Below is a fascinating statement issued by Physicians for a National Health Program, “a membership organization of over 15,000 physicians [which] supports a single-payer national health insurance program.”

You should read the whole thing but, in a nutshell: The people who receive donated organs in the U.S. nearly always have health insurance, while a significant fraction of the people who donate the organs do not.

In other words: poorer people are more willing to give organs than they are likely to receive them.

This only further leads me to challenge the notion that a market for organs, as we’ve written about before, would punish or exploit poor people out of proportion to rich people.

Anti-market arguments usually include the concern that poor people would be compelled to sell organs while rich people never would. As true as this may be — may be — it ignores what is to me the more salient point: a market would also give many more poor people the opportunity to get organs, not just give them. As this statement makes clear, that isn’t so much the case today.

People who lack health insurance are about 20 times more likely to donate their liver or a kidney for a lifesaving transplant than to receive one, a new study shows.

Read more…

Larry Summers

There is a lot of speculation about whether President-elect Barack Obama will choose Larry Summers to be his Treasury Secretary. But some people are openly opposing Summers’s appointment, in part because of controversial comments he made about women in science.

It’s a close question, but I’m hoping that Obama appoints Summers. I have three reasons:

First, Summers is really a cut above the next-best appointment. Larry Summers is incredibly smart. It’s not just that he is a wickedly insightful academic (who may still win a Nobel Prize); he is also a very quick study.

I trust his economic judgment and ability to make good decisions under pressure. He has an ability in these difficult times to do the right thing. This is especially true if the alternative is Jon Corzine, and even true in the case of Timothy Geithner (who are both rumored to be on Obama’s shortlist). This is no knock on Corzine or Geithner. Summers, to my mind, is just that much better. Read more…

Thanks to all the readers who wrote in last week with news that Freakonomics was mentioned on the TV show Boston Legal.

It happened at the end, when the William Shatner character and the James Spader character were having their ritual end-of-the-episode scotch, musing about law and the world.

Alan Shore (Spader): Well, it’s possible Roe v. Wade has brought our crime rates down.

Denny Crane (Shatner): How do you figure?

A.S.: Well, Roe became law in the ’70’s. Studies have shown that the typical child that went unborn after Roe was more likely to come from poor families, single parents — the very children most likely to grow up to become criminals. After Roe became law, many of those children were being aborted. The would-be criminals of the ’90’s weren’t around because they were never born in the ’70’s.

D.C.: You’re making all this up.

A.S.: I’m not making it up. There’s a book. Freakonomics. Read it! (beat) You’re still not reading?

Read more…

Photo: cicilief

In my last post, I offered several reasons why the urban riot has gone out of style in the U.S.

However, France will not be spared the sword. I predict that the world will watch French cities light up in youth unrest in 2009, 2010 at the latest … 2011 for sure.

I have been traveling to the suburbs outside of Paris trying to understand the parallels between French marginality and U.S. urban poverty. (The “suburbs” or banlieues in France carry the opposite connotation as the U.S.: namely, predominantly nonwhite, poor, excluded from the general life of the wider society.)

I am struck at the resonances between the voices of young people in contemporary France and the cries of those who rebelled in U.S. inner cities in the 1960’s — arguably the last time we had nationwide un-civil unrest. French youth in the suburbs are mostly North African in origin — or from other parts of Francophone Africa. They are also mad as hell. Read more…

Photo: Darwin Bell

Beets are the new broccoli. Or at least they will be after Obama takes office on January 20, as the president-elect recently revealed his distaste for this vitamin-laden root vegetable. And Obama is not alone: Even as beet salads have become popular in trendy eateries, most American kids I know also reject the mighty beet.

It’s a curious thing. You see, I grew up in Australia, where just about everyone seems to love eating beets, especially kids. In fact, even those kids who wrinkle their noses at other vegetables still love beets (or “beetroot” to an Aussie). When I arrived in the U.S., I was stunned to find Americans don’t add beetroot to their burgers. In Australia, beetroot on a burger is a given. In fact, during my undergraduate days the student cafeteria stopped serving beetroot on their burgers; I ran for election to the Sydney Uni student union partly on the platform of restoring beetroot on the burgers. (Obama should be careful, beetroot-lovers are a powerful constituency: I was elected in a landslide.) Read more…

The latest surprise victims of the recession: Small-town Santas.

The latest surprise beneficiaries: Internet psychics.

Incidentally, consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest level ever recorded.

Why ask for toys from Santa when you’re asking a psychic about your chances of getting a pink slip this quarter?

We’re used to watching the TED spread as an indicator of economic health. Maybe we should start checking the Santa spread.

Shopsin’s is a New York institution, a restaurant that began as a grocery store whose owner, Kenny Shopsin, is colorful, irascible, and talented. It is famous for breakfast but also for its vast, unusual, common-sense menu.

From Shopsins.com

Shopsin has just written a book that is half cookbook and half memoir, entirely fascinating. I had never sat down and read a cookbook from cover to cover but that is what happened with Shopsin’s book (co-written with Carolynn Carreno). It is called Eat Me. The introduction is a reprint of a New Yorker article by Calvin (Bud) Trillin, a regular at Shopsin’s. Read more…

Annalee Newitz, editor of the science-fiction blog i09, created a chart showing the number of zombie movies produced annually in the West (mostly the U.S. and Europe) since 1910:

Chart design by Stephanie Fox.

The chart shows several spikes in zombie-movie production that, according to Newitz, “always seem to happen eerily close to historical events involving war or social upheaval.”

Some of the “upheavals” that she correlates with production spikes (like the launch of Sputnik) seem like a bit of a stretch; and overall, more movies are being made today than at the beginning of the century — but Newitz claims that the zombie-movie spikes are significant regardless.

If she’s right, and there is a zombie-strife correlation, why would gruesome movies about the undead be popular after a war?

Eric Melin, on his movie blog Scene Stealers, suggests that zombies are popular because they serve as social mirrors, helping society come to terms with itself and its actions. Read more…

Photo: Jimmy Prescott

David Edery, the worldwide games portfolio manager for Xbox Live Arcade, a research affiliate of the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies Program, and author of the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, blogged here last week about video games. This is his second of two guest posts on the subject. Here’s an earlier relevant discussion about the music industry.

Can Guitar Hero Help Save the Music Industry?
By David Edery
A Guest Post

One of the most interesting developments in the video-game industry is the way that games are being used to jazz up — if not completely re-invent — other, more mature industries. There are several good examples of this phenomenon: the stuffed toy industry and the fitness industry, for example, but my focus for this guest post is the music industry. Read more…

There’s a shortage of sperm in Britain! Apparently, Britain needs donations for about 4,000 women per year; to reach that number, about 500 sperm donors per year are required, while only 300 are currently registered. Things were fine until 2005, when a law was enacted allowing children of sperm donors the right to discover the identity of their father at age 18; simultaneously, the number of women who could use the same donor’s sperm was limited further.

The first change scared off a lot of potential donors, shifting the supply curve of sperm to the left, while the second change caused the demand curve for individual donors to shift to the right.

Because there is no price that might help the market reach equilibrium, Britain has been forced to search elsewhere for donated sperm. Read more…

Photo: davidsilver

Americans are eating out less, driving down restaurant profits around the country.

But some eateries are doing better.

The first is McDonald’s, where profits grew 11 percent last quarter. A recession would seem to be good news for inexpensive food.

The second is a plucky, five-year-old community kitchen in Salt Lake City called the One World Cafe. Thanks in part to its pay-as-you-wish pricing policy, One World has seen its traffic grow by 15 percent this quarter.

Prices aren’t the only negotiable thing at One World. There’s no set menu, and diners choose whatever size portion they’d like. The restaurant also lets customers work off the cost of their meal by volunteering.

Though the average per-meal donation has slid recently from $10 to $7.50, the restaurant’s business model should stay viable, says One World spokesman Don Merrill. Part of what makes One World appealing in the downturn, he says, is the sense of personal control — over the portions and the price — that it gives diners.

We’ve written about successful pay-as-you-wish schemes before, from the Bagel Man of Washington D.C., to an Ontario bakery, to a certain British rock band.

Will the recession turn out to be the moment to shine for pay-as-you-wish?

We received this good and heartfelt bleg from Jim Farmer of Chattanooga, Tenn. Don’t let him down. And send your own blegs here.

Although my wife and I are very involved in our community, I am invigorated by the election results and want to step up some more.

Photo: MoBikeFed

My question is what can I do that will get the most bang for the buck for my community, my region, my country, my world? Should I work an extra hour a week and donate it [the extra income] to a charity or cause, or should I donate an hour of my time to a charity, cause, civic group, or whatever. Of course, [I'd like to know] which ones as well.

My wife and I are both Bigs in Big Brothers/Big Sisters and really feel that it has the most bang for the buck, but I’m curious about the economics of it. Just thought it would be an interesting topic and would bring out some good commentary from the peanut gallery.

Not long ago we ran a similar bleg, but Jim, while interested in a fairly specific topic, opens up the floor to a broader one as well: How is a “concerned citizen” supposed to act these days?

There’s lots of evidence that commitment contracts can help people change behavior with regard to all kinds of things (like savings and smoking cessation). But since participation is voluntary, a huge question is whether you can get people to sign up. This is more than an academic question for me, since the answer will help determine the success of stickK.com, a commitment store that I co-founded earlier this year.

One theory is that the demand will be limited to people who have a willpower problem and are self-aware enough to know they have a willpower problem.

In a post on voting commitments, I argued that even people without willpower problems might enter into commitment contracts as a way to credibly signal their commitment to others.

I just published an article in Forbes with Barry Nalebuff that extends this signaling idea to conservation commitments: Read more…

The essence of economics is its focus on incentives, and how they affect consumers’ utility maximization and firms’ profit maximization to generate price and quantity outcomes. This is such a powerful engine for predicting behavior!

It’s what makes non-economists hate us and seek to find reasons to ignore standard economic analysis. No doubt behavioral economics has something to offer; and the attraction of culture — the role of social norms — is appealing too. Certainly without resorting to something like social norms it’s hard for me to explain why Germans will not cross a street when the “Don’t Walk” sign is lit and give me dirty looks when I act like an American and blithely proceed to cross.

Indeed, even a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago-type economist like me is willing to explain some phenomena as being culturally determined when all else fails.

Nonetheless, in the end the essence of the economic approach and economic research, and an extremely powerful way of analyzing behavior, is our standard analysis. It can use fixing, but it certainly isn’t broken; and those who fail to heed it while devising policy are likely to make our country, and the world, worse off.

(It isn’t just Germans who are reluctant to jaywalk; Dubner found the same to be true in Vancouver.)