end of week 48, there have been 2,924 jobs listed on JOE since the beginning of 2023, which is 14.7% lower than at the same week in 2022, 8.7% lower than the same week in 2021, 21.9% higher than the same week in 2020 (the worst COVID year), and 15.9% lower than the same week in 2019, the last pre- COVID year.

Subsequent graphs compare the number of job openings separately by sector. Figure 2 shows that 741 full-time academic positions in the U.S. have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; this is 16.5% lower than at the same week in 2022, 0.4% lower than at the same week in 2021, 109.3% higher than at the same week in 2020, and 8.2% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 4.

Figure 4 shows that 949 full-time academic job openings in institutions outside the U.S. have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; that is 7.2% lower than at the same week in 2022, 9.5% lower than the same week in 2021, 11.1% higher than at the same week in 2020, and 16.7% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 6.

Figure 6 shows that 508 full-time non-academic positions (in the U.S. or abroad) have been listed on JOE so far in 2023; that is 26.8% lower than at the same week in 2022, 30.0% lower than at the same week in 2021, 18.2% lower than the same time in 2020 and 35.4% lower than the same week in 2019 - see p. 8.

Over the past four years, roughly 92% of the calendar year’s job listings have been posted by the end of November. In January 2024, we will post a year-end report that includes the final numbers for 2023.

The AEA Executive Committee and the Committee on the Job Market provide the following guidance for the job market, to ensure common expectations, fairness, and a thick job market. This guidance concerns the timing of interview invitations, the interviews themselves, and exploding job offers.

...

Computers in Econ (and in market design)

 The current issue of the journal Œconomia. is devoted to The Computerization of Economics. Computers, Programming, and the Internet in the History of Economics

It includes this surprisingly grumpy-sounding take on market design, particularly on its intersection with game theory:

 Nik-Khah, Edward. "The Closed Market: Platform Design and the Computerization of Economics." Œconomia. History, Methodology, Philosophy 13-3 (2023): 877-905.

Here's a paragraph that caught my eye:

"In his book Who Gets What—And Why, the market designer Alvin Roth pronounced firms such as Google, Amazon, and Uber to be “markets,” proclaiming, “Successful designs depend greatly on the details of the market, including the culture and psychology of the participants” (Roth, 2015). One need not actually find an example of an economist counseling advisees to skip that additional course in game theory and take up cultural anthropology to arrive at the sense that matters had taken a surprising turn: only a decade before one regularly encountered brash claims that all social science worth its salt must be reducible to game theory, with market design cited as evidence for why this must be so (e.g., Binmore, 2004)."

#####

Here's the table of contents of the issue:

• The Computerization of Economics. Computers, Programming, and the Internet in the History of Economics

  edited by Marcel Boumans, Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Pierrick Dechaux and Francesco Sergi
  • Marcel Boumans, Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche, Pierrick Dechaux and Francesco Sergi
    The Computerization of Economics: Three Lessons for Economics [Full text]
    Introduction to the Special Issue
    L’informatisation des sciences économiques : trois leçons pour les sciences économiques
  • Laetitia Lenel
    The Introduction of the Electronic Computer and the End of Business Forecasting at the NBER [Full text]
    L’introduction de l’ordinateur électronique et la fin des prévisions économiques au NBER
  • Chung-Tang Cheng
    From Computors to Computers: The Early History of Econometric Computation at the University of Cambridge [Full text]
    Des calculateurs aux ordinateurs : à l’aube du calcul économétrique à l’université de Cambridge
  • Pedro G. Duarte and Francesco Sergi
    Computer Operators and Software Engineers at Data Resources Inc. [Full text]
    Opérateurs informatiques et ingénieurs logiciel chez Data Resources Inc.
  • Andrej Svorenčík
    The Role of Computers in the Emergence of Experimental Economics Laboratories: Material Culture and Moral Economy [Full text]
    Le rôle des ordinateurs dans l’essor des laboratoires d’économie expérimentale : culture matérielle et économie morale
  • Béatrice Cherrier, Aurélien Saïdi and Francesco Sergi
    “Write Your Model Almost as You Would on Paper and Dynare Will Take Care of the Rest!” A History of the Dynare Software [Full text]
    « Écrivez votre modèle comme sur papier et Dynare s’occupera du reste ! » Une histoire du logiciel Dynare
  • Julien Gradoz
    The Computer and the Statistician. Computerization and the Mobilization of Scanner Data by National Statistical Institutes for the Construction of Price Indexes [Full text]
    L’informatisation et la mobilisation des données de caisse par les instituts nationaux de statistiques dans la construction des indices de prix
  • Edward Nik-Khah
    The Closed Market: Platform Design and the Computerization of Economics [Full text]
    Le marché clos : la conception des plateformes et l’informatisation des sciences économiques

  • • Symposium on Elisabeth Popp Berman's “Thinking Like an Economist. How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy”

      • Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche and Aurélien Goutsmedt
        Symposium on Elisabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist. How Efficiency Replace Equality in U.S. Public Policy [Full text]
      • Edward Nik-Khah
        RARG Against the Machine [Full text]
      • Thomas Kayzel
        Not Just the Economic Style: Technocratic Ideology and Neoliberalism in US Policymaking [Full text]
      • Diane Coyle
        Automating the Economic Style of Reasoning [Full text]
      • Giulio Zanella
        Shallow and Deep Economic Thinking [Full text]

Drug addiction: not just opioids

 Consumption of addictive drugs seems to come in deadly cocktails these days, which is making interdiction of drugs, and treatment of addiction more complicated.

The NYT has the story:

‘A Monster’: Super Meth and Other Drugs Push Crisis Beyond Opioids. Millions of U.S. drug users now are addicted to several substances, not just opioids like fentanyl and heroin. The shift is making treatment far more difficult.  By Jan Hoffman

"The United States is in a new and perilous period in its battle against illicit drugs. The scourge is not only opioids, such as fentanyl, but a rapidly growing practice that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labels “polysubstance use.”

Over the last three years, studies of people addicted to opioids (a population estimated to be in the millions) have consistently shown that between 70 and 80 percent also take other illicit substances, a shift that is stymieing treatment efforts and confounding state, local and federal policies.

“It’s no longer an opioid epidemic,” said Dr. Cara Poland, an associate professor at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. “This is an addiction crisis.”

...

"The incursion of meth has been particularly problematic. Not only is there no approved medical treatment for meth addiction, but meth can also undercut the effectiveness of opioid addiction therapies. Meth explodes the pleasure receptors, but also induces paranoia and hallucinations, works like a slow acid on teeth and heart valves and can inflict long-lasting brain changes.

"The Biden administration has been pouring billions into opioid interventions and policing traffickers, but has otherwise lagged in keeping pace with the evolution of drug use. There has been comparatively little discussion about meth and cocaine, despite the fact that during the 12-month period ending in May 2023, over 34,000 deaths were attributed to methamphetamine and 28,000 to cocaine, according to provisional federal data.

...

"Like opioids, which originally came from the poppy, meth started out as a plant-based product, derived from the herb ephedra. Now, both drugs can be produced in bulk synthetically and cheaply. They each pack a potentially lethal, addictive wallop far stronger than their precursors."

Applying for medical residencies: a consensus statement from Internal Medicine

 The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine has released a "consensus statement" with many proposals about application and interview caps, and signaling.

Catalanotti, Jillian S., Reeni Abraham, John H. Choe, Kelli A. Corning, Laurel Fick, Kathleen M. Finn, Stacy Higgins et al. "Rethinking the Internal Medicine Residency Application Process to Prioritize the Public Good: A Consensus Statement of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine." The American Journal of Medicine (2023).

It also includes a call for data and analysis:

"AAIM proposes increasing internal medicine program preference signals to 15, using tiered signaling with three “gold” and 12 “silver” signals, and setting an interview cap of 15 in the 2024-2025 recruitment season, with participation by all internal medicine programs. The Alliance recommends that all internal medicine programs participate in ACI. AAIM recommends that programs transparently share information about their use of preference signals and other application screening methods and calls for real-time data analysis to explore impact, inform future iterations and identify potential harms.

"The Alliance calls upon ERAS and NRMP as well as Thalamus® and other interview scheduling platforms to transparently share data, to embrace change, and to perform analyses needed to inform this process. For example, recent modeling with eight years of retrospective NRMP data in OBGYN demonstrated that an early match round may increase the number of “mutually dissatisfied applicant-program pairs” and that a multiple-round match process could introduce potential rewards for gamesmanship, a prime factor addressed by the current process.35 AAIM applauds this analysis and hopes that the new collaboration between ERAS and Thalamus® may provide useful interview data to inform this proposal and further interventions."

And here is reference 35 in that last paragraph, about which I've blogged before.

I Ashlagi, E Love, JI Reminick, AE. Roth

Early vs Single Match in the Transition to Residency: Analysis Using NRMP Data From 2014 to 2021

J Grad Med Educ, 15 (2) (Apr 2023), pp. 219-227, 10.4300/JGME-D-22-00177.1

View in ScopusGoogle Scholar

Organ & Body Donations: John Oliver

Laugh through the tears with John Oliver:

Convalescent plasma: the picture is getting clearer

 Slowly, there is evidence accumulating that convalescent plasma is helpful in treating patients with severe Covid, if it is administered early.  There is also evidence that it doesn't help much once the disease has become well established, particularly when the primary symptoms become due to the body's own immune reaction.  These caveats help explain why early reports did not find an effect of convalescent plasma--i.e. it helped only a subset of the patients to whom it was administered. But for those it was sometimes life saving. Here is a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Convalescent Plasma for Covid-19–Induced ARDS in Mechanically Ventilated Patients by Benoît Misset, M.D., Michael Piagnerelli, M.D., Ph.D., Eric Hoste, M.D., Ph.D., Nadia Dardenne, M.Sc., David Grimaldi, M.D., Ph.D., Isabelle Michaux, M.D., Ph.D., Elisabeth De Waele, M.D., Ph.D., Alexander Dumoulin, M.D., Philippe G. Jorens, M.D., Ph.D., Emmanuel van der Hauwaert, M.D., Frédéric Vallot, M.D., Stoffel Lamote, M.D., et al., October 26, 2023, N Engl J Med 2023; 389:1590-1600 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2209502

"Abstract

BACKGROUND

Passive immunization with plasma collected from convalescent patients has been regularly used to treat coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Minimal data are available regarding the use of convalescent plasma in patients with Covid-19–induced acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).

METHODS

In this open-label trial, we randomly assigned adult patients with Covid-19–induced ARDS who had been receiving invasive mechanical ventilation for less than 5 days in a 1:1 ratio to receive either convalescent plasma with a neutralizing antibody titer of at least 1:320 or standard care alone. Randomization was stratified according to the time from tracheal intubation to inclusion. The primary outcome was death by day 28.

RESULTS

A total of 475 patients underwent randomization from September 2020 through March 2022. Overall, 237 patients were assigned to receive convalescent plasma and 238 to receive standard care. Owing to a shortage of convalescent plasma, a neutralizing antibody titer of 1:160 was administered to 17.7% of the patients in the convalescent-plasma group. Glucocorticoids were administered to 466 patients (98.1%). At day 28, mortality was 35.4% in the convalescent-plasma group and 45.0% in the standard-care group (P=0.03). In a prespecified analysis, this effect was observed mainly in patients who underwent randomization 48 hours or less after the initiation of invasive mechanical ventilation. Serious adverse events did not differ substantially between the two groups.

CONCLUSIONS

The administration of plasma collected from convalescent donors with a neutralizing antibody titer of at least 1:160 to patients with Covid-19–induced ARDS within 5 days after the initiation of invasive mechanical ventilation significantly reduced mortality at day 28. This effect was mainly observed in patients who underwent randomization 48 hours or less after ventilation initiation."

#####

Here are my posts on convalescent plasma, and the confusing initial reports about its effects.

Photos from the daily market design activity at Stanford

Two photos remind me of the day to day market design activity at Stanford. 

Tinglong Dai joined our Wednesday market design coffee and sent along this picture. (You can see who came by plane and who came by bike...)  He wrote about his visit here.

And Matias Cersosimo successfully defended his dissertation on Friday, which  included market design experiments like this one.

 Welcome to the club, Matias.

Design of (international) kidney exchange: ex-post rejection versus ex-ante withholding

 Here's a paper by several Dutch computer scientists, which seems to be motivated by the problem of international kidney exchange within the EU, in which there are lots of concerns about fairness between countries.  But (as the paper notes) these could also apply to individual transplant centers, in the U.S. context.  The thrust of the paper is that looking for exchanges that won't be rejected ex post in a full information environment may be more productive than looking for ways to incentivize countries or transplant centers to reveal their full sets of patient donor pairs in an incomplete information environment.

Blom, Danny, Bart Smeulders, and Frits Spieksma. "Rejection-Proof Mechanisms for Multi-Agent Kidney Exchange." Games and Economic Behavior (2023).

Abstract: Kidney exchange programs (KEPs) increase kidney transplantation by facilitating the exchange of incompatible donors. Increasing the scale of KEPs leads to more opportunities for transplants. Collaboration between transplant organizations (agents) is thus desirable. As agents are primarily interested in providing transplants for their own patients, collaboration requires balancing individual and common objectives. In this paper, we consider ex-post strategic behavior, where agents can modify a proposed set of kidney exchanges. We introduce the class of rejection-proof mechanisms, which propose a set of exchanges such that agents have no incentive to reject them. We provide an exact mechanism and establish that the underlying optimization problem is 

we also describe computationally less demanding heuristic mechanisms. We show rejection-proofness can be achieved at a limited cost for typical instances. Furthermore, our experiments show that the proposed rejection-proof mechanisms also remove incentives for strategic behavior in the ex-ante setting, where agents withhold information.

Fairness in algorithms: Hans Sigrist Prize to Aaron Roth

 The University of Bern's Hans Sigrist Prize has been awarded to Penn computer scientist Aaron Roth, and will be celebrated today.

Here are today's symposium details and schedule:

The Hans Sigrist Symposium

Data Science: The Power of the Human Mind for the Sake of Humankind

Here's an interview:

Aaron Roth: Pioneer of fair algorithms  In December 2023, the most highly endowed prize of the University of Bern will go to the US computer scientist Aaron Roth. His research aims to incorporate social norms into algorithms and to better protect privacy.  by Ivo Schmucki 

"There are researchers who sit down and take on long-standing problems and just solve them, but I am not smart enough to do that," says Aaron Roth. "So, I have to be the other kind of researcher. I try to define a new problem that no one has worked on yet but that might be interesting."

"Aaron Roth's own modesty may stand in the way of understanding the depth of his contributions. In fact, when he authored his doctoral thesis on differential privacy about 15 years ago and then wrote on the fairness of algorithms a few years later, terms like “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” were far from being as firmly anchored in our everyday lives as they are today. Aaron Roth was thus a pioneer, laying the foundation for a new branch of research.

"I am interested in real problems. Issues like data protection are becoming increasingly important as more and more data is generated and collected about all of us," says Aaron Roth about his research during the Hans Sigrist Foundation’s traditional interview with the prize winner. He focuses on algorithmic fairness, differential privacy, and their applications in machine learning and data analysis.

...

"It is important that more attention is paid to these topics," says Mathematics Professor Christiane Tretter, chair of this year's Hans Sigrist Prize Committee. Tretter says that many people perceive fairness and algorithms as two completely different poles, situated in different disciplines and incompatible with each other. "It is fascinating that Aaron Roth’s work shows that this is not a contradiction."

...

"The first step to improving the analysis of large data sets is to be aware of the problem: "We need to realize that data analysis can be problematic. Once we agree on this, we can consider how we can solve the problems," says Aaron Roth."

UNOS ends its liver exchange pilot program

UNOS has shuttered it's liver exchange pilot program, after less than a year, without having performed any liver exchange transplants. (My understanding is that this wasn't part of UNOS's OPTN contract, but part of its activities as a private company.)

A colleague forwarded me this announcement:

"After careful consideration and evaluation, we regret to announce the discontinuation of the UNOS Liver Paired Donation Pilot Program (LPDPP).

The UNOS LPDPP was launched with the noble goal of matching candidates in need of a liver transplant with living donors from across the United States. Top-tier transplant programs from around the country participated in the program, entering pairs to be matched for transplantation.

 Despite the enthusiasm and dedication of the UNOS LPDPP Steering Committee, participating hospitals, a visionary funder and UNOS Labs staff, we must acknowledge that the program faced significant challenges. Regrettably, no matches were made, and no transplants occurred during the course of the pilot.

 This decision to discontinue the program is a result of several factors, primarily the depletion of funding allocated to the pilot and other barriers to widespread adoption. While practical constraints have led us to this difficult decision, we are still committed to uncovering key insights that may help future efforts toward a national liver paired donation program and apply to other challenges facing the organ donation and transplant community.

 We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the Steering Committee, participating transplant programs’ staff, candidates and donors who agreed to be entered and the generous living liver recipient who funded this endeavor. Your dedication to saving lives through organ transplantation is truly commendable. These efforts have yielded valuable data and insights that will allow our community to continue to advance.

 While this chapter may be closing, our commitment to increasing the number of lives saved through organ donation and transplant remains unwavering. We will continue to explore innovative ways to improve access to organ transplants for those in need. We will be doing more investigation into the program’s barriers to success, unexpected challenges and opportunities for improvement, and we plan to share our discoveries with the community so we may all learn from the results.

 The program will officially end November 30, 2023, with the last match run on September 30, 2023."

###########

Earlier:

Friday, January 27, 2023

Liver exchange pilot program at UNOS

see also, from UNOS:

Liver paired donation — LPD

and this, from Medscape:

Can a Nationwide Liver Paired Donation Program Work?   by Lucy Hicks, January 30, 2023

"It is possible that the 1-year pilot program could run without performing any paired transplants, but that's unlikely if multiple pairs are enrolled in the system, the spokesperson said. At the time of this story's publication, the one enrolled pair are a mother and daughter who are registered at the UCHealth Transplant Center in Colorado.

...

"The pilot program requires that the donor bring one support person with them if they need to travel for the surgery, but undergoing major abdominal surgery from a transplant team they are not familiar with may be stressful, said Peter Abt, MD, a transplant " at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "That's a big ask," he said, "and I'm not sure many potential donors would be up to that."

"John Roberts, MD, a transplant surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed that the travel component may put additional stress on the donor, but "if it's the only way for the recipient to get a transplant, then the donor might be motivated," he added.

...

"Leishman agreed that the travel aspect appears to one of the greatest barriers to participants entering the program but noted that a goal of the pilot program is to understand better what works — and what doesn't — when considering a liver paired donation program on a national scale. "[Our] steering committee has put together a really nice framework that they think will work, but they know it's not perfect. We're going to have to tweak it along the way," she said."

Repugnant sales of art: deaccessioning, in Switzerland

 "Deaccessioning" is a repugnant transaction in the art world, in which it's often considered acceptable to sell art only to finance the purchase of other art, and not to keep a museum from going bankrupt.  I've written about this in the U.S. context, but it's an international phenomenon.

The NY Times has the story, from Switzerland:

Swiss Museum in Financial Straits Sells Three Cézannes for $53 Million. Museum Langmatt said the sales were necessary to keep its doors open. Critics had said they violated industry guidelines on when a museum should sell off parts of its collection.

"The Foundation Langmatt’s decision to sell the Cézannes earned wide criticism before the auction. The Swiss branch of the International Council of Museums, which said the sale was a clear breach of its guidelines for de-accessioning from museum collections, called for the paintings to be withdrawn.

"Professional blood donors" in India (where paying blood donors is illegal)

 India allows only unpaid blood donation, from altruistic donors or from "replacement donors" who are friends or relations of particular patients in need of blood (who must procure it before receiving it). There is a severe blood shortage, some of which is filled by black market "professional" blood donors, who are paid to pretend to be unpaid replacement donors.

Here's a story from the Indian news service Quint:

Out for Blood: Why Are Many Indians Forced To Seek 'Professional Blood Donors'? Although it is illegal, why is there a thriving market for paid blood donors in India?  by ANOUSHKA RAJESH and MAAZ HASAN

"Donating blood in exchange for money was banned in India in 1996. However, paying 'professional blood donors' to meet this requirement is still fairly common.

...

"To see how easy it would be to 'arrange' a paid blood donor, FIT went to one of the busiest government hospitals in Delhi.

...

"All leads – from vendors to patient families and bootleg pharmacists – point us to Ashok (name changed). He sits, surrounded by 4-5 men, and is guarded when we make inquiries.

"He begins with the following line of questioning: 'Where is our patient admitted?  What surgery do they need?  Why couldn't we just get friends and relatives to donate?

"Posing as a patient's friend, the FIT reporter gives him preplanned answers. In the emergency ward.  He had an accident and needs surgery on his leg.  I donated blood a month ago. He has no family here, and everyone else we reached out to has refused.

"Only when he's satisfied with the answers, he says he would be able to 'arrange boys' by the next day, and that it would cost between Rs 3,500 to Rs 4,000.

...

"According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India's annual requirement for blood is around 1.5 crore units per year, while in reality, only around 1 crore units are available.

"This gap in supply and demand of blood poses a major public health crisis in the country. For example, around 70 percent of postpartum hemorrhage (PPH)-related deaths in India are due to lack of immediate availability of blood.

...

"The paid donors are generally young boys, between the ages of 20 and 25, from very poor backgrounds," says Dr Dubey. ""This will no doubt be detrimental to their health," he adds. Moreover, if caught, they face the risk of jail time.

"The protocol is to ask every donor a set of questions before we take their blood. "If they seem suspicious, we ask them questions like, 'how are you related to the patient?', 'what is the patient's name?', and 'what surgery are they having?', to sus them out. If we get enough proof, we either defer them, or hand them over to the cops," Dr Priyansha Gupta, PG resident, Public Health, who has worked in Delhi's AIIMS blood bank in the past.

"What, then, happens to the families who desperately need blood when their donors are deferred?

"Dr Dubey says they are referred to the social workers attached to the hospital to get them help.

...

"But you have to understand, blood is a scarce commodity, and there's only so much we have."

##########

Here's a story from the Hindustan Times (in 2022), which begins with some relevant background (before debunking myths that lead to a shortage of voluntary donors):

Common myths on blood shortage in India  "The article is authored by Dr Parth Sharma, researcher, Ranita De, researcher in Lancet Citizen's Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System and Dr Vaikunth Ramesh."

"The shortage of blood products has been a major public health problem in India. It is estimated that nearly 12,000 people lose their lives every single day due to the lack of blood products. Supporting a population of 1.4 billion, the present blood transfusion service is fragmented with a little over 3,700 blood centres of which about 70% are located in eight states only. As of 2020, 63 districts in India do not have a blood centre. Space crunch and a burgeoning population have led to the establishment of health care facilities without blood centres on their premises, which in turn depend on nearby blood or storage centres for access to safe blood.

"Unfortunately, India has one of the largest shortages of blood supplies globally, while several diseases requiring blood transfusions are on the rise.

"A recent study by Joy Mammen, et. al. estimated the shortage to be around 2.5 donations per 1,000 eligible donors which equals a shortage of 1 million units. Blood products are required not only for surgeries but also for patients suffering from various medical conditions causing severe anaemia. At present, the source of donated blood is a combination of voluntary donors and replacement donors. Although professional donors are forbidden by law, they still continue to persist in our system under the guise of replacement donors. Voluntary non-remunerated donors, who donate based on altruism and a sense of doing greater good for the community, unfortunately, account for only 80% of the donors in India.

#######

HT: I was directed to the above links from the Indian posting

India Policy Watch #2: Regulating SoHO  by Pranay Kotasthane, which was in part about the recent move in the EU to further restrict payment for Substances of Human Origin (SoHO), as discussed in

Saturday, November 4, 2023

The EU proposes strengthening bans on compensating donors of Substances of Human Origin (SoHOs)--op-ed in VoxEU by Ockenfels and Roth

Banks boycott sex workers even for legal kinds of sex work

 Repugnance isn't erased by legality. Workers in morally contested, repugnant markets may be boycotted by banks even when their work is legal.  Marijuana sellers in states where marijuana sales are legal run into this problem because Federal law still prohibits such sales, but sex workers in legal industries (video sex, porn) and even prostitution in Nevada often can't keep bank accounts, even personal (i.e. non-buisiness) accounts.

The NYT has the story:

Sex Workers Have Been Shunned by Banks, Even When Their Work Is Legal. Financial service companies often avoid what they deem high-risk industries like adult entertainment. When workers lose their accounts, they are left with few options.  By Tara Siegel Bernard

“Despite being a legal establishment, there is, of course, still a stigma attached to the work,” Ms. Cummins, 74, said from Wells, Nev., the only state where prostitution is legal in certain counties. “There is no bank in Nevada that will lend money to a brothel."

...

"Workers in sex-related industries — whether in a brothel or a strip club or selling sexually explicit videos online — often risk their safety and face social and employment discrimination. But a lesser-known struggle is that it’s often difficult to maintain a basic bank account and other financial relationships that most people take for granted.

...

"Financial institutions are responsible for monitoring the nation’s cash flow for potential criminal activities, including human trafficking and money laundering. In the process they’ve also become quasi-law enforcement, making life-altering calls on who can keep banking and who cannot, based on their own calculus about what kind of risk is worth taking.

But without bank accounts, people are unable to accomplish the most basic of financial tasks: collecting, spending and saving their earnings. Once banished from mainstream bank accounts and everyday financial apps Americans have come to rely on, sex workers are left with fewer, and often less attractive, options — turning to crypto, for example, or being forced to rely on others to hold their cash, opening them up to exploitation. 

Interview with Vernon L. Smith by Sami Al-Suwailem

 Here's an interview with Vernon Smith, in which he comments on the history of economics and his place in it.

Interview with Vernon L. Smith by Sami Al-Suwailem 

"Smith was born in 1927 in Wichita, Kansas. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Caltech in 1949, an M.A. in economics from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1955.

...

"GL: In your recent book, Economics of Markets, coauthored with Sabiou Inoua, you argue (convincingly, I’d say) that “markets succeeded where theory failed.” Does that imply that economic (neoclassical) theory failed to study real-world markets well enough?

"VS: It’s more that they failed to study them at all and, in particular, failed to model price formation or price discovery in market processes.

...

"Walras not only failed to model price discovery but gave us a mechanism that required price mysteriously to be given, then used to model price change depending on the sign of excess demand. This diverted theorists from modeling price discovery and, we believe, created the illusion of progress, but it was more appropriately considered a regress occasioned by marginal analysis, which helped not a wit to address the fundamental task.

...

"GL: In your work, you argue that competitive equilibrium can be quickly achieved under very reasonable experimental conditions for consumption goods, but that this is not the case for assets where speculation may substantially distort the outcomes. Economic theory seems to pay no attention to this important difference. Why is that?

"VS: It is because standard theory tends to be insensitive to close observation: Item A is purchased in preference to item B if and only if U(A) > U(B), a theory that makes no advance prediction but rather concludes only that if A is bought rather than B it must have had higher utility value.

...

"In consumer markets, buyers attempt to buy cheap, constrained by their maximum wtp private value. Sellers try to sell dear but are limited by their minimum willingness-to-accept (wta) costs.

"The problem with asset markets is that they have a value-in-use like any consumer good but also a value-in-resale. This sets up a conflict that has to get resolved before an asset market can settle into any sort of equilibrium.

"All economic stability arises in consumer markets, while all instability arises in asset markets for re-tradable goods. Fortunately, about 75% of private products cannot be re-traded, causing great stability.

"GL: The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 2012 to Lloyd S. Shapley and Alvin Roth for their work on market design. How do you see the relationship between these two branches, market design and experimental economics?

"VS: They are closely and intimately related. Indeed, my work in market design was part of my recognition in 2002, and was part of my presentation in 2001 at the Nobel Conference on Experiments in Economics, the year prior to the award."