In the U.S., you are legally permitted to sell your blood plasma for money, but it's called "donation".
In recent years, the numbers of places set up for donations has skyrocketed, and the amount they're compensating donors has followed suit.
Let's dig in.
Most of the visitors to these donation centers are highly local (A)
People are also more likely to visit donation centers in census block groups (CBGs) that are marked by poverty (B)
Why?
In surveys, donating plasma is predicted by being poor, Black, male, married, having kids, being a student, etc.
In short, people who could really use an extra $150 twice a week for a minimal inconvenience are more likely to donate.
We know this is true because we also have survey data indicating people's stated reasons for donating. Few people are donating altruistically. The top categories by far are about money!
Take a look:
Now, before getting to the juicy result, I want to show one more thing: the impact of COVID stimulus checks on plasma donations.
When the checks went out, the number of visits to plasma donation centers cratered. Donations plummeted because people had the cash they needed.
Now here's the kicker: When plasma donation centers open up, local inquiries into predatory payday and installment loans falls off.
People are seeking credit and donating blood might be how they get it.
If we stratify these trends by age, we see that those with ages less than or equal to 35 - the less well-established - are the ones deciding to use blood plasma donations to offset the need for quick, dangerously high-interest cash, not those greater than 35 years old.
When you look at payday transactions rather than inquiries alone, you get the same picture, albeit with more noise.
Young people really do seem to be defraying the need for credit by selling (sorry, donating!) their blood plasma.
The reasons people sell their are also, evidently, not just to cover essentials.
One of the clearest-cut impacts is that entertainment establishments see an increase in visits after blood plasma donation centers open up.
That last part clarifies something: people would prefer not to get risky, high-interest loans, and they really want a little bit of extra cash. So while they will seek out those loans if push comes to shove, they're more likely to frivolously pursue blood donation.
And that's good! We need blood plasma donations, so if paying people a bit of money makes that possible, so be it.
If we take away that possibility, we can also see that it would make people's lives worse.
How far can we take this? Maybe we can learn from Iran.
In the U.S., about 0.5-1% of the federal budget goes to dialysis:
In Iran, there is a legal, regulated market in selling kidneys and it's such a good deal that the government even pays for the operations. It beats paying for dialysis!
People are more than willing to sell their bodies in different ways that help their fellow citizens, from selling their blood plasma to pawning off a kidney.
Given so many people want to do that, and so many people would benefit from it, the question is, why not?
Frankly, I think we should just do it. The blood plasma donation model has been such a success and it's more than evident that organ payments could be too.
"SAT scores just reflect zip codes" is probably dead.
A new study used a sample of 760,000 military children whose families were randomly assigned to different counties/zips and found living in a +1 SD county or zip code for twenty years upped scores by just 0.05 or 0.19 d:
That 1 SD gap between Blacks and Whites? It's not explained by Blacks living in about 0.6 SD worse neighborhoods. Maybe about 10% is.
That's probably to much though, because the instrumental variable analysis suggested the sign of the effect on SAT scores was negative!
The authors had this to say on the negative estimated effect on SAT totals:
Looking closely, all of the causal estimates of place effects on SAT scores were at best marginally significant, unlike the effects on attained income, college attendance, and earnings.
The College Board just released this year's SAT scores!
I thought I'd go ahead and put everything in familiar terms and make some plots.
This thread will have a lot of pictures. First up: How did everyone do?
All of the typical race differences are there. Blacks did roughly 15 IQ points worse, Hispanics did about 10 points worse, Asians did similarly better, etc.
If we scale all that by the sizes of the populations who took the tests, we get this:
Another way to look at this data is to stack everyone into a single population, like so:
Innovation is the backbone of modern economic growth, and without the Protestants, we probably wouldn't have it🧵
Consider the period of the Counter-Reformation. During this time, the Catholic Church set science back in the territories it governed:
Before the Counter-Reformation, Catholic and Protestant Europe were on similar scientific trajectories:
They produced comparable numbers of scientists, comparably important intellectuals, and comparable numbers of inventions.
But, seemingly overnight, Catholics started rampaging against intellectualism, and they had a focused impact on scientists, with no appreciable impacts on artists or other types of intellectuals.
Protestantism promoted the separation of Church and Science, so this makes sense.