Black markets for drugs in Europe: report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction

Here is the 2019 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and Europol, the EU's police organization:

EU Drug Markets Report 2019
EMCDDA, Europol, Lisbon, November 2019

Summary: The EU Drug Markets Report 2019 is the third comprehensive overview of illicit drug markets in the European Union by the EMCDDA and Europol. The analysis presented in this report spans numerous topics such as the links between drugs and other crimes, the licit economy and society more generally as well as the processes and players involved in the trade, from production and trafficking to distribution. Taking an evidence-based approach, the report reviews the markets for heroin, cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA and new psychoactive substances. It also provides action points to inform policy development at EU and national level. This publication is an essential reference for law enforcement professionals, policymakers, the academic community and indeed for anyone seeking up-to-date information and analysis on drug markets in Europe.

Here is the full report.

From the Executive Summary:

"The drug market is a major source of income for organised crime groups (OCGs) in the EU, with minimum estimated retail value of EUR 30 billion per year. In addition to the economic impact, drug-related deaths and other harms to public health, there are broader consequences of drug markets, such as links with wider criminal activities and terrorism; the negative impact on the legal economy; violence in communities; damage to the environment; and the increasingly important issue of how the drug market can fuel corruption and undermine governance.
...
" All data indicate that overall drug availability within Europe, for both natural and synthetic drugs,
remains very high. The European drug market is increasingly characterised by consumers having access to a wide variety of high-purity and high-potency products that, in real terms, are usually equivalent in price or cheaper than they have been over the past decade.
...
"Cannabis
Europe’s biggest drug market is for cannabis and significant production of the drug takes place within the EU. With around 25 million annual users, the retail market for cannabis was estimated to be worth at least EUR 11.6 billion in 2017. Around one in seven young adults in the EU reports having used cannabis in the past year, with prevalence rates generally stable but with early signs of possible  increases in some countries.
...
"Herbal cannabis is extensively produced within the EU, with estimates indicating that at least 20 000 cultivation sites are dismantled each year, and is a major source of income for the criminal economy. Despite efforts to counter production, the Western Balkans, and Albania in particular, appear to remain an important source of origin for seized herbal cannabis
...
"Heroin and other opioids
The use of heroin and other opioids still accounts for the largest share of drug-related harms. The retail value of the heroin market in 2017 was estimated to be at least EUR 7.4 billion. There are indications that heroin availability in the EU may increase: recent opium production estimates from Afghanistan, levels of seizures in Turkey and intelligence assessments of activity along the main trafficking routes to Europe are all high, and large consignments of heroin have been detected within the EU.
...
"Cocaine
The cocaine market is the second largest illicit drug market in the EU, with an estimated minimum retail value in 2017 of EUR 9.1 billion. Surveys estimate that about 4 million people in the EU will have used cocaine in the past year. Use is still concentrated in the west and south of Europe but appears to be becoming more common elsewhere.
...
"While Colombian and Italian OCGs have historically played a central role in the trafficking
and distribution of cocaine, increasingly other groups are becoming more significant, including Albanian-speaking, British, Dutch, French, Irish, Moroccan, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish OCGs. At the same time some European OCGs have established a presence in Latin American countries, developing a new ‘end-to-end’ business model for managing the supply chain, with large quantities of cocaine purchased near production areas at lower costs. This may be driving competition and conflict within the cocaine market and leading to increasing cocaine market-related violence and corruption within the EU.
...
" The global market for cocaine appears to be growing and a knock-on effect of this is that the EU appears to be increasingly used as a transit area for cocaine destined for other markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Turkey and countries in the Middle East and Asia. The cocaine market is increasingly enabled by digital technology, including darknet markets and the use of the surface web, social media and mobile phone apps to advertise and facilitate the delivery of cocaine to consumers. Innovation seen in the supply chain at the consumer level is suggestive of both high
availability and attempts by OCGs to increase market share.
...
"Synthetic drugs: amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine
Europe’s synthetic drugs market, particularly in respect to stimulants like amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine, is evolving rapidly. Within the stimulant market, these drugs compete for market share alongside cocaine and a number of new psychoactive substances. Of the two closely related stimulants, amphetamine continues to be more commonly used than methamphetamine in most EU countries, though there are growing signs of a gradual diffusion of methamphetamine use. The value of the EU retail market for amphetamines (amphetamine and methamphetamine combined) in 2017 is estimated to be at least EUR 1 billion, and for MDMA EUR 0.5 billion.
...
"New psychoactive substances
Policies relating to new psychoactive substances (NPS) appear to be having some impact, especially those aimed at reducing open trade in the EU as well as measures taken in source countries, such as China. There has been a slow-down in the number of first detections of NPS in Europe. Currently around 50 new substances are reported annually, giving a total of over 730 that have been reported to the EU Early Warning System."

Sex, lies, videotape and...blackmail?

The NY Times has a very interesting story about how it, and two very prominent lawyers, became involved with a man who claimed to have access to videotapes of important men having sex with underrage women.  It touches on the subtle difference between blackmail and some kinds of legal settlement.

Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’
A shadowy hacker claimed to have the financier’s sex tapes. Two top lawyers wondered: What would the men in those videos pay to keep them secret?
*********

Matt Levine over at Bloomberg has an interesting followup article that begins this way:

"The basic “mystery of blackmail” is:

1. If I know that you have done some bad secret stuff, it is totally legal for me to publish that information.
2. It is also totally legal for me to keep it quiet.
3. In general, if it is legal for me to do or not do something, and you’d prefer that I (not) do it, I can ask you for money in exchange for (not) doing it.
4. But if I ask you for money in exchange for not publishing bad stuff about you, that’s blackmail, and it’s a crime.

The mystery is why blackmail should be illegal when its component parts aren’t. But there’s another practical mystery about blackmail, which is:

1. If you have done some bad stuff to me, and no one knows about it, I am once again free to tell everyone, or not.
2. If I go to you and say “give me a million dollars or I will tell people,” that is blackmail and I go to prison.
3. But if I go to you and say “I am going to sue you for doing the bad stuff to me, I am filing my case on Monday, but I am willing to settle for $1 million and sign a nondisclosure agreement in connection with the settlement,” that is fine, that is just how lawsuits work."

****************
Earlier related posts (on blackmail as a repugnant transaction that is sometimes occasioned by the knowledge that the victim has engaged in a different repugant transaction, and that can sometimes be whitewashed by the protected transaction of legal action...):

Monday, November 2, 2009

Blackmail, legal and illegal

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Blackmail has something in common with transactions that become repugnant when money is added

Testing your own DNA is illegal in France

Statnews.com has the story:

In France, it’s illegal for consumers to order a DNA spit kit. Activists are fighting over lifting the ban  By ERIC BOODMAN

"The French ban on direct-to-consumer genetic testing is part of the country’s bioethics laws, which legislators are supposed to revise every seven years. When those discussions got underway earlier this year, some geneticists expected the National Assembly to relax the rules about commercial DNA analysis. It didn’t. Now, Jovanovic-Floricourt and the other genetics enthusiasts in her education and advocacy group, DNA Pass, are agitating more and more to get some of these tests legalized, contacting lawmakers, chatting up scientists, promising a more vociferous campaign than they’ve waged before.

"But as one of the most vocal pro-legalization advocates, Jovanovic-Floricourt may have found her match in geneticist Guillaume Vogt and his bioethicist postdoc Henri-Corto Stoeklé. Theirs is an unusual standoff, in that they’re all motivated by the same ideas. Both sides hope to protect French genomes from exploitation by foreign companies. Both sides believe that French institutions are the best guardians for the job. They just disagree about how, exactly, to realize that vision. As Vogt, a scientist at the National Center for Human Genomics Research, put it, “Don’t change the law!”

The still struggling legal market for cannabis

Here's an indirect update on the state of the American cannabis market, from the WSJ (hemp is a source for cannabidiol, or CBD):

Farmers Rushed Into Hemp. Now They Face a Glut.
Prices for the crops are falling, and some growers are struggling to unload their product

"A rush of farmers seeking to grow hemp, which became legal to cultivate in the U.S. last year, is creating a glut, damping prices and leaving some farmers struggling to unload their product. It is among the growing pains in the nascent industry for hemp-derived products—a potentially lucrative market, but one beset by regulatory uncertainty, financing constraints and other challenges.
...
"Hemp—which is the same plant species as marijuana, but with a minimal amount of the psychoactive compound in pot—was farmed legally in the U.S. until a 1937 federal law began a period of hemp prohibition. It became legal again because of a provision of the 2018 federal farm bill."

Congestion and competition in college admissions (in the WSJ)

Is college admissions ripe for re-design?  (The problems outlined are real, but I'm skeptical that there's the consensus needed for a major overhaul...)

How to Fix College Admissions
Getting into a top school is a stressful, unpredictable process. Here are 10 ways to make it fairer and more transparent.  By Melissa Korn

"We asked college admissions officers, high school and private counselors, parents, students and others for ways to make the system fairer, more transparent and less painful for everyone involved. Here are 10 of their ideas—some easy to implement, others just meant to start a conversation—to reform the status quo.
...
"2. Limit the number of colleges to which students may apply. Thanks in part to the ease of applying online—especially through the Common Application, which allows applicants to use one basic form for hundreds of colleges—36% of students submitted seven or more applications in 2017, up from 10% in 1995. “The number of clicks you can make on the Common App causes congestion in the system,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist who helped to design the system that matches new doctors with residency programs.

"Schools pursue aggressive outreach, urging even fairly unqualified applicants to apply, then boast every spring about how many they rejected, as if exclusivity is proof of quality. Ballooning application numbers, combined with stagnant class sizes, cause acceptance rates to slide even lower into the single digits at places like Columbia and Pomona. As a result, high-school seniors apply to more schools just in case, and the vicious cycle continues—creating havoc for schools that can’t predict their yields. The overall yield rate for new freshmen at U.S. colleges fell to 34% in 2017 from 48% in 2007.
...
"Almost nobody needs to submit 20 applications; a reasonable limit would be as low as a half dozen, assuming that students receive meaningful counseling. High schools could enforce the cap by only agreeing to submit a certain number of official transcripts to colleges. The College Board and ACT could also limit distribution of SAT and ACT results, but they have little incentive to do so, since they make money from sending scores.
...
"9. ...Even more radical, schools could try some version of the algorithm used to determine matches for medical residency programs, which involves programs and medical students ranking one another and then being paired up by a computer system. This would be a heavy lift, however, as colleges would need to coordinate their procedures to rank candidates, run the computer program and inform all parties about the outcomes."

Seema Jayachandran on the Banerjee, Duflo, Kremer Nobel, in the NYT

The Economic View column of the NY Times, by someone who knows the subject, and the subjects very well:

When a Disappointment Helped Lead to a Nobel Prize
The winners of this year’s Nobel in economics did pioneering field experiments that sometimes didn’t work as expected.  By Seema Jayachandran

"The negative finding about textbooks was important in the development of Mr. Kremer’s career. “I’m happier when I find that something works,” he said. “But I’m not in despair if I don’t — the key thing is listen and learn from it.”

Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

The Lancet recalls the life and work of Sadako Ogata, born 16 September 1927; died 22 October 2019.

Sadako Ogata
"Sadako Ogata began to transform UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, almost as soon as she became UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1991. At the time, the Gulf War had displaced more than a million Iraqi Kurds and thousands were blocked from crossing into Turkey. They were in desperate need just inside the Iraqi border. Ogata quickly sought to expand UNHCR's rules to allow it to provide aid not only to refugees but also to people displaced within their own country. “Most of the senior leaders in UNHCR were against providing assistance to those Kurdish refugees because they were inside Iraq”, said Izumi Nakamitsu, who was based in Turkey at the time for UNHCR and accompanied Ogata on her first mission as High Commissioner to visit the displaced Kurds. “The refugee law says that you're not a refugee until you cross the border and senior officials advised her against providing protection and assistance. But she instinctively felt this was wrong”, said Nakamitsu, who is now a UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Ogata's insistence that UNHCR provide aid to people who are internally displaced is one of her lasting legacies."
**************

And from the Guardian:

Sadako Ogata obituary
Independent-minded head of the UN agency for refugees, who expanded its role to help millions more displaced people

Divorce as a repugnant transaction

A recent obituary reminds me that divorce used to be a repugnant transaction, to which there were barriers even when both partners in a marriage were eager to end it on agreed upon terms.  It was a repugnant transaction because of the way we regard marriage as a protected transaction.

Jerome Wilson, Key in Revamping New York Divorce Law, Dies at 88
As a legislator in 1966, he led a commission that pushed to broaden the legal grounds for divorce. New York had been the last state to recognize only adultery.

"Jerome L. Wilson, a former Democratic state senator from Manhattan who helped liberalize a rigorous 18th-century law that had left New York as the sole state that required a spouse to prove adultery as the only legal ground for divorce, died on Friday
...
"The amended act, which took effect on Sept. 1, 1967, added four other grounds for divorce: cruel treatment, abandonment for two years, the sentencing of a spouse to prison for five years or more and a couple’s living voluntarily apart for at least two years.
...
"In the second year after the law went into effect, the number of divorces granted in New York ballooned to 18,000 in all five categories, compared with 4,000 granted only for adultery during the last year that the old law was in effect.

"Supporters of the changes said the new law also reduced instances of perjury (because so many estranged spouses had to lie about allegations of adultery) and end runs by wealthier couples who could afford to fly to Mexico or Nevada and remain there for two weeks to qualify for a divorce.
...
"Mr. Wilson’s first marriage, in 1957 to Frances Roberts, ended in divorce."

Video: Big Data and Global Kidney Matching

Here's a talk, just recently posted on the web, that I gave in China at the Luohan Academy in Hangzhou, in June 2019.

Paying participants in economic experiments, in Ireland, in jeopardy

On Wednesday I received some email correspondence about a difficulty being faced by experimental economists in Ireland, who may be forbidden from paying participants in experiments, at least if the money comes from research grants

The issue has to do with this sentence on page 6 of the research grant guidelines of the Irish Research Council.
"Participants in surveys/focus groups/workshops or other such project related activities may not
be paid..." although their travel expenses can be reimbursed.

I dashed off the following statement in support of efforts to make sure that this policy isn't interpreted as preventing standard economics experiments.

“Laboratory experiments in Economics largely depend on specifying precisely and attempting to measure or  control  the incentives of the participants in an experiment. Almost always this involves paying the participants in ways that conform to the incentives the experimenter is trying to create.  [Paying subjects] is a well established and almost universal practice in experimental economics, and often necessary for publication in internationally recognized economics journals.”

Regulations gone awry -- an example from transplantation

A general lesson of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, so any given set of rules can have unanticipated undesirable consequences.  Here's an example from transplantation. Transplant centers are regulated in part based on their one-year survival rate.

Here's a story from the BMJ:

US hospital is accused of keeping vegetative patient alive to boost its transplant survival rate

"Federal agents are investigating a New Jersey hospital accused of keeping a patient with catastrophic brain damage alive for a year and barely consulting his family, in order to keep its one year transplantation survival rate from falling to a level where the programme’s Medicare certification might be withdrawn.

"The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has its own law enforcement agency, will lead the investigation into Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. The hospital has launched its own internal probe.
...
"Newark Beth Israel’s heart transplantation programme is among the top 20 in the country by volume. A banner on the hospital’s facade says, “1000 hearts transplanted. Countless lives touched.”

"But in 2018, its one year survival rate fell significantly below the 91% national average. Young’s death would bring the average down to 81%, which staff feared would trigger sanctions from the public payer."

HT: Alex Chan

Academic (computer science) conferences as marketplaces

Eppstein and Vazirani propose a centralized marketplace for computer science conferences:

A Market for TCS Papers??
November 19, 2019 by Kevin Leyton-Brown

By David Eppstein & Vijay Vazirani

"No, not to make theoreticians rich! Besides, who will buy your papers anyway? (Quite the opposite, you will be lucky if you can convince someone to take them for free, just for sake of publicity!) What we are proposing is a market in which no money changes hands – a matching market – for matching papers to conferences.

"At present we are faced with massive inefficiencies in the conference process – numerous researchers are trapped in unending cycles of submit … get reject … incorporate comments … resubmit — often to the next deadline which has been conveniently arranged a couple of days down the road so the unwitting participants are conditioned into mindlessly keep coming back for more, much like Pavlov’s dog.

"We are proposing a matching market approach to finally obliterate this madness. We believe such a market is feasible using the following ideas. No doubt our scheme will have some drawbacks; however, as should be obvious, the advantages far outweigh them.

"First, for co-located symposia within a larger umbrella conference, such as the
conferences within ALGO or FCRC, the following process should be a no-brainer:

1). Ensure a common deadline for all symposia; denote the latter by S.

2). Let R denote the set of researchers who wish to submit one paper to a symposium in this umbrella conference – assume that researchers submitting more than one paper will have multiple names, one for each submission. Each researcher will provide a strict preference order over the subset of symposia to which they wish to submit their paper. Let G denote the bipartite graph with vertex sets (R, S) and an edge (r, s) only if researcher r chose symposium s.

3). The umbrella conference will have a large common PC with experts representing all of its symposia. The process of assigning papers to PC members will of course use G in a critical way.

"Once papers are reviewed by PC members and external reviewers, each symposium will rank its submissions using its own criteria of acceptance. We believe the overhead of ranking each paper multiple times is minimal since that is just an issue of deciding how “on-topic” a paper is – an easy task once the reviews of the paper are available.

4). Finally, using all these preference lists, a researcher-proposing stable matching is computed using the Gale-Shapley algorithm. As is well-known, this mechanism will be dominant strategy incentive compatible for researchers." 

"With a little extra effort, a similar scheme can also be used for a group of conferences at diverse locations but similar times, such as some of the annual summer theory conferences, STOC, ICALP, ESA, STAC, WADS/SWAT, etc.

The future of economic design: a book of short essays, edited by Laslier, Moulin, Sanver, and . Zwicker

Here's a new book that I haven't seen yet, except on the internet. There's a long table of contents at the link, and you can click on the chapters to read an abstract. It looks like most essays are four or five pages, by many distinguished authors.

The Future of Economic Design
The Continuing Development of a Field as Envisioned by Its Researchers
Editors: Jean-François Laslier, Hervé Moulin, M. Remzi Sanver, and William S. Zwicker

Matching officers to branches at West Point

West Point grads get assignments through new branching system
By Brandon OConnor

"During a ceremony Nov. 13, 1,089 members of the Class of 2020 at the U.S. Military Academy received their assignments for which branch of the Army they will start their careers in upon graduation.
...
"This year marked the first time West Point has assigned branches using the Army's new Market Model Branching System, which will be rolled out to ROTC next year. The new model paired cadets with a branch by considering how they ranked the 17 branches as it has in years past, but for the first time the commandants of each branch also had a vote in which cadets received their branch.

Following branch week in September, the cadets in the Class of 2020 locked in their branch preferences for the sixth and final time. They each ranked the branches one through 17, or one through 15 for female cadets who opted out of armor and infantry. Each cadet was also ranked as most preferred, preferred or least preferred by each branch based on their branch resumes and interviews, which cadets were given the option to take part in for the first time this year.

Before locking in their preferences, cadets were given information about how each branch ranked them as well as the results from a simulation using their fifth branch preference list which showed them where they would have been placed. The cadets then had the chance to use that information to adjust their preferences before locking them in for the final time.

Sunsdahl said they saw movement within the cadets' top four preferences following the simulation as cadets moved up the branches they had a better chance of receiving based on the commandant's feedback and moved down branches where their chances were lower.

"That was the market working, which helped branches get who they wanted as well," Sunsdahl said. "We talk cadet preference a lot, but branches got more of the people they wanted this year than they have in past years. That's where that commandant vote meant something. Now when somebody goes into a branch, the cadet wants to be there, and the branch wants them. It's a win-win."

Following the application of the matching algorithm, which was adapted from the medical residency matching program, and final adjustments made by West Point's branching board, 96% of the cadets in the class were placed into one of their top three preferences.

Overall, 80% of the class was placed into a combat arms branch, a 5% increase over last year. For the first time, cyber was considered a combat arms branch along with infantry, armor, engineer, air defense, field artillery and aviation. The 40 cyber spots, up from 25 last year, accounted for almost the entirety of the increase in combat arms spots."

First kidney exchange in Denmark

The first Danish incompatible patient-donor pair has received a transplant in an exchange with a pair in "another Scandinavian country."

Mette skaffede sin mand en nyre ved at sende sin egen til en fremmed
Første dansker har fået en nyre takket være nyt nyrebyttesystem.
[Google Translate: Mette obtained her husband a kidney by sending her own to a stranger
First Danes have got a kidney thanks to a new kidney replacement system.]

"At the Kidney Association, there is great enthusiasm about the new method in kidney transplantation.

- I would go so far as to say that it is a revolution in living organ donation, says the association's vice-president, Malene Madsen.

Right now, there are approximately 400 patients at home who are on a waiting list for a new kidney. And for them it will have a huge effect if the donor chains really get going."

HT: Lise Vesterlund
*************
See also Nyresyge bytter nyredonorer
19.11.2019
Den første dansker har gennem et nyudviklet skandinavisk nyreudvekslingsprogram fået en ny nyre fra en nærtstående til en anden nyresyg person

"The kidney exchange program STEP (ScandiaTransplant Kidney Exchange Program) is a collaboration between the Scandinavian transplant centers in the organization Skandiatransplant. The first transplants in the kidney exchange program were performed at transplant centers in Sweden in autumn 2018. Here, a chain of three kidney transplants was performed simultaneously.

"Aarhus University Hospital works systematically to increase the number of transplants through the use of live donors and in collaboration with the Danish Center for Organ Donation and the intensive care units in Jutland to increase the number of deceased donors. Still, about 100 kidney patients are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in Aarhus.
**************

and see this earlier post:

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Kidney exchange looks imminent in Sweden

Kidney exchange in Time Magazine

Time celebrates kidney exchange:

Kidney Swaps Are Revolutionizing a Broken Organ-Donation System in the U.S.

"While kidney swaps can be performed at most transplant centers across the U.S., the majority are facilitated by the National Kidney Registry. Other swaps are organized by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, or arranged in-house at the transplant center itself with incompatible patient pairs."

Harvey Prize to Christos Papadimitriou

The Technion's 2018 Harvey Prize prize, to Christos Papadimitriou, has been only recently announced: it will be awarded this month.

From Columbia University:
Professor Christos Papadimitriou Awarded the 2018 Harvey Prize
OCT 08 2019

"The Harvey Prize for Science and Technology for 2018 is awarded to professor Christos Papadimitriou for his work on the theory of algorithms and computational complexity and its application to the sciences. Papadimitriou will receive the award at a ceremony at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Technion first presented the award in 1972 and two awards are given yearly. The scientists behind the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 are also awardees this year.

“Professor Papadimitriou is considered the founding father of algorithmic game theory, defining key concepts, formulating key questions and proving basic results,” said Peretz Lavie, professor and president of the Technion. “He is a pioneer in the application of algorithms and complexity to other fields, including economics, biology and more.”

********
And here's the entry at the Harvey Prize link:

The Harvey Prize, established in 1971 by Leo M. Harvey of Los Angeles, is awarded annually at Technion for exceptional achievements in science, technology, and human health, and for outstanding contributions to peace in the Middle East, to society and to the economy.

PROF. CHRISTOS H. PAPADIMITRIOU

Leo M. Harvey (1887-1973) was an industrialist and inventor. He was an ardent friend and supporter of Technion and the State of Israel.

Over the years, more than a quarter of Harvey laureates have subsequently won the Nobel Prize.

The award ceremony will take place in November 2019 at Technion.

Aiming for diversity in Brooklyn schools

The Washington Post  has the story:

What happened when Brooklyn tried to integrate its middle schools  By Laura Meckler

"New York City, with more than 1 million students, is far and away the nation’s largest school district — and one of its most segregated. Resistance to integration dates to the 1950s, when mothers in Queens staged an early demonstration against busing.

"Now, in fits and starts, the city is becoming a laboratory of experimentation, examining whether it’s possible to tackle the stratification that courses through urban districts.

"First, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) tried — and has so far failed — to overhaul the admissions process for eight elite specialized high schools, which admit few black or Hispanic students. He is now considering a recommendation for a citywide plan to eliminate most gifted and talented programs, which attract a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.
...
"Under the old system, criteria set by each school played a big role in deciding who went where. Certain middle schools required high test scores and excellent behavior ratings from elementary school, and affluent families gravitated to them. Over time, various schools won reputations for excellence, and with each passing year, their incoming classes grew whiter and wealthier.
...
"Under the new plan, family preference still matters, but 52 percent of sixth-grade seats at each school are reserved for children from poor families or for those learning English, reflecting the demographics of the district as a whole. The city’s goal is for each school to include 40 percent to 75 percent priority-group students by the program’s fourth year.
...
"This sort of plan is possible only because a significant number of middle-class and wealthy families live in the area covered by the integration plan, Kahlenberg said. If there are too many poor kids, he said, meaningful integration is not possible. By Kahlenberg’s calculations, integration is possible in nine of the city’s 32 school districts.

Others caution that it won’t work anywhere if affluent parents leave the public schools. When Mike Bloomberg was mayor, he worked to attract and keep these families by giving them considerable control over school placement. If you take that power away, these parents may choose private schools or to move, said Joel Klein, schools chancellor under Bloomberg.

“If you look at many urban school districts, you will find they are overwhelmingly minority because the middle class has already moved out,” Klein said."

NYC school choice: long lines for high school tours (and some confusion about first choices)

The high school choice process in New York City uses an algorithm that makes it safe for families to list high schools in their order of preference over them.  But forming well-informed preferences is no easy task.

The NY Times has a story about long lines forming for tours of a desirable public high school:

Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School Tour
The high stakes of high school admissions in New York — and the lengths some go to get any small advantage.  By Eliza Shapiro

"Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

"On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

"Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.
...
"Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place."
**********

The story goes on to talk about the matching system for high schools, which uses a deferred acceptance algorithm.  Parag Pathak points out to me that one paragraph contains a sentence that is easy to interpret incorrectly:

"Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice." (emphasis added)

Parag writes about this line: "while factually correct, the statement creates a misleading impression: a student is only less likely to get Beacon if they didn't list it as their top choice in the case that they were assigned their first choice school instead.  And most people who apply to Beacon list it first because it's their top choice. "

The manner in which the deferred acceptance algorithm (with students proposing) makes it safe for families to state their true preferences can be summarized this way: If you list Beacon as your second choice, and don't get your first choice, then your chance of admission to Beacon is the same as if you had listed it as your first choice.

Of course, even with that guarantee, a family's choice may not be simple if they would have liked to rank order 15 schools, and are only allowed to list 12. Then they have to consider whether, if they are rejected by their first choice, they are likely to be accepted by Beacon, or whether rejection from their first choice is a signal that they might not be competitive at Beacon either. (In which case, listing Beacon as first choice wouldn't have helped...)

See my recent post:

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching, by Rees-Jones, Shorrer, and Tergiman

Milgrom Marshall Lectures at University of Cambridge

Paul Milgrom will be giving the 2019-2020 Marshall Lectures at Cambridge today and tomorrow.  Here's a video abstract by Paul:

2019-20 Marshall Lecture by Professor Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom is best known for his contributions to the microeconomic theory, his pioneering innovations in the practical design of multi-item auctions, and the extraordinary successes of his students and academic advisees. According to his BBVA Award citation: “Paul Milgrom has made seminal contributions to an unusually wide range of fields of economics including auctions, market design, contracts and incentives, industrial economics, economics of organizations, finance, and game theory.” According to a count by Google Scholar, Milgrom’s books and articles have received more than 90,000 citations. - Professor Milgrom's Personal Site >>

 Professor Paul Milgrom
(Stanford Department of Economics)
will give two lectures on,
"Market Design When Resource Allocation is NP-Hard"

Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall

Tuesday 19th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.00pm
and
Wednesday 20th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.30pm
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I'll update when Paul's lectures are available.
(In the meantime, here are my 2013-2014 Marshall Lectures on "Matching Markets and Market Design"  )
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Update: Both lectures are now available at the Marshall Lectures site.