Kim Krawiec

I have questions about this survey methodology . . .

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/8/2025) Illegal ex ante but generous ex post, Repugnant Transactions comes to a close, and markets for free food

Donor compensation, charitable allocation markets, and the final Repugnant Transactions class form a triptych on how we negotiate the limits of markets.
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Eggonomics with Diane Tober - Taboo Trades My guest today is Diane Tober, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus…

Mixed-race donors often confront identity curation, phenotype sorting, and agency-edited profiles. Spain hides donors; the U.S. markets them. Diane Tober’s comparative ethnography illuminates both approaches.
Episode:

“organ donations are not routinely tested for rabies “because of its rarity in humans in the United States and the complexity of diagnostic testing.”

Kidney Recipient Dies After Transplant From Organ Donor Who Had Rabies

“A man died of rabies after getting a kidney transplant from another man who died of the virus, only the fourth instance in nearly 50 years in which an organ donor passed the virus to a recipient, federal officials said.”

At the time, 23 children with the genetic mutation had been discovered, out of 67 children linked to the donor. Ten of those children with the mutation had already been diagnosed with cancer. … It appears that some national laws were breached.”

“The affected donor sperm was discovered when doctors seeing children with cancers linked to sperm donation raised concerns at this year's European Society of Human Genetics.

Sperm donor with cancer-causing gene fathered nearly 200 children across Europe, investigation finds A genetic mutation that carries a 90% cancer risk has been passed on by an unwitting sperm donor to dozens of children, a Europe-wide investigation has revealed.

“Some children conceived using the sperm have already died from cancer, and the vast majority of those who inherited the gene will develop cancer in their lifetimes, geneticists said.”

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/8/2025) Illegal ex ante but generous ex post, Repugnant Transactions comes to a close, and markets for free food

A generosity paradox in organ transplantation, a market innovation for distributing donated food, and a course on repugnant exchanges together show how structure shapes outcomes.
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Eggonomics with Diane Tober - Taboo Trades My guest today is Diane Tober, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus…

New Taboo Trades episode: Diane Tober joins us to discuss global egg markets, racialized demand, donor profiles, and the U.S.–Spain regulatory divide. Essential listening for scholars of reproduction, markets, and ethics.
Link:

Eggonomics with Diane Tober - Taboo Trades My guest today is Diane Tober, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus on...

New Taboo Trades episode: Diane Tober joins us to discuss global egg markets, racialized demand, donor profiles, and the U.S.–Spain regulatory divide. Essential listening for scholars of reproduction, markets, and ethics. @uvalaw.bsky.social 2Ls Rachel Duffy & Rachel Greenbaum are co-hosts

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/8/2025) Illegal ex ante but generous ex post, Repugnant Transactions comes to a close, and markets for free food

This week connects ex-post donor gifts, Chicago economists’ food-bank bidding system, and reflections on teaching repugnant markets—three cases of design confronting taboo.
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Walter and Elizabeth Scott are the first names mentioned in this list because Walter Scott was in some ways the key figure in Ellmann's circle of faculty friends. Ellmann was taken with him from the start, describing him to Mary in a letter of May 1951 as "very sharp and pleasant," the most "re-markable" person at a dinner given for him by Lyn and Barbara Shanley.S Scott stood out in several ways. He was older than others in the circle, born in 1906, and was a member of the School of Speech rather than the English Department (his title in 1951 was associate professor of dramatic literature). He also stood out because he published almost nothing in his thirty-seven years at the university, from 1939 to 1968. Instead he busied himself with what Gerald Graff, a colleague and close friend, described as a one-man "office industry" of mimeographed satire: "an unendingly delightful, not infrequently outrageous, stream of letters, parodies, travesties, faked official notices, faked photographs, and other items falling under no known classification. Many of these creations were wildly (at times obscenely) illustrated with cut-outs from newspapers or magazines or drawings from Walter's own hand.... The products of the Scott workshop went out almost daily to Northwestern colleagues, administrators, and students lucky enough to be on Walter's mailing list."

Here’s a random bit about an incidental character who, on the one hand, is very much of their time and impossible to imagine in academia today, but also on the other hand clearly born hopelessly too early, before the meme- and shitpost-industrial complex could have made full use of his huge talents.

Effective altruism
#econsky
marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/12/why-...

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Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/8/2025) Illegal ex ante but generous ex post, Repugnant Transactions comes to a close, and markets for free food

Organ-donation rules, auctions inside Feeding America, and a seminar devoted to taboo trades reveal a shared theme: institutions mediate our moral discomfort with certain exchanges.
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Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/8/2025) Illegal ex ante but generous ex post, Repugnant Transactions comes to a close, and markets for free food

This week: the paradox of ex-post gifts to donor families, Feeding America’s shift to a market-based allocation system, and closing the Repugnant Transactions seminar. Three cases of how design and norms shape repugnant exchanges.
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I could go on but will not 🤣

a man in a tuxedo is sitting in front of a window . ALT: a man in a tuxedo is sitting in front of a window .

So many! I’m like a child who will watch the same thing over and over

The air is terrible—I wore my Covid mask outdoors almost the whole time and still couldn’t breathe. Enjoy the fabulous food!

Where are you? Hanoi?

Swiss founder of medical aid in dying organization uses the exit he prepared
marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/12/ludw...

“"The American Economic Association (AEA) has accepted Lawrence H. Summers' voluntary resignation from membership and, pursuant to the AEA's Policies, Procedures, and Code of Professional Conduct, has imposed a lifetime ban on his membership.”

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/1/25) Designer babies, reproductive labor in India, surrogacy money, Trump and Penn

This week's substack: rising elective IVF, India’s shift to altruism-only surrogacy, a multimillion-dollar escrow failure, and Penn’s pushback against a sweeping EEOC demand targeting Jewish students/faculty.
open.substack.com/pub/kimberly...

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/1/25) Designer babies, reproductive labor in India, surrogacy money, Trump and Penn

IVF trends, India’s contested ART/SRA reforms, surrogacy-escrow misconduct, and Penn’s refusal to share Jewish student/faculty names—all in one concise roundup.

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/1/25) Designer babies, reproductive labor in India, surrogacy money, Trump and Penn

From embryo screening to reproductive-labor law in India, surrogacy-escrow fraud, and federal pressure on universities, this week’s roundup tracks four big stories across tech, law, and governance.

Taboo and Repugnant Roundup (Week of 12/1/25) Designer babies, reproductive labor in India, surrogacy money, Trump and Penn

This week's substack: rising elective IVF, India’s shift to altruism-only surrogacy, a multimillion-dollar escrow failure, and Penn’s pushback against a sweeping EEOC demand targeting Jewish students/faculty.
open.substack.com/pub/kimberly...