I review Kieran Healy's Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs
in the Sunday NYTBR. The opening:
Organ transplants are at once the most amazing and frustrating of medical miracles. A new kidney or heart can cure someone who would otherwise die or, even in less than ideal circumstances, extend life and improve well-being. The surgical skill and pharmaceutical innovation required to make transplantation work are wonders of human ingenuity.
But there is still no such thing as a truly new organ. Unlike insulin or artificial hips, organs so far cannot be successfully manufactured. They come only pre-owned, usually from young, healthy people who have died suddenly in traumatic accidents that destroyed their brains. Rainy weekends increase the organ supply. Helmet laws reduce it. The more than 94,000 Americans on the waiting list for organs are, in effect, waiting for someone else to die so that they can live.
The link embedded in the first paragraph goes to recent Times articles on organ transplants--a useful reference.
While the review obviously reflects my interest in the organ shortage, it's also a follow-up to my Boston Globe article on economic sociology. In fact, thanks to journalistic mobility, the same editor, Jenny Schuessler, assigned both pieces.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 27, 2007 • Comments
The Ball of Whacks, which sold out in December, is once again available through Amazon.com.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 26, 2007 • Comments
The producers of Free to Choose write:
Monday, January 29 is Milton Friedman Day. Numerous events are scheduled. Of note:
The University of Chicago Memorial is being streamed live via http://www.ideachannel.tv at 2:00 p.m. CST (GMT -6 hours). This site will also have available an exclusive audio discussion featuring Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and Ken Arrow discussing Friedman and his ideas. You can also view the Free to Choose series here at no charge.
The Friedman biography, The Power of Choice, premieres on PBS. Check local listings here. DVDs of the program are available via Idea Channel.
For the full listing of events, go to http://www.miltonfriedmanday.org.
Paul Krugman calls Friedman "a great economist and a great man." in this essay in The New York Review of Books. (Via Greg Mankiw.)
Reason's Brian Doherty selects Friedman quotes from three decades of contributions to the magazine.
Here's the agenda, with papers, of a 2003 Dallas Fed conference, "The Legacy of Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose: Economic Liberalism at the Turn of the 21st Century."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 26, 2007 • Comments
Why does this LAT article on the Bush library flap have a Houston dateline? If the Times couldn't afford a ticket on Southwest, why not file from L.A.?
I have to wonder where the protesting faculty were during the long site-selection process, when SMU was campaigning for the library and was widely considered the leading contender. Have they been on sabbatical for the past two years?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 26, 2007 • Comments
Now that's a pull quote. Whole interview here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 25, 2007 • Comments
I love the way the word fair plays in this report on modeling jobs in India.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2007 • Comments
A pictorial essay. I can't agree with the opening statement that "When you consider that an entire plate of broccoli contains the same number of Calories as a small spoonful of peanut butter, you might think twice the next time you decide what to eat." Broccoli and peanut butter aren't substitutes. The doughnut-bagel tradeoff is interesting, though. (Via Design Observer.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2007 • Comments
Michael Bierut draws some parallels, with examples from Peggy Noonan.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 24, 2007 • Comments
Alan Wolfe concluded his Sunday NYTBR review of Dinesh D'Souza's latest hackwork with the following sentence: "I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University." I realize that the Book Review can have long lead times--I have a review coming out next Sunday that I submitted in late October--but the lag is shorter for topical books. So I have to wonder whether Wolfe has willfully overlooked the strong negative reaction to the book that has, in fact, come from "decent conservatives." He can find that reaction conveniently catalogued by Eric Scheie here and here (via InstaPundit, whom Wolfe would almost certainly consider a conservative.) Wolfe reviewed The Future and Its Enemies, along with a number of conservative works, here.
I look forward to the attention the NYTBR will lavish on such intellectually serious books as Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed American Politics and Culture and Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Remember the definitive review they ran of Ryan Sager's The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party? Neither do I.
UPDATE: Alan Wolfe emails, "There was indeed a longish lead time on the review, as you suggest. I am extremely pleased to see so many on the right expressing hostility to DD's book."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 22, 2007 • Comments
California legislators are never without new ideas for regulations and bans. The latest proposal is to make spanking children under 3 a crime, punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to a year in jail. Debra Saunders makes the basic case against the bill. Though I don't have kids, I'm not as opposed to spanking as other enlightened folk; my brothers and I were spanked occasionally (not terribly hard), with some good and no ill effects. Smacking a 2-year-old's hand as she reaches toward, say, the flame on the kitchen stove seems to me a lot more persuasive than trying to explain the dangers of fire. And, on a purely anecdotal basis, psychological punishment seems to create much more long-term resentment.
All you spanking foes and child-rearing experts don't need to write to explain what a terrible parent I'd be. Even if I had kids, my Pennsylvania-reared husband would never countenance such punishment. Spanking, like gun ownership, is one of the characteristics of southern culture that non-southerners find barbaric. It persists in diaspora, especially among those who don't assimilate into the dominant culture of, say, California. A spanking ban would therefore have a wildly disproportionate effect on conservative Christians and on blacks. With zealous enforcement, California could get the incarceration rates of black mothers up there with those of young, black men.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 22, 2007 • Comments