Harm reduction for drugs: an experiment in British Columbia

 Here's a news story in the Guardian, and the policy paper from British Columbia about the new efforts on harm reduction there.

Canada to decriminalize some drugs in British Columbia for three years. Policy aims to stem record number of overdose deaths by easing a fear of arrest by those who need help

Here's the official report of the Provincial Health Officer of British Columbia. I think the choice of cover picture does a good job of capturing the tension between treating drug users as criminals or as patients.

STOPPING THE HARM. DECRIMINALIZATION OF PEOPLE WHO USE DRUGS IN BC

Congratulations to Arthur Lee, on receiving the Anna Laura Myers Prize for Outstanding Honors Thesis

Arthur Lee received the Economics Department's Anna Laura Myers Prize for Outstanding Honors Thesis yesterday, for his thesis on school choice in Singapore:

A Multi-Phase School Choice Mechanism: Theory and Practice by Arthur Lee

Abstract: We study aspects of a multi-phase school choice system used to allocate students to primary schools (first to sixth grade) in Singapore. We first examine the institutional objectives and contextual constraints of the market. Using interviews and public sources, we then present evidence of strategic decision-making by parents, and outline common considerations they face. We then introduce a novel theoretical model of a sequential matching mechanism, and analyze its performance under uncertainty. We find that the sequential nature of the mechanism may permit equilibrium welfare improvements for students when compared to the static Boston Mechanism. However, we also find that in some important respects (e.g. stability of equilibrium outcomes), such a system may be less desirable than a slot-specific Deferred Acceptance mechanism, a variant of Deferred Acceptance that allows for quotas. We use empirical evidence to demonstrate, using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) inspired approach, that many parents use prior year’s application information in strategic decision-making. We make partial progress towards additional empirical questions, such as explaining a spike in unassigned students in 2020. Finally, we use our data to provide recommendations for students and parents in their decision-making process.

Congratulations on a fine thesis, Arthur.

What are (swim) tests for?

 Tests serve multiple purposes, they can be to screen, to certify, to incentivize.  In recent years we have seen concern about tests' differential predictive power for different groups of test takers lead to reduced use for screening, e.g. as SAT's have become optional for college admissions, or as the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) step 1 is moving to pass/fail grades, to prevent its (over)use in screening medical students for residencies.

Here's a story in the Chronicle of Higher Ed on swimming tests being abandoned at colleges, most recently at Williams.  (It brought back memories of my own freshman swim test at Columbia in 1968... )

Race on Campus: Why Colleges Are Dropping Their Swim Tests by Adrienne Lu 

"Welcome to Race on Campus. At one point or another, about a quarter of American colleges required students to pass a swim test. Today, there are far fewer who do, but a few holdouts remain. One college dropped its requirement this month after examining data showing students of color were far more likely to need a remedial swim class. 

...

“Students expressed feeling shamed and punished for not knowing how to swim,” wrote D. Clinton Williams in an email to The Chronicle. Williams is director of the college’s Pathways for Inclusive Excellence and chairman of the Diversity Advisory Research Team, which studied the swimming requirement. “One student told her first-year adviser, ‘It’s like they are punishing the city kids.’

...

"Once common among American colleges, swimming requirements have been dwindling for decades. A 1997 survey by professors at North Carolina State University found only 5 percent of colleges had a swim-test requirement then, down from the 25 percent that once did.

...

"Concerns about how swim requirements affect students differently are not new. Hobart and William Smith Colleges dropped its requirement in 1994, calling it archaic, difficult to administer, and unfair to students who had no access to pools, according to a Chronicle article at the time. An op-ed in the student newspaper of Washington and Lee University last November argued that the university had “failed to consider racial, economic, and cultural barriers to swimming.”

"Jeff Wiltse, a professor of history at the University of Montana, who has published extensively on the history of swimming pools in the U.S., said Black Americans today are about half as likely to know how to swim as white Americans.

...

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning is one of the three leading causes of unintentional-injury death among Americans under 29 years old, and from 1999-2019, American Indian or Alaskan Native people died from drowning at twice the rate of non-Hispanic white people, while non-Hispanic Black people died from drowning at 1.5 times the rate."

*********

The Talmud (in a section that's not so easy to read, kiddushin 29a, concerned among other things with a father's obligations to a son) records this opinion: " And some say: A father is also obligated to teach his son to swim. "

What might the assisted reproduction gray market look like, post Roe?

 Yesterday I blogged about what might happen to the availability of abortion if it's constitutional protection is reversed so that individual states can ban it.  Today let's consider other medical issues involving conception, such as IVF, which involves creating embryos in Petri dishes. It may be at risk, state by state, if we find that embryos have legal rights.  But (like abortion), IVF is likely to remain legal in some states even if banned in others.

Here's an article in JAMA:

What Overturning Roe v Wade May Mean for Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the US, by I. Glenn Cohen, JD; Judith Daar, JD; Eli Y. Adashi, MD, MS, JAMA. Published online June 6, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.10163

"Across the US there exists a wide range of state laws (statutory and common law) regarding assisted reproductive technologies. For example, California courts essentially enforce agreements involving gestational surrogacy, whereas Nebraska treats such agreements as void and unenforceable and Michigan treats the creation of a commercial surrogacy agreement as a felony.

...

"The leaked opinion in the Dobbs case explicitly states that “to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right” and that “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion” after sentences that reference the Supreme Court’s pre-Roe constitutional cases regarding a constitutional right to use contraception.1 But on its face, the key piece of the reasoning of the Dobbs decision, that a “right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,”1 would seem to apply with even more force to IVF, which was first used in the US in 1981, after Roe v Wade—and certainly was not present at the time of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).

...

"A future Supreme Court opinion might easily group embryo destruction as more like abortion because of its involvement with the destruction of “potential life.” If anything, it is easier to see how the Supreme Court might reach such a decision because there is not a countervailing claim to a woman’s gestational bodily autonomy raised by, for example, a prohibition on IVF."

*********

States that make laws against IVF may have difficulty enforcing them if other U.S. states continue to have legal IVF.  Laws can of course claim to apply to their citizens wherever they are, but a woman who returns home, pregnant, from a jurisdiction with legal IVF will be very hard to distinguish from other pregnant women.  So it will be easier to shut down fertility clinics (or to ban the sale of contraceptives) within a state's boundaries than to prevent state residents who can afford it from going to a neighboring state to help them with family planning.  

What might the abortion gray market look like, post Roe?

 My favorite psychiatrist points out that, before abortions became generally legal except when the woman's life was at risk, psychiatrists were often called upon to make a decision.

The ‘Open Secret’ on Getting a Safe Abortion Before Roe v. Wade  By Sally L. Satel

"Dr. Satel is a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute."

"If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, will psychiatrists resume their pre-Roe role as arbiters of abortion access? The law once compelled psychiatrists and pregnant women to perform dishonest rituals to get abortions. Will psychiatrists once again need to be complicit post-Roe?

"Before Roe v. Wade, a number of states allowed abortions if doctors could certify that the mother’s health, not solely her life, was at serious risk. A great number of those certifications were granted by psychiatrists, some of them by the professors who taught me as a resident in the mid-1980s in Connecticut.

"Through the 1940s and 1950s, medicine advanced to the point where health problems like heart disease and tuberculosis were generally no longer considered to be indications for therapeutic abortion. As a result, psychiatric justification became the primary rationale for therapeutic abortion before Roe.

...

"It was an “‘open secret,’” Dr. Richard A. Schwartz of the Cleveland Clinic observed in 1972, the year before Roe was decided, “that a woman can obtain a safe abortion in a licensed hospital if she can find a psychiatrist who will say she might commit suicide.”

"To accommodate such women, psychiatrists used a combination of empathy and civil disobedience to declare them at risk unless they were allowed to terminate their pregnancies."

***

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, laws about abortion will go back to the individual States. One difference from the pre-Roe environment is that there will now be probably around half of the states that will continue to allow legal (and hence safe) abortions.  So the gray market in states with abortion bans will also involve travel, for those who can afford it (and perhaps mail order pills for those well organized enough and for whom travel isn't a good option).

The return of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid

 As evidence accumulates, it appears that convalescent plasma helps some patients with Covid.  Here's an article from Medpage

COVID Convalescent Plasma Finds a Therapeutic Role. — Growing evidence shows benefits in the immunocompromised

by Arturo Casadevall, MD, PhD, Jeffrey P. Henderson MD, PhD, Brenda J. Grossman, MD, MPH, Michael J. Joyner, MD, Shmuel Shoham, MD, Nigel Paneth, MD, MPH, and Liise-anne Pirofski, MD June 19, 2022

"In the dark days of the early COVID-19 pandemic, when there was no known therapy, COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) brought a ray of hope. COVID-19 survivors, community organizers, clinicians, regulators, and blood bankers collaborated to quickly bring CCP to patients. First used at the end of March 2020 in the U.S., 40% of all hospitalized patients were being treated with CCP by October 2020, considerable progress for a treatment without pharmaceutical industry support.

"Since those early days, CCP use has largely fallen off based on insufficient evidence of efficacy in hospitalized patients and the availability of other therapies. But growing evidence has shown benefits of CCP in a population with diminished treatment options and vaccine responses: the immunocompromised. This population encompasses about 3% of the population and their needs have been relatively neglected in treatment guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

...

"As the pandemic progressed, further evidence showing that CCP was effective when used early and with high antibody content emerged, strengthening support for the FDA EUA in specific groups. However, with evidence of widespread benefit being considered insufficient in the broader patient population, CCP was largely branded as ineffective, collections dropped, and little or no CCP was available when Omicron surged in early 2022.

...

"The continued needs of immunocompromised patients and the discovery that CCP obtained from vaccinated convalescent donors possess extremely high levels of antibodies that neutralize all known variants to date, including Omicron, have promoted a CCP comeback. CCP use is now recommended for immunocompromised patients by multiple major professional organizations, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies (AABB).

*********

Earlier:

Sunday, April 25, 2021

The rise and fall of convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid

 

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Convalescent plasma collection and distribution

A beachfront lot for you in the metaverse--or maybe an experimental lab

 With Facebook transforming itself into Meta, we're starting to hear a lot about the metaverse, a term that may have been coined by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snowcrash.

Scott Kominers, who recently signed on to an Andreessen Horowitz ("a16z" for short) expedition to the metaverse, offers this view of why you might want to set up shop there yourself sometime:

Metaverse Land: What Makes Digital Real Estate Valuable by Scott Duke Kominers

 Reading it, I realized that I had something of an early metaverse experience, involving an experiment in May 2008 in Second Life, eventually memorialized in a paper in a special issue of JEBO in honor of Werner Güth:

Greiner, Ben, Mary Caravella, and Alvin E. Roth. "Is avatar-to-avatar communication as effective as face-to-face communication? An Ultimatum Game experiment in First and Second Life." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 108 (2014): 374-382. 

We needed a metaverse laboratory in Second Life, and in order for us to be able to control communication between subjects, they each had to be teleported to a room more than a mile distant from anyone else (so that they would be beyond the range of Second Life chat tools). So our lab was an unusual bit of metaverse real estate: a tower of laboratory rooms floating above our island, each a mile above the room below it. (Construction in the metaverse is more flexible than in the physical universe.) Here's the description from the paper:

"Within Second Life, the sessions took place on an “island” under our control. We restricted access to the island to those participants’ avatars who had signed up to the session. Participants were received in a virtual laboratory building, the interior of which closely resembled the CLER layout (see screenshot 1 in Appendix B). They received a Linden$400 showup-fee, plus their income from the Ultimatum Game. At the beginning, participants received general instructions and were randomly matched to pairs and roles. In the no-communication treatment SL-NC, participants were teleported to private “decision rooms” (distant enough from each other to prevent any chat communication) and made their choices. In the avatar-to-avatar communication treatment SL-A2A, participants were first teleported in pairs to “discussion rooms” (see screenshot 2 in Appendix B) where they were free to discuss any topic for 5 min, before being teleported to their private decision room. In their decision room, participants received instructions on the Ultimatum Game. Decisions were made on an interactive wall in the decision room, which resembled the zTree input mask used in the laboratory sessions (see screenshot 3 in Appendix B). After all decisions were made, participants were informed of their payoffs and paid in Linden$ via the Second Life money transfer mechanism."

Econometric Society Summer School in Dynamic Structural Econometrics: Market Design

Market design isn't just about game theory these days:

Econometric Society Summer School in Dynamic Structural Econometrics: Market Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 15-20, 2022

Lecturers of the summer school and invited conference speakers include:

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Irene Lo, Stanford University

Victoria Marone, University of Texas at Austin

Robert A. Miller, Carnegie Mellon University

Whitney Newey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisory board: 

Ariel Pakes, Harvard University

Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Paulo Somaini, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Daniel Waldinger, New York University

2022 organizers: 

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Whitney Newey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NBER workshop on market design: Stanford November 4-5

 Here's an announcement that arrived by email:

To: NBER Market Design Working Group

From: Eric Budish, Jakub Kastl, and Marzena Rostek

 The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in Stanford, CA on November 4 & 5, 2022.

 We welcome new and interesting research and are happy to see papers from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a range of topics and methodological approaches. Last year's program can be viewed at:

https://conference.nber.org/altsched/MDf21

 The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published later in journals.

 There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to participate.

Younger researchers, and researchers who are members of historically under-represented groups, are especially encouraged to submit papers.

 If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please upload a PDF version by midnight EDT on August 1, 2022, to this link:

http://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf22

 Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted papers will be contacted.

 For presenters in North America, the NBER will cover the travel and hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America, while the NBER will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide support for hotel accommodation.

 There are a limited number of spaces available for graduate students to attend the conference, though we cannot cover their costs. Please email jkastl@princeton.edu a short nominating paragraph.

 Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested scholars. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

Organ transplants and capital punishment don't go well together

 I recently blogged about a paper by Robertson and Lavee in the American Journal of Transplantation, looking at surgeries conducted in China before 2015, a period in which China acknowledged that most transplants there were conducted with organs from executed prisoners.  Now they summarize their report in a column in the WSJ.

In China, New Evidence That Surgeons Became Executioners. Clinical reports recount scores of cases in which organ donors were alive when operations began.  By Jacob Lavee and Matthew P. Robertson

"The Wuhan doctors write: “When the chest of the donor was opened, the chest wall incision was pale and bloodless, and the heart was purple and beating weakly. But the heartbeat became strong immediately after tracheal intubation and oxygenation. The donor heart was extracted with an incision from the 4th intercostal sternum into the chest. . . . This incision is a good choice for field operation where the sternum cannot be sawed open without power.”

"By casually noting that the donor was connected to a ventilator (“tracheal intubation”) only at midsurgery, the physicians inadvertently reveal that the donor was alive when the operation began.

...

"Our findings end in 2015, but we think the abuse likely continues. Medical papers like those we studied were first unearthed by Chinese grass-roots investigators in late 2014, and it would have been simple to command journals to stop publishing the incriminating details after that. While China claims to have stopped using prisoners in 2015, our previous research raises doubts. In a 2019 paper in the journal BMC Medical Ethics, we used statistical forensics to show that the official voluntary-organ donation numbers were falsified, inflating the success of a modest voluntary organ-donation reform program used to buttress the reform narrative.

"Global medical leaders have largely dismissed such concerns. The World Health Organization took advice from Chinese transplant surgeons in the establishment of its anti-organ-trafficking task force—and then installed them on the membership committee. In 2020, WHO officials joined long-time apologists for China’s transplant system, attacking our previous research showing falsified numbers."

...

"Dr. Lavee is the director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center and a professor of surgery at Tel Aviv University. Mr. Robertson is a research fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a doctoral candidate in political science at the Australian National University."

Stanford Economics Site Conferences 2022

Here's the full set of sessions for this summer: 

Program Overview

• How Should We Fund Science? (June 30-June 30, 2022)
• The Economics of Animal Welfare (July 12-July 12, 2022)
• Empirical Implementation of Theoretical Models of Strategic Interaction and Dynamic Behavior (July 13-July 15, 2022)
• New Frontiers in Asset Pricing (July 18-July 20, 2022)
• Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets (August 8-August 10, 2022)
• Gender (August 11-August 12, 2022)
• Political Economic Theory (August 11-August 12, 2022)
• Macroeconomics and Inequality (August 15-August 17, 2022)
• Experimental Economics (August 15-August 16, 2022)
• Psychology and Economics (August 17-August 19, 2022)
• The Micro and Macro of Labor Markets (August 22-August 23, 2022)
• Migration (August 25-August 26, 2022)
• Labor Markets and Policies (August 29-August 31, 2022)
• Financial Regulation (August 29-August 31, 2022)
• IO of Healthcare and Consumer Finance Markets (August 31-September 1, 2022)
• Housing & Urban Economics (September 7-September 9, 2022)
• Climate Finance, Innovation and Challenges for Policy (September 12-September 13, 2022)
• The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility (September 14-September 16, 2022)

Health data and privacy, in a world of overlapping data

 Re-identifying de-identified data, by combining it with other data sets, sometimes provides a way of legally circumventing medical privacy laws such as HIPAA.  Data re-identification isn't illegal.

Here's a story from Stat:

 Top privacy researchers urge the health care industry to safeguard patient data. By Megan Molteni 

"As a STAT investigation published Monday revealed, data brokers are quietly trafficking in Americans’ health information — often without their knowledge or consent, and beyond the reach of federal health privacy laws. This market in medical records has become highly lucrative  — $13.5 billion annually —  thanks to advances in artificial intelligence that enable the slicing, dicing, and cross-referencing of that data in powerful new ways.

"But the building of these algorithms often sidelines patient privacy. And researchers who’ve been tracking these erosive effects say it’s time to reform how health data is governed and give patients back control of their information.

...

"One of the most frequent harms he and other researchers have chronicled: Patients being denied care or insurance coverage based on information payers drew from their social media activities after combining datasets to re-identify them. 

Food fight in California: Foie gras is legal for private consumption from out of state providers

 The Ninth Circuit has confirmed a nuanced lower court verdict about foie gras, in the latest episode of a long running California food fight about gavage, the force feeding of ducks:

California court okays import of foie gras from out of state, barred in 2012. The law, passed in 2004, went into effect in 2012 and banned the sale of the delicacy if produced by force feeding geese or ducks.

"A California law that effectively bans foie gras sales in the state was limited in part on Friday. Californians can continue purchasing the controversial pate from out-of-state retailers, the ninth circuit court of appeals said in a ruling.

"The law, which passed in 2004 and went into effect in 2012, bars the sale of foie gras if produced by force feeding geese or ducks, according to Courthouse News Service. As the mousse is traditionally produced from the engorged livers of force-fed geese and ducks, the legislation is a near-prohibition.

‘It’s just gorgeous’: rare deep-sea dragonfish spotted off California coast

Read more

"The ninth circuit’s decision upheld a lower court’s 2020 ruling, which also permitted the shipping of out-of-state foie gras through third-party delivery companies, according to the Associated Press."

"This ruling is only applicable to people who purchase foie gras for their individual use; California law still bars retailers and restaurants from selling or giving away foie gras. The law has been challenged repeatedly since its enactment."

Eliminating cruelty (and methane) from the food chain: lab-grown ("no-kill") meat

 The Guardian has the story:

World’s largest vats for growing ‘no-kill’ meat to be built in US by Damian Carrington

"The building of the world’s largest bioreactors to produce cultivated meat has been announced, with the potential to supply tens of thousands of shops and restaurants. Experts said the move could be a “gamechanger” for the nascent industry.

"The US company Good Meat said the bioreactors would grow more than 13,000 tonnes of chicken and beef a year. It will use cells taken from cell banks or eggs, so the meat will not require the slaughter of any livestock.

"There are about 170 companies around the world working on cultured meat, but Good Meat is the only company to have gained regulatory approval to sell its product to the public. It began serving cultivated chicken in Singapore in December 2020.

...

"“I think our grandchildren are going to ask us about why we ate meat from slaughtered animals back in 2022,” said Josh Tetrick, the chief executive of Good Meat’s parent company, Eat Just.

“Cultivated meat matters because it will enable us to eat meat without all the harm, without bulldozing forests, without the need to slaughter an animal, without the need to use antibiotics, without accelerating zoonotic diseases.

...

"Cultivated meat has not yet been approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration. 

...

"Another cultivated meat company, Upside Foods, raised $400m in April, in part to fund a commercial-scale facility to produce thousands of tonnes of meat a year.

...

"Other companies with facilities for cultivated meat include SuperMeat, Mosa Meat, Future Meat Technologies and the seafood producers Wildtype and Shiok Meats. There are also many companies making plant-based meat replacements."

Tipping in taxis

 The WSJ writes about a working paper about tipping in taxis by my Stanford GSB colleague (and taxi driver emeritus) Kwabena Donkor.

Here's the WSJ article:

When Given a Menu of Tipping Options, People Tip More  By Lisa Ward

"People tend to use tip menus as a reference point or anchor, interpreting the options as indicators of what they should actually tip, says Kwabena Donkor, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s School of Business, the paper’s author and a former New York City taxi driver.

"The study found that 58% of riders chose to use the taxi cabs’ tip menus, though riders tended to opt out of using the menu when the calculations were easiest."

********

And here's the working paper:

The Economic Value of Norm Conformity andMenu-Opt-Out Costs

Kwabena Donkor, Stanford GSB December, 2021

"Abstract: This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes trade-offs between consumption versus norm-adherence and choosing from a menu of default options versus computing a non-default choice. In the theoretical model, peoples’ choices depend on consumption, norm conformity, and menu-opt-out costs. Using passengers’ tips sampled from a billion NYC taxi rides, I empirically estimate the model parameters.I find that the cost of deviating from the norm tip and opting out of the default tip menu are both high relative to the taxi fare. I then examine the welfare implications of norm conformityand the positive and normative effects of default menu design."

EU purchases of Russian natural gas: some market design thoughts

 Coordinated action might help the EU curb how much it spends on Russian natural gas. Here are some thoughts by Cramton, Lévêque, Ockenfels and Stoft, in Vox.eu (followed by a Financial Times editorial):

An EU gas-purchasing cartel framework  by Peter Cramton, François Lévêque, Axel Ockenfels, and Steven Stoft  26 May 2022

“Instead of outbidding each other and driving prices up,” on 25 March, the 27 EU nations decided to “pool [their] purchasing power” for the “voluntary common purchase of gas”. In short, they decided to form a buyers’ cartel. So far, difficulties have been identified, but what is needed is a systematic design effort addressing those difficulties. This column proposes a simple, but fairly comprehensive framework for an EU gas-purchasing cartel."

...

"While a tariff on Russian gas is justified and can avoid the severe consequences of an outright ban, it would be best implemented as part of a gas-purchasing cartel that could also organise a quick and vigorous response in the form of a price ultimatum.

...

"Although only one piece of a responsible plan, a gas-purchasing cartel could play an essential role in protecting EU economies from Russian blackmail and also in helping to keep the EU unified as Putin tries to fracture it, as he is attempting to do (WSJ Editors 2022). Its twin goals would be reducing the EU’s financial support for Russia’s Ukraine invasion and reducing Putin’s ability to hold EU economies hostage to Russian gas supplies. It could do this in two steps.

"1. A quick-start Russian price ultimatum with some part (up to 100%) of the price reduction placed in an escrow account. 

"2. Collective purchasing of additional gas from all sources but with targeted tariffs (leaving non-Russian long-term contracts undisturbed).

"Behind the cost-benefit justification for an EU cartel lies a strategic vision recognising the benefits of credible, step-by-step reductions in Russia’s energy revenues until the conflict is resolved (Eichstädt 2022). This is only possible with the coordination that comes with some form of buyer’s cartel."

*********

And here's the FT editorial:

A tariff on Russian oil could pave the way to an embargo. The best way to squeeze Moscow’s war machine is to deprive it of energy profits

"The EU’s economy commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis this week summed up the dilemma as the bloc struggles to agree on an embargo on Russian oil. “We are discussing massive financial support to Ukraine on one hand, and continue to provide financing for Russia’s war on the other hand,” he said. “It needs to be stopped.” A ban on Russian imports should remain the priority. But an interim measure designed to stem Moscow’s profits from energy sales more quickly — a punitive EU tariff on Russian oil, proposed by the US and others — is worth looking at too.

"An embargo choking off the 3.4mn barrels a day of oil and oil products that Russia exports to the EU would be a stunning blow to its revenues. But an EU embargo is vigorously opposed by landlocked Hungary, which says it is less able than coastal states to source alternative oil, and its refineries are set up to process Russian crude so require costly conversion. Bringing Budapest round is likely to need financial support and a phase-in period for an embargo.

...

"After a meeting with US President Joe Biden this month, Mario Draghi, Italy’s premier, mooted a global “buyers’ cartel” that would attempt to reduce global oil prices."

Personal data as a national (not international) resource

 The NY Times has the story:

The Era of Borderless Data Is Ending. Nations are accelerating efforts to control data produced within their perimeters, disrupting the flow of what has become a kind of digital currency.  By David McCabe and Adam Satariano

"France, Austria, South Africa and more than 50 other countries are accelerating efforts to control the digital information produced by their citizens, government agencies and corporations. Driven by security and privacy concerns, as well as economic interests and authoritarian and nationalistic urges, governments are increasingly setting rules and standards about how data can and cannot move around the globe. The goal is to gain “digital sovereignty.”

...

"In Washington, the Biden administration is circulating an early draft of an executive order meant to stop rivals like China from gaining access to American data.

"In the European Union, judges and policymakers are pushing efforts to guard information generated within the 27-nation bloc, including tougher online privacy requirements and rules for artificial intelligence.

"In India, lawmakers are moving to pass a law that would limit what data could leave the nation of almost 1.4 billion people.

"The number of laws, regulations and government policies that require digital information to be stored in a specific country more than doubled to 144 from 2017 to 2021, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

"While countries like China have long cordoned off their digital ecosystems, the imposition of more national rules on information flows is a fundamental shift in the democratic world and alters how the internet has operated since it became widely commercialized in the 1990s.

Displaced people passes 100,000,000

 The Guardian has the story, focusing on the causes of displacement. But efficiently matching diverse refugees to places of temporary or permanent asylum is still one of the biggest unsolved matching problems.

Number of displaced people passes 100m for the first time, says UN. ‘Staggering milestone’ calls for urgent international action to address underlying causes of conflict, persecution and the climate crisis, says high commissioner for refugees.  by Diane Taylor

"The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has said the global number of forcibly displaced people has passed 100 million for the first time, describing it as a “staggering milestone”.

"The UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said the grim new statistic should act as a wake-up call for the international community and that more action is needed internationally to address the root causes of forced displacement around the world.

...

"The figure hit 90 million at the end of 2021, propelled by a range of conflicts including in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Nigeria.

"Eight million Ukrainian people have been displaced within their home country as a result of the war, along with more than six million refugee movements registered from Ukraine.

“The international response to people fleeing war in Ukraine has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Grandi. “Compassion is alive and we need similar mobilisation for all crises around the world. But ultimately humanitarian aid is a palliative, not a cure. To reverse this trend the only answer is peace and stability so that innocent people are not forced to gamble between acute danger at home or precarious flight or exile.”

"The term “displaced person” was first used during the second world war, in which more than 40 million people were forcibly displaced."

Matching prisoners to jails: peer effects are of first order importance

 Akhil Vohra points me to this very interesting matching problem, which is apparently quite far from a good solution:

RIKERS ISLAND: City Jails Scrap Last Remnants of Pricey Consultant Plan as Deaths Mount BY  REUVEN BLAU, May 18, The City

"In 2018, the city Department of Correction began using a new detainee classification process created at great expense by consulting group McKinsey & Company. 

"The de Blasio administration had paid the white-shoe firm $27.5 million to create the system that used an algorithm based on a host of factors — including age, possible gang affiliation, and any prior history in jail — to determine where to house people behind bars with the least risk for confrontation. 

"On Tuesday, jail Commissioner Louis Molina announced that the pricey system — widely criticized for failing to reduce violence — will be formally scrapped after just four years as part of the department’s court-mandated overhaul plan. 

...

"jail officials have long struggled where to place new detainees to reduce the likelihood of fights. Top jail supervisors have traditionally tried to avoid creating housing units based on gang affiliation, according to current and former jail insiders. 

"Units made up of just one gang tend to get along with each other but also have the ability to gang up on the officers in the area and are more likely to join forces to ignore basic orders, jail experts say. 

"Housing units mixed with people from at least two different gangs as well as some people who are totally unaffiliated are considered the golden standard, according to criminologists. 

"But other factors are also important such as a person’s prior criminal history, age, and possible previous record in jail. 

...

"“It’s a revolving door of stupidity and poor decisions,” one high-ranking jail official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told THE CITY. 

“We changed from that system because it wasn’t working, now we are reverting back to it,” the jail insider said. 

...

"Jail officials said the result was part of the chaos that has led to a massive spike in the number of stabbings and slashings among detainees and assaults on staff."