The Perils of Price Controls

by Richard A. Epstein

Defining Ideas
August 30, 2011

Last week in the New York Times, veteran health correspondent Gardiner Harris wrote of the recent sharp and puzzling shortages of critical drugs used for treating a wide range of life-threatening cancers and bacterial infections. The total number of shortages has increased from 58 vital drugs in 2004 to 211 in 2010. These shortages have prompted some wholesalers to hoard certain scarce drugs, which has only aggravated the problem.

Harris reports that public officials and policy makers are now anxiously preparing a set of proposals to deal with these shortages. One such proposal calls, not surprisingly, on the federal government to take on a greater role in stockpiling dry ingredients of key drugs, which in times of need could be released to hospitals where pharmacists could then convert them into injectable compounds. A second legislative proposal, introduced by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to demand that drug companies give the FDA early warnings when they anticipate a cutback in the quantities of goods they ship to the market. Still a third proposal calls for removing restrictions on importing generic drugs from overseas in order to ease the current shortages.

One of the real difficulties in understanding these shortages is that they appear to stem from multiple causes. Some shortages come from the failure of various suppliers to meet FDA inspection standards for safety. Other shortages appear to stem from the scarcity of drugs in their cheaper generic forms. Harris says that the FDA attributes this shortage to "capacity problems at drug plants or lack of interest because of low profits." Low profits follow inexorably from price caps. These caps in turn interact with safety issues, creating possible synergistic effects, Let’s tackle each cause of the drug shortages separately, starting with the pricing issues.

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Sylvia Nasar’s Animated Guide to Econ

The Daily Beast
August 23, 2011

Take a surprisingly entertaining stroll through the pages of economic history with Sylvia Nasar, whose new book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius tells the story of modern economics. Watch this animated short that breaks down the key points that got us to where we are today.

An Economic Analysis of Gang Colors

by Christopher Shea

Wall Street Journal
August 2, 2011

Most of us have grown sufficiently used to the idea of gang colors that we don’t bother to ask why they exist. But, if you think about it, they’re paradoxical: Why would people who belong to groups that sell drugs or commit crimes go out of their way to advertise their membership in those groups? A new paper, by Andrew Mell, an economist at Nuffield College, Oxford, attacks that conceptual problem.

He does so by drawing on evolutionary theory and the related issue of coordination between agents. If you’re a criminal, one of your principal challenges involves knowing whom it’s safe to do business with. You don’t want to sell to an undercover cop, obviously, but you also don’t want to sell to an eager-but-clueless criminal who may well get caught and drag you down with him.

Like certain ostentatious displays by males in the animal kingdom, gang colors serve as a handicap, Mell argues: Yes, they make it more likely that the person wearing them will be caught. Yet they semaphore the following message: If I’m still willing to commit crimes when I have this handicap, I must be pretty good at evading the police. Incompetent criminals couldn’t get away with wearing gang colors.

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Seeking Arrangement: College Students Using 'Sugar Daddies' To Pay Off Loan Debt

by Amanda M. Fairbanks

Huffington Post
July 31, 2011

"I was thinking about going on Match but I needed help financially," says a 25-year-old student at a trade school in New York. When meeting men online, she sometimes goes by the name of Suzanne. "I guess what finally pushed me over the edge was that I needed help to pay off my loans from school."

Earlier this spring, after Suzanne got fired from her job as a waitress at a diner on the Upper East Side, a girlfriend suggested she create a profile on Seeking Arrangement. Suzanne had grown desperate after falling behind on rent. She also needed to come up with $3,000 for a trimester's worth of paralegal classes.

Suzanne already has an associate's degree in elementary education from a community college in New Jersey. Unable to find a job as a teacher's aide, she decided to enroll in paralegal classes at night. But after losing her job, the extra debt proved more than she could afford. She took out $10,000 in loans to pay for a year of school and promptly went on the hunt for a sugar daddy.

Over the past few months, Suzanne says she's gone on more than 40 dates with men from the site. She's not interested in getting wined and dined every single time. At a minimum, she hopes for at least a modicum of attraction. She's already turned down a man who weighed 400 pounds, as well as the advances of countless married men. Though desperate, Suzanne says a homewrecker she is not.

Following numerous emails and chats on the phone, Suzanne generally schedules a first meeting with a man in a public place -- a crowded restaurant, cafe or bar.

After nearly giving up on finding an arrangement, Suzanne recently met a 39-year-old college professor from Dover, N.J. So far, the two have gone on three dates. They typically meet at his house, where he usually cooks her dinner. Afterwards, they have sex.

"After all the assholes I've met, this guy's a real gentleman," says Suzanne, during a break before class. "At the end of the night, he usually gives me $400 or $500 bucks. It's not bad money for a night." While the men typically pay per meeting, Suzanne is hoping to set up an ongoing hookup. Mostly, she doesn't want the men thinking she's only seeing dollar signs, pegged to when her rent or tuition money is due.

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Π. Καρκατσούλης, "Ρύθμιση, Απορρύθμιση, Μεταρρύθμιση: Μεταλλαγές του Κανόνα Δικαίου στην Εποχή της Παγκοσμιοποίησης"

Το παρόν έργο αποτελεί μια πραγματεία για τη σχέση κράτους και δικαίου μέσα από τη μελέτη δύο διαχρονικών παθολογιών τους: της πολυνομίας και της εκνομίκευσης.

Οι ρυθμιστικές αυτές ανακολουθίες μελετώνται μέσα από την εμπειρική διερεύνησή τους στην Ελλάδα για διάστημα μιας τριακονταετίας και τα συμπεράσματα συγκρίνονται με εκείνα αντίστοιχων ερευνών σε δύο κεντρο-ευρωπαϊκές χώρες: τη Γερμανία και την Αυστρία. Η πολυνομία και η εκνομίκευση ερμηνεύονται μέσα από τη νομική και διοικητική επιστήμη, την κοινωνιολογία του δικαίου, τη νομική πολιτειολογία, την κοινωνική ψυχολογία και την πληροφορική. Επιχειρείται μια συγκριτική αξιολόγηση των απαντήσεών τους και διακρίνονται εκείνες που προσφέρουν το καταλληλότερο, υπό την έποψη της απαιτούμενης περιπλοκότητας, ερμηνευτικό πλαίσιο.

Η κεντρική ιδέα του βιβλίου είναι ότι οι διαφοροποιήσεις των κοινωνικών υποσυστημάτων επιφυλάσσουν μία διαφορετική θέση στον κανόνα δικαίου, ο οποίος αποβάλλει τον παρεμβατικό του χαρακτήρα και μετατρέπεται σε ιδιο-σύστημα, επιτρέποντας την έμμεση ρύθμιση των συστημάτων με τα οποία αλληλεπιδρά.

Thinking Like an Economist—About Superman

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Hat tip: WSJ

Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith on Experimental Economics, Adam Smith, the housing bubble, and his journey towards libertarianism

Interview by Nick Gillespie

Reason.tv
July 20, 2011

Vernon Smith is a pioneer, discovering a whole new way to study economics and winning a Nobel Prize for doing so.

Smith sat down with Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie to discuss a variety of topics, including growing up in Kansas during the Great Depression, his ideological journey from socialist to libertarian, how and why some of Adam Smith's most important intellectual contributions are overlooked, and what experimental economics has to say about the collapse of the housing market.

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Toying With Deregulation

Wall Street Journal
Editorial
July 20, 2011

Here's a question for White House regulatory czar Cass Sunstein: Do Presidential executive orders mean anything? Only last week President Obama asked independent agencies to examine existing rules and get rid of the duds, but nobody is listening.

Within days of the executive order, the Consumer Product Safety Commission voted 3-2 that it is "technologically feasible" to impose a lower limit on lead content in children's products, reducing the level to 100 parts per million from 300 parts per million. The new limit, which will go into effect August 14, will mean one more round of hair-pulling for small business owners who will have to change their manufacturing processes and junk existing products that don't meet the new standard. The three votes in favor came from Mr. Obama's chairwoman Inez Tenenbaum and two other Democratic commissioners.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act passed in 2008 in a frenzy of concern over lead content in toys from China, and it has since tormented anyone who makes or sells bicycles, books, children's jewelry and so much more. Its strictures have imposed costs for testing, recalls and other inconveniences without any reasonable correlation to the risks to children. "No sweetheart, don't eat that bicycle!"

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Μείωση αστυνόμευσης οδηγεί σε περισσότερα τροχαία

Το Βήμα
15 Ιουλίου 2011

Δεκαέξι νομοί της χώρας χαρακτηρίζονται, σύμφωνα με έρευνα του Πολυτεχνείου Κρήτης, ως οι περιοχές που έχουν πρόβλημα ατυχημάτων και η απόδοση της τροχαίας δεν είναι ικανοποιητική βάση των σχετικών στατιστικών στοιχείων της Τροχαίας για το 2010.

Η έρευνα, που παρουσιάζει σήμερα Το Βήμα, με τίτλο «Τροχαία αστυνόμευση και οδική ασφάλεια» πραγματοποιήθηκε από τους Κωνσταντίνο Ζοπουνίδη, καθηγητή του Εργαστηρίου Συστημάτων Χρηματοοικονομικής Διοίκησης, Μιχαήλ Νικολαράκη, Διδάκτορα και Μιχάλη Δούμπο, Επίκουρο Καθηγητή.

Κατά την έρευνα από την μελέτη των στοιχείων προκύπτει πως όπου βεβαιώνονται ελάχιστες παραβάσεις του Κώδικα Οδικής Κυκλοφορίας σημειώνονται και πολλά τροχαία ατυχήματα ενώ όπου ο αριθμός των παραβάσεων είναι υψηλός μειώνονται τα ατυχήματα.

Οι νομοί αυτοί, κατά την έρευνα, όπου κατεγράφησαν πολλά τροχαία ατυχήματα και λίγες παραβάσεις είναι οι: Θεσσαλονίκης, Δωδεκανήσου, Έβρου, Εύβοιας, Ζακύνθου, Ημαθίας, Θεσπρωτίας, Καβάλας, Καρδίτσας, Κυκλάδων, Λακωνίας, Μεσσηνίας, Πρέβεζας, Φθιώτιδας, Φωκίδας και Χανίων.

Οι ερευνητές σημειώνουν πως στις περιοχές αυτές η αυξημένη αστυνόμευση δεν έχει φέρει αποτελέσματα και έτσι απαιτούνται άλλες λύσεις όπως βελτίωση του οδικού δικτύου, της κυκλοφοριακής αγωγής κλπ ενώ παράλληλα χρειάζονται ειδική μελέτη από συγκοινωνιολόγους.

Αντίθετα οι νομοί με τα λιγότερα ατυχήματα και τις πολλές βεβαιώσεις παραβάσεων είναι: Κιλκίς, Λασιθίου, Πέλλας, Πιερίας, Ρεθύμνης, Σερρών, Φλώρινας και Χίου. Αυτές είναι οι περιοχές, όπως σημειώνεται στις οποίες η αυξημένη αστυνόμευση φαίνεται πως είχε αποτελέσματα.

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Barry Eichengreen - Why Economics Needs History

interview by Perry G. Mehrling

Institute for New Economic Thinking
July 11, 2011

What challenges will China have to surmount in order to make its currency a true international currency? To answer this question and others, Barry Eichengreen studies history. In the old days, he says, historians and theorists worked smoothly together and saw one another as serious scholars. But those days are gone, and nowadays the profession largely neglects historical and institutional research. That's why Barry Eichengreen is running the Berkeley Economic History Lab to educate a future generation of scholars -- a generation that is historically literate and does policy-relevant research. These are the seeds of new economic thinking.

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987.

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Income = Happiness? A Strangely Tough Sell in Aspen

by Justin Wolfers

New York Times
July 8, 2011

I spent last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, talking about Betsey’s and my research on the Economics of Happiness. You might think that my message - that income and happiness are tightly linked - would be an easy sell in Aspen, which is the most beautiful and most expensive city I’ve ever visited. But in fact, it’s the millionaires, billionaires and public intellectuals who are often most resistant to data upsetting their beliefs. You see, the (false) belief that economic development won’t increase happiness is comfortingly counter-intuitive to the intelligentsia. And it’s oddly reassuring to the rich, who can fly their private jets into a ski resort feeling (falsely) relieved of any concern that the dollars involved could be better spent elsewhere.

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Do Britain’s Strict Press Laws Actually Encourage Bad Behavior?

by Bradford Plumer
July 8, 2011

And just like that, the News of the World is gone. Never mind that Rupert Murdoch’s racy tabloid was the best-selling and most profitable weekly in Britain, with a circulation of some 2.6 million. After the paper was caught hacking—repeatedly, and flagrantly—into the phones of everyone from the royals to a child murder victim, and once advertisers started fleeing en masse, a death sentence was the only option left.

The NOTW meltdown has led to lots of focus on the bizarre, hyper-aggressive world of Britain’s red-top tabloids—and, for that matter, Britain’s broadsheets, which often aren’t all that better behaved. While NOTW may have been particularly egregious, odds are decent other papers could have scandals lurking. (As Nick Davies, who broke open the phone-hacking story, noted in his 2009 book Flat-Earth News, more than a dozen British papers have hired private investigators to suss out confidential personal info, often through legally dubious means.) But even setting aside potential lawbreaking, many of Britain’s papers were famous for their reckless pursuit of stories at any cost, their thin regard for accuracy, their adventures in outright libel. No wonder American journalists have been feeling awfully smug this week.

So how did the British press get so irresponsible—especially compared to its (relatively) staid and sober cousins across the Atlantic? It’s especially curious when you consider that U.S. newspapers enjoy sweeping First Amendment freedoms, while the British press has to operate under some of the strictest defamation and libel laws on the planet. Is it possible that Britain’s stricter press laws actually encourage bad behavior?

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Το Θεσμικό Έλλειμμα

του Αριστείδη Χατζή

Φύλλα Ελευθερίας
Forum για την Ελλάδα
Ιούνιος 2011

Η Ελλάδα βρίσκεται στο μέσο της χειρότερης πολιτικής, οικονομικής και θεσμικής κρίσης μετά την μεταπολίτευση. Η κρίση είναι κυρίως οικονομική αλλά είναι και πολιτική, καθώς προφανώς θα οδηγήσει μεσοπρόθεσμα στο ριζικό μετασχηματισμό του κομματικού συστήματος που διαχειρίστηκε την Ελληνική δημοκρατία τα τελευταία 35 χρόνια. Η οικονομική και η πολιτική κρίση όμως αποτελούν τα συμπτώματα της πολύ σοβαρότερης θεσμικής κρίσης.

Μια επιδερμική προσέγγιση της θεσμικής κρίσης θα την απέδιδε στην απίσχναση της πολιτικής νομιμοποίησης, στην απαξίωση θεσμών όπως το κοινοβούλιο, η κυβέρνηση, η παιδεία, ακόμα και η δικαιοσύνη. Πρόκειται όμως και πάλι για τα εμφανή συμπτώματα μιας βαθύτερης θεσμικής κρίσης που συνοδεύει την ελληνική πολιτεία από την ίδρυσή της. Η κρίση αυτή οφείλεται στην θεσμική ανωριμότητα της ελληνικής κοινωνίας. Η θεσμική ανωριμότητα, για τους σκοπούς αυτού του σύντομου κειμένου, ορίζεται απλά ως υπανάπτυξη των θεσμών.

Θα βρείτε εδώ την συνέχεια του κειμένου

Pursuit of Happiness Gets More Difficult

Wall Street Journal
July 2, 2011

29%: Share of Americans who say they’re “very happy”.

The Declaration of Independence enshrined the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. Lately, that pursuit appears to have gotten more difficult.

The General Social Survey, out of the University of Chicago, polls U.S. residents on everything from how often they attend church to how much they trust one another. In the latest poll, the number of people who said they were “very happy” fell to 29% last year. That is down from 32% in 2006, the year before the recession started, and the lowest level the survey has registered in its 39-year history.

Before the recession, the survey’s measure of happiness saw little reaction to the ups and downs of the U.S. economy. The record low speaks to the downturn’s severity. But that it took such a deep recession to move the happiness needle also points to the difficulty of measuring well-being with surveys.

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The Measure of Human Happiness

by Clive Crook

The Atlantic
July 1, 2011

A theme at many sessions at this year's AIF has been happiness--what it is, how you advance it, how you measure it. Fascinating. Justin Wolfers and Robert Frank had an interesting exchange on this earlier in the week, and I'm continuing to turn their arguments over in my mind.

Wolfers tore into the "Easterlin Paradox", which is the claim that happiness does not rise with income beyond a certain point. That finding (see Richard Easterlin: Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?) gave rise to the popular view that, for rich countries at least, economic growth is a treadmill. People are struggling to improve their status, and feel happier if they succeed, but the race for status goods is zero-sum. Growth in absolute income cannot raise everybody's relative position. It allows higher consumption but expands desires at about the same rate. The gain in happiness, if any, is small. For a rich country, the obsession with growth in GDP is an error.

Wolfers walked through his impressive array of data--derived from a remarkable project of international comparisons undertaken by Gallup--and argued that the Easterlin claim is simply and unambiguously false. Higher incomes make people happier. It takes ever larger increases in absolute income to yield a given improvement in happiness (happiness rises with the log of income), but there is no point of saturation. Within countries, richer people are happier than poor people. Globally, rich countries are happier than poor countries. He examined some of the statistical evidence which is said to point the other way, and showed it was wrong. Economic growth does what it is supposed to.

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Bruce Caldwell - Why Economics Needs the History of Thought

interview by Perry G. Mehrling

Institute for New Economic Thinking
June 30, 2011

Who is going to teach fields like economic methodology and the history of economic thought if these fields aren't taught to current graduate students? Bruce Caldwell is filling this hole in the graduate curriculum. The Hayek scholar is ramping-up the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University to educate a generation of future professors – a generation that is well-versed in the history of economic thought, and that communicates with other social sciences and the humanities. These are the seeds of new economic thinking.

Bruce Caldwell is a Research Professor of Economics and the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the author of Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the 20th Century. For the past two decades his research has focused on the multi-faceted writings of the Nobel prize-winning economist and social theorist Friedrich A. Hayek. Since 2002 he has been the General Editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, a collection of Hayek's writings.

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The Fear of Reason: In defense of rational argument

by Leon Wieseltier

New Republic
June 23, 2011

“I just want to point out,” declared the student at the far end of the seminar table, “that when Maimonides offers a proof of God’s existence, he is not saying that he has really proved it. What he’s saying is: This works for me, and if it works for you, great.” I was teaching a graduate seminar on The Guide of the Perplexed at a fine American university, and I was pleased to see my students warming to my insistence that the old masterpiece is still alive, and one of the most formidable obstacles ever erected against a thoughtless existence. We returned repeatedly to the question of what medievals can teach moderns about the indispensability of a worldview, and about the proper methods for justifying one. But the young man’s comment about the subjectivism of Maimonides’s proof—anyway the least interesting part of the book--startled me. It was so American and so wrong. After explaining why it was not just historically correct, but also philosophically respectable, to conclude from the text that its author really could have believed that a proof was possible, I proposed that we quit the twelfth century and put a little pressure on the talismanic words “and if it works for you, great.” I began a discussion of the shortcomings of pragmatism, which allowed me to launch into a withering—and of course intellectually devastating—analysis of the ideas of Richard Rorty and their poisonous impact upon thinking in America. My students offered surprisingly little resistance; but then they had signed up for a winter of rationalism and religion--this countercultural band was not ashamed of its interest in the idea of truth. Yet the Rortyan shrug was still there in the young man’s comment, and so I asked him for his opinion about reason. He said that it frightened him and discouraged him. The problem with reason, he explained, was that it claimed to settle matters once and for all, and that this was arrogant, and that it left him with nothing more to say. Rationalism made him feel excluded and late. I replied that he had it backward. It is not reason, but unreason, that shuts things down. You cannot argue against an emotion, but you can argue against an argument. That is why we were still contending with Maimonides, and why he was still contending with Aristotle. A reasoned discussion is always open and a reasoned intervention is always timely. Unreason is more arrogant, more impatient, more cruel, than reason. Since reason is general, it is inclusive. Reason, I said, is strict but fragile, forever hounded, forever distracted, the minority cause, provisional, fair, curious, fallible, public—not tyrannical but heroic, in its lonely insurrection against the happy and popular hegemony of passions and interests. I told my students about Maimonides’s life, the persecution, the tragedy, the depression, the paranoia, so that they would see the creatureliness of the rationalist, and honor his confidence in the mind as a human triumph. Reason is even poignant.

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Why Free Trade Matters

by Jagdish Bhagwati

Project Syndicate
June 23, 2011

Contrary to what skeptics often assert, the case for free trade is robust. It extends not just to overall prosperity (or “aggregate GNP”), but also to distributional outcomes, which makes the free-trade argument morally compelling as well.

The link between trade openness and economic prosperity is strong and suggestive. For example, Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University divided developing countries into two groups: “miracle” countries that had annual per capita GDP growth rates of 3% or higher, and “debacle” countries that had negative or zero growth rates. Panagariya found commensurate corresponding growth rates of trade for both groups in the period 1961-1999.

Of course, it could be argued that GDP growth causes trade growth, rather than vice versa – that is, until one examines the countries in depth. Nor can one argue that trade growth has little to do with trade policy: while lower transport costs have increased trade volumes, so has steady reduction of trade barriers.

More compelling is the dramatic upturn in GDP growth rates in India and China after they turned strongly towards dismantling trade barriers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In both countries, the decision to reverse protectionist policies was not the only reform undertaken, but it was an important component.

In the developed countries, too, trade liberalization, which started earlier in the postwar period, was accompanied by other forms of economic opening (for example, a return to currency convertibility), resulting in rapid GDP growth. Economic expansion was interrupted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the cause was the macroeconomic crises triggered by the success of the OPEC cartel and the ensuing deflationary policies pursued by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

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The Link Between House Prices and Divorce

Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2011

Declining house prices make it less likely that a homeowner will get divorced but more likely that a renter’s marriage will end, a new study finds—probably because a drop in equity traps unhappy couples in their house, while renters can find two affordable apartments.

There’s been anecdotal discussion of the effect of the housing bust on divorces—the authors of the new study cite this post, from WSJ.com’s The Juggle—but the article represents a first cut at studying the issue empirically.

Lacking long-term data including both demographics and housing prices, the researchers combined two data sets: the Bureau of Census’s Current Population Survey, from 1991 to 2010, and Federal Housing Finance Agency figures for house prices in more than 150 metropolitan areas.

The researchers used educational status as a proxy for renters and homeowners (since many more college grads than high-school dropouts are homeowners: 80% versus 58%). The focus was on people ages 25 to 79 who had ever been married. Looking at high-school dropouts, over the full period, the proportion who were divorced was 14.6%. That figure would rise to 17.58% if housing prices dropped 10%, the researchers calculated, after looking at historical patterns.

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Yuan a Kidney?

by Sally Satel

Slate
June 13, 2011

China's record on organ trafficking is by now a well-known international horror story. The vast majority of organs transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals are taken from executed criminals—and allegedly from political detainees, such as members of the the Falun Gong; charges that are currently under investigation by the U.N. Human Rights Council and Amnesty International. Now, paradoxically, China is proposing forward-thinking transplant policies; commendable laws that, if properly carried out, challenge the status quo and major international health organizations.

China's black market is why paying patients—citizens as well as foreigners—can get a new kidney or liver in a matter of days or weeks. Such lightning speed is unheard of in countries without black markets in organs; in countries that rely solely on altruistic giving, the wait for a deceased-donor organ is years long. In major cities in the United States, for example, it is not unusual for patients on dialysis to wait eight or 10 years before a kidney becomes available—a wait that only about half can survive.

Last winter, a 26-year-old migrant worker from Hunan made headlines in the Chinese press because he wanted to sell a kidney to pay off gambling debts. A black-market broker promised him 40,000 yuan (about $6,000), but at the last minute the migrant worker got cold feet. According to the man's story, the broker then took him to a small hospital and bound him to an operating table, where a nurse sedated him and surgeons removed his left kidney. Authorities are now investigating, but China's thriving kidney trade makes accounts like these sound quite plausible.

In 2007, China began licensing transplant centers in an effort to raise standards of practice and regulate performance. Only 163 of the more than 600 centers qualified and are now authorized to perform transplants, the vice minister of health Huang Jiefu, told the Lancet in an article published earlier this month. Huang, who is regarded as uncommonly open about his aversion to using prisoners as the major source of transplantable organs, still acknowledges that the market is far from moribund. Indeed, the same Lancet article notes that transplant specialists in the United States and Europe say they still occasionally see patients who report having purchased their transplants in China.

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