If We Pay Football Players, Why Not Kidney Donors

Ethicists who oppose compensating kidney donors claim they do so because kidney donation is risky for the donor’s health, donors may not appreciate the risks and may be cognitively biased in other ways, and donors may come from disadvantaged groups and thus could be exploited. However, few ethical qualms are raised about professional football players, who face much greater health risks than kidney donors, have much less counseling and screening concerning that risk, and who often come from racial and economic groups deemed disadvantaged. It thus seems that either ethicists—and the law—should ban both professional football and compensated organ donation, allow both, or allow compensated organ donation but prohibit professional football. The fact that we choose none of those options raises questions about the wisdom of the compensation ba

If We Pay Football Players, Why Not Kidney Donors

Ethicists who oppose compensating kidney donors claim they do so because kidney donation is risky for the donor’s health, donors may not appreciate the risks and may be cognitively biased in other ways, and donors may come from disadvantaged groups and thus could be exploited. However, few ethical qualms are raised about professional football players, who face much greater health risks than kidney donors, have much less counseling and screening concerning that risk, and who often come from racial and economic groups deemed disadvantaged. It thus seems that either ethicists—and the law—should ban both professional football and compensated organ donation, allow both, or allow compensated organ donation but prohibit professional football. The fact that we choose none of those options raises questions about the wisdom of the compensation ba

“Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy”: An Economic Analysis of the Attack on Gun Control

A relatively new way for utilizing the thermal performance of heat pipes is to use nanofluids as working fluids in the heat pipes. Heat pipes are effective heat transfer devices in which the nanofluid operates in the two phases, evaporation and condensation. The heat pipe transfers the heat supplied in e.g. a laptop, from the evaporator to condenser part. Nanofluids are mixtures consisting of nanoparticles (e.g. nano-sized silver particles) and a base fluid (e.g. water). The aim of this bachelor’s thesis has been to examine the effect of nanofluids on heat pipes on the subject of temperature parameters and thermal resistance in the heat pies, through findings in literature and an applied model. The study, based on literature and an applied model, found that higher particle conductivity and higher concentration of nanoparticles consequently decrease the thermal resistance in the heat pipes, resulting in an enhanced thermal performance of the heat pipes with nanofluids as working fluids. It is however concluded that difficulties in finding the optimal synthesis of nanofluids, the concentration level of nanoparticles and the filling ratio of nanofluids in heat pipes, set bounds to the commercial use of nanofluids in heat pipes. It is suggested that, in order to enhance the heat transfer performance of nanofluids in heat pipes, to conduct further research concerning e.g. synthesis of nanofluids and concentration level of nanoparticles in nanofluids

A Primer on Kidney Transplantation: Anatomy of the Shortage

Kidneys are unique among the solid organs due to the combination of the low risk of living donation, the feasibility of sustaining life on dialysis for several years following kidney failure, and Medicare coverage of dialysis and transplantation for kidney patients. Despite these advantages, thousands of Americans die each year while waiting for a kidney transplant, and the waiting list grows each year. In this kidney transplantation primer, we provide a quantitative description of the kidney shortage and discuss future trends and possible solutions. We demonstrate that the current system provides only about half as many kidneys as are needed for transplantation and the gap cannot be eliminated through an increase in deceased donation alone, because most kidneys from suitable deceased donors are already procured. The prospects for increasing living donations under the current system are also dim. Donations from living kidney donors have declined from their 2003 peak and nearly all living kidney donations are directed by the donor, usually to family members, rendering the current account of living kidney donation as “altruistic” somewhat misleading. For all of these reasons, we believe the time is ripe to reconsider financial incentives for kidney donation. Needless to say, a system that provided financial rewards for living donors could produce unsavory consequences, and would have to be carefully designed and managed. But without such a system, the most likely version of the future is a continuation of unnecessarily high rates of death and disability from kidney failure

If We Allow Football Players and Boxers to be Paid for Entertaining the Public, Why Don’t We Allow Kidney Donors to be Paid for Saving Lives?

We contrast the compensation ban on organ donation with the legal treatment of football, boxing, and other violent sports where both acute and chronic injuries to participants are common. Our claim is that there is a stronger case for compensating kidney donors than for compensating participants in violent sports. If this proposition is accepted, one implication is that there are only three logically consistent positions: allow compensation for both kidney donation and for violent sports; allow compensation for kidney donation but not for violent sports; or allow compensation for neither. Our current law and practice is perverse in endorsing a fourth regime, allowing compensation for violent sports but not kidney donation. We base our argument chiefly on the medical risk to participants, the consent process, social justice concerns, and social welfare considerations. The medical risks to a professional career in football, boxing, and other violent sports are much greater both in the near and long term than the risks of donating a kidney. On the other hand, the consent and screening process in professional sports is not as developed as in kidney donation. The social justice concerns stem from the fact that most players are black and some come from impoverished backgrounds. Finally, the net social benefit from compensating kidney donors – namely, saving thousands of lives each year and reducing the suffering of 100,000 more receiving dialysis – far exceeds the net social benefit of entertaining the public through professional sports. In sum, the arguments against compensating kidney donors apply with equal or greater force to compensating athletes in these sport

Cigarette Taxes and Youth Smoking: New Evidence from National, State, & Local Youth Risk Behavior Surveys

Several studies have examined the effects of state cigarette tax increases on youth substance use over the 1990s, with most -- but not all -- finding that higher taxes reduce youth consumption of tobacco. We advance the literature by using data from the 1991-2005 waves of the national Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS), providing information on over 100,000 high school age youths. We also are the first to make use of hundreds of independently fielded state and local versions of the YRBS, reflecting data from over 750,000 youths. Importantly, these data are to our knowledge the only sources of relevant information on youth smoking that were explicitly designed to be representative of the sampled state or locality. We estimate two-way fixed effects models of the effect of state cigarette taxes on youth smoking, controlling for survey demographics and area and year fixed effects. Our most consistent finding is that -- contrary to some recent research -- the large state tobacco tax increases of the past 15 years were associated with significant reductions in smoking participation and frequent smoking by youths. Our price elasticity estimates for smoking participation by high school youths are generally smaller than previous cross-sectional approaches but are similar to recent quasi-experimental estimates.

The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement

The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates, but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence -- the proportion of suicides that involve firearms -- together with newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary patterns. The importance of such empirical work stems in part from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to burglars, but also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides more lucrative burglary opportunities than one where guns are more sparse. The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence.