My latest Forbes column looks at the outrageous refusal of some prominent hospitals to do kidney transplants for people who've found their donors through Internet sites or media publicity. Sally Satel addresses the same issue in The Weekly Standard.
The transplant establishment is, unfortunately, all too accustomed to managing the shortage rather than expanding the supply of organs. Too many powerful "experts" consider a donor who is moved by a particular stranger's story to be a generic "altruistic donor," for whom one stranger should be exactly the same as another. By their lights, favoring someone you've read about over whoever's first on the list is "unfair." (Check out Dr. Douglas Hanto's example toward the end of my article.) In fact, such a donor is someone who would not have given at all without empathy for a particular person. That empathy is no different in principle than the empathy one feels for a friend or relative.
And, no matter what The Onion says, organs don't grow on trees. Even assuming no change in the law, hospitals should do whatever they can to encourage, rather than discourage, donations. Sixty thousand Americans are waiting for kidneys. Even if every single family of a potential deceased donor agreed to contribute that person's organs, that would only double the number of cadaver kidneys available--to about 13,000 a year. Until biomedical advances make it possible to produce organs on demand, live donors are the only hope for the tens of thousands of Americans who need kidneys.
Inspired by op-eds by Sally Satel in the NYT and Richard Epstein in the WSJ, the Freakonomics blog features a lively discussion of organ markets. Richard Epstein published a related article in the WSJ in 2002 and, unlike his latest one, it's available online to nonsubscribers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2006 • Comments
The Dallas Observer's blog brings word of plans to tear down one of my neighborhood's most enjoyable facades: the Madi Museum/Kilgore law firm. The building's facade and art space aren't that old. They date roughly to our arrival in Dallas six years ago. The artist who created the colorful plates surrounding the building is suing to block demolition. From the Observer post (via D Magazine's FrontBurner:
"The point is, the artwork is unique and kind of special, a wonderful expresson of public art," Winocour says. "Dallas has very little, unlike New York or Los Angeles, because there's not a lot of public investment in this city. We have billionaire philanthropists like Ray Nasher, but there's little public art, and it would be nice to present it in a city that likes to see itself as a world-class city. If it wants to be London or Paris it needs to encourage this. And it's great that at one time Mr. Masterson did...but if you challenge the constituionality of a statute designed to protect the artist and work and cast yourself as a patron of the arts, I think you're talking our of both sides of your mouth."
From what little I know about the law, I don't think he has much of a case. It sounds like artists who attach their art to buildings don't enjoy automatic protections, only contractual ones. But the more important point is what this interpretation of the law--or even the constant threat of litigation--would do to incentives. If the law makes interesting-looking buildings hard to tear down, nobody will build interesting-looking buildings. If the Madi Museum goes, I'll miss its happy face. But at least we were able to enjoy it for a few years.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2006 • Comments
In the new issue of D Magazine, high-dive enthusiast Tim Rogers takes on the latest regulatory attack on fun. An excerpt:
Since 1964, the city-owned Cottonwood pool in Richardson, on West Belt Line Road, with its 3-meter board, has served as a chlorinated firing range. Forty-two years of cannonballs. And can openers, preacher seats, watermelons, and flying squirrels (to depart from the munitions metaphor). Not to mention, for those who appreciate the splashless entry, jackknives, swan dives, and one-and-a-half front flips.
But not this summer. When the pool opens Memorial Day weekend, the Cottonwood high dive won't be there. The reason: Section L of Chapter 265 of the Texas Administrative Code, which prescribes clearances for diving boards, depths of water, and slopes of pool bottoms as they rise from deep end to shallow. The new rules became effective in September 2004. To oversimplify, they call, respectively, for greater, deeper, and gentler. Many municipalities gave their noncomplying pools a reprieve last season. But this summer, no exceptions.
Cottonwood had a prickly clearance problem further complicated by a slope violation. So even though Kerry Little, assistant superintendent of aquatics for Richardson, says no one had ever suffered an injury while jumping from the high dive, it had to be torn down this past winter.
The story was prompted by a tip from Dallas lawyer, blogger, and Dynamist friend John Lanius, via this high-dive-phobic author. (Just because I'm petrified of diving off diving boards doesn't mean I won't oppose stupid regulation.) John is on the board of a community pool in Plano, a Dallas suburb. John, whose older son's cannon ball illustrates Tim's article, sends this update:
Our fight's not over yet, as we're going to try and get some sort of reexamination by the Department of Health and maybe some legislative relief from our local representatives (one of whom grew up in Plano swimming in that pool). The best I would hope for would be some type of grandfathering of pre-2004 pools, but I'm not too optimistic. Fighting the grey fog of regulations just seems so futile. You might clear some of it, but it keeps pressing in from all around. I'll post updates on our progress (or lack thereof) on my blog.
John also reminds me of Nick Gillespie's terrific 1997 Reason article, "Childproofing the World."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 22, 2006 • Comments
I explain how it happened in Texas Monthly.
Here's hoping Sally will forgive me for the photo.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 17, 2006 • Comments
We've already done to organs what Debra Ortiz wants to do to human eggs (see item below). The result: thousands of unnecessary deaths. My friend Sally Satel takes on "death's waiting list" in an op-ed in today's NYT:
March was National Kidney Month. I did my part: I got a new one. My good fortune, alas, does not befall nearly enough people, and the federal government deserves much of the blame.
Today 70,000 Americans are waiting for kidneys, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which maintains the national waiting list. Last year, roughly 16,000 people received one (about 40 percent are from living donors, the others from cadavers). More are waiting for livers, hearts and lungs, which mostly come from deceased donors, bringing the total to about 92,000. In big cities, where the ratio of acceptable organs to needy patients is worst, the wait is five to eight years and is expected to double by 2010. Someone on the organ list dies every 90 minutes. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Read the whole thing (permanent link on AEI site here). Sally has organized a half-day conference on solutions to the organ crisis for June 12.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 15, 2006 • Comments
In my last Forbes column, I warned that long-term threats to biomedical research are as likely to come from the anti-commercial left as from the anti-abortion right. That's happening, with little comment, in blue-state California, where state Senator Deborah Ortiz is sponsoring a bill to prohibit paying women who donate eggs for research. From the text:
This bill would prohibit human oocytes or embryos from being acquired, sold, offered for sale, received, or otherwise transferred for valuable consideration for medical research or development of medical therapies, and would prohibit payment in excess of the amount of reimbursement of expenses to be made to any research subject to encourage her to produce human oocytes for the purposes of medical research....
No payment in excess of the amount of reimbursement of direct, out-of-pocket expenses shall be made to any research subject to encourage her to produce human oocytes for the purposes of medical research. There shall be no reimbursement for lost wages.
The bill is supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, a left-wing anti-biotech group.
After tracking this bill, I was surprised to read in the LAT that Ortiz is running for secretary of state in the Democratic primary against Debra Bowen, another state senator. Bowen, whom I met a number of times when I was editing Reason, is one of my favorite California Democrats.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 15, 2006 • Comments
My trip to speak at Créapôle, a private design school in Paris, taught me a bit about French education. Elaine Sciolino's NYT report confirmed, with more details, what I'd gathered about the sad state of French universities
At Nanterre, Alexandre Frydlender, 19, a second-year student in law and history, complained about the lack of courses in English for students of international law. But asked whether he would be willing to pay a higher fee for better services, he replied: "The university is a public service. The state must pay."
A poster that hangs throughout the campus halls echoed that sentiment: "To study is a right, not a privilege."...
The protests also were the latest warning to the French government and private corporations that the university system needs fixing. Officials, entrepreneurs, professors and students alike agree that too many students are stuck in majors like sociology or psychology that make it difficult to move into a different career in a stratified society like France, given the country's troubled economy.
The fear of joblessness has led many young people in different directions. Students who have the money are increasingly turning to foreign universities or private specialized schools in France, especially for graduate school. And more young people are seeking a security-for-life job with a government agency....
"We are caught in a world of limits where there's no such thing as the self-made man," said Claire de la Vigne, a graduate of Nanterre who is now doing graduate work at the much more prestigious Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. "We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible. Our guide is fear."
Founded in 1981 by an entrepreneurial couple, Jean-Michele and Harumi Laralu, Créapôle sees itself as an upstart, with a somewhat adversarial relationship to the French policital and academic establishment. Its big selling point is its job placement rate. The school works students hard, focuses on practical problems, and guarantees graduates a job. Créapôle students don't have time to protest, I was told, and they laugh at the manifestations (demonstrations, or protests). They have too many assignments to complete--and, unlike the student marchers, they're paying hefty tuition, about $8,000 to $10,000 a year, with no scholarships. (When my mother asked M. Leralu if the school offers scholarship, his answer demonstrated a telling cultural gap: "No, we are a private school.")
Créapôle students, too, are looking for security above all--a job with a "stable company," I was told. What a contrast to U.S. design students, who tend to value interesting work much more highly than stability. After all, you can always get another job.
On that note, Molly Selvin's LAT feature on picky college grads provides a sharp contrast to Sciolino's NYT article. I was particularly struck by this anecdote:
UC Berkeley senior Katie Seligman values that kind of opportunity. The 21-year-old psychology major turned down an offer from Internet search titan Google Inc., instead agreeing to start next month with a San Francisco healthcare consulting firm partly because she will interact with top managers and the chief financial officers of large hospitals.
"I wanted to be challenged," she said.
On the French disease, James Traub's NYT magazine article on French presidential hopeful Ségolène Royal contains this priceless anecdote:
In fact, Royal seems innocent of any taint of economic liberalism. She regards Villepin's peremptory imposition of the new law as a sign of a systematic failure to listen to ordinary people; but she does not view the national suspicion of market forces as a comparable source of paralysis. I was surprised, I said during our interview, that someone whose entire life constituted a triumph over adversity would join the campaign to insure against précarité....Royal countered my observation with a familiar refrain: "The problem is that everybody isn't subject to insecurity. Do you see businessmen being fired for incompetence? The young see politicians, who also have a stable and secure job, being civil servants, lecturing others on insecurity. So the young graduate will say, 'In the name of what am I going to sign an insecure contract?' "
Then the conversation took an odd turn. Royal asked me, with the air of someone pulling out a trump card, "Are you in an insecure situation?" Actually, I explained, as a contract writer for this magazine, I have little security.
Royal wasn't going to be put off the scent that easily. "Yes, but how many years does your contract last?"
"I sign a new one every year."
Now she was frankly incredulous. "You could be fired every year?" For all her own experience, Royal apparently viewed précarité as a kind of socioeconomic stigma rather than the price you might choose to pay for freedom. Or maybe you could say that for her, as for the left generally--and not only in France--market liberalism and globalization have the status merely of fact, which is categorically inferior to a right. This is no less so if the fact appears to obviate the right. "The global economy shouldn't be supported by wage earners," Royal insisted. "They have to be able to build a future, like any human being."
I wrote another book about that. Like The Substance of Style, however, it is not available in French. Ces livres sonts trop americains, or so they say. You can, however, buy them in Chinese and Korean.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 15, 2006 • Comments
In a fascinating bit of reporting, Kathleen Pender of the SF Chronicle traces a huge chunk of the state's recent fiscal good fortune back to a single source:
California took in a record $11.3 billion in personal income tax receipts in April, $4.3 billion more than it collected last April. It's almost certain that a significant chunk of April's haul came from Google employees -- perhaps one-eighth or more of the tax receipt gain.
The fact that a single high-flying Silicon Valley company is giving such a big boost to the state treasury can be determined by examining insider stock trading information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fourteen of Google's top executives and directors sold $4.4 billion worth of stock last year, according to Thomson Financial. That includes founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each of whom sold about $1.3 billion worth of stock.
Assuming the 14 insiders had acquired the shares at very low cost and that all were in the top 10.3 percent state-tax bracket, they could have owed the state close to $450 million in capital gains tax on their stock sales.
It's just the latest illustration of two remarkable California facts: that the state is incredibly dependent on a few rich people for its tax revenue and that those rich people haven't all left for Nevada, where there's no state income tax. How skewed are tax payments in California? Pender reports:
California's tax structure is highly progressive, which makes it highly volatile. For the 2004 tax year, 38,000 California tax returns reported more than $1 million in income. They represented just 0.2 percent of all state-tax returns, yet they accounted for 14 percent of total adjusted gross income and about 30 percent of the total personal tax.
The top 3 percent of the returns, those with incomes exceeding $200,000, paid about 60 percent of all state taxes.
"What happens to the top 1 percent is of great interest to the Department of Finance," says David Hitchcock, a debt analyst with Standard & Poor's.
(Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 12, 2006 • Comments
Wal-Mart is pushing organic food, while Whole Foods boasts about low prices.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 11, 2006 • Comments
I'm back from France, which should give Dan Brown some kind of award for his tremendous contributions to the economy. I'm mostly sorting through my enormous piles of virtual and physical mail but am making an attempt to resume blogging. Hence, there are a couple of new posts below. More to come later.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 11, 2006 • Comments