It's that time of year again, when we learn which lucky scientists are among the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes. This year, the prizes honor research on designing the perfect splash-free urinal; using mosquito proboscises to "necroprint" tiny nozzles; studying composition rates of buried cotton underwear; and the aerodynamics of a healthy nose-blow, among other highlights.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and "24/7 lectures," whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words.

Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

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I buy a new car a lot sooner than I expect to because — well, why not?

For a single person living alone with no kids, I have a lot of cars. I occasionally refer to them as my fleet.

• I have my 1999 Jeep Wrangler, which I bought brand new, beat the crap out of, and use as my local around-town vehicle. It’s in decent shape but wouldn’t win any awards at a car show, despite it’s age. A trailer hitch on the front makes it the perfect vehicle for shuffling around trailers in the garage or driveway.


My Jeep in its younger days, crawling over rocks in Sedona AZ. It’s on its third soft top now.

• I have my 2003 Honda S2000, which I bought brand new and took good care of. It’s my Joy Machine and makes me happy every time I drive it. It’s fast with tight steering and good brakes. The convertible top makes it almost as good as a motorcycle for feeling the air around me — but no helmet required! It’s impractical as a vehicle, but has decent fuel efficiency and is oh so fun. I use if on road trips when I don’t need to carry a lot of luggage, as well as on day trips up into the mountains.


I can’t imagine any car being more fun to drive than my Honda S2000.

• I have my 2012 Ford F35 SuperDuty Diesel Crew Cab with an 8-foot bed, which I bought in 2015. It’s my workhorse and I use it to haul just about anything that needs hauling: building or garden supplies, my slide-in truck camper, and my (oversize load) boat. I also used it on my trips to and from the marina in Bellingham where my boat lives, mostly because it can haul all the stuff I need to drag along with me when I go out on my boat.


My boat weighs 13,000 pounds on its trailer. Good thing my truck can tow 16,000 pounds.

Each vehicle is different. Each has its pros and cons. If I had to get rid of one of them, I’d have a hard time choosing because they each do different things for me.

They’re also each paid for in full and have their own space in my larger-than-average — okay, humungous — garage. Cheap to keep, easy to take care of. Always ready when I need them.

I Want a New Car

But I’ve been wanting a new car for a while. Remember, the last new-to-me vehicle I bought was my truck, 11 years ago. Before that, it was my Honda, 22 years ago. Sheesh.

It would be nice to buy something more fuel efficient, possibly to take advantage of the cheap power where I live. Electric would be nice, but not on a road trip. Hybrid would be nice for a road trip, but it wouldn’t really take advantage of the cheap power at home. The answer was, of course, a plug-in hybrid. Something I can keep plugged in when not in use and then use for virtually free local driving and more fuel efficient road trips.

And wouldn’t it be nice to have a vehicle with all the new bells and whistles I’d experienced in new rentals cars over the years? All those cameras and Apple Car Play?

I certainly did not need a fourth car. And I couldn’t get rid of any of the ones I have because they each do their own special things for me. So I figured I’d wait until I started downsizing. The truck wouldn’t be needed when I sold the boat; I’d sell the slide-in truck camper with it. The Jeep wouldn’t be needed when I got rid of my utility trailer and the boat trailer. When I sold those, I’d buy a nice plug-in hybrid SUV or “crossover” vehicle to replace them. Then I’d be down to just two cars, like a more normal person.

That was the plan, anyway.

In early June, as I steered my truck through the mountains on the long drive back from Bellingham, I started questioning this plan. I wasn’t getting any younger. Why should I wait? It’s not as if I’d get a big windfall from the sale of a 27+ year old Jeep and a truck with nearly 200,000 miles on it. I was turning 65 at the end of the month. Didn’t I deserve a big birthday present for such a big birthday? And why shouldn’t I have a new car while I was young enough to enjoy it?

And wasn’t my boat named Do It Now for a reason?

So just like that, I decided to buy myself a new car for my birthday.

Choosing the Car

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t do much research. Most of the folks I spoke to raved about the Toyota RAV4, which was now available as a plugin hybrid. Toyota is the maker of one of the first hybrid cars out there: the Prius, which they first sold in December 1997. They still made and sold that car and I suspected that they’d learned a lot in the nearly 20 years since its first release. Everything I read and saw online in car guy videos confirmed this.

So I went to look at one, all ready to buy. The local Toyota dealer only had one on the lot and it was sold. But I got to see it and sit inside. It met my needs as an eventual replacement for the truck and Jeep as far as practicality was concerned. It even had limited towing capabilities. I could keep the Honda for fun and use this as my every day car.

The local dealer didn’t seem to understand that I was ready to buy the car. He kept saying I should think it over and get back to him. Instead, I asked when more were coming in. I told him I was ready to buy. It’s a shame (for him) that he didn’t have one to sell me. This was early on in my limited research and I didn’t know much about the various “trims” they sold. I probably would have bought the first one he offered me. But there was a list and he put me on it. The car was in high demand. It might be a few weeks.

In the meantime, I did a bit more homework and decided that I wanted the Woodland trim. This was a middle-range trim with some good rough road features. There was even a video on YouTube of a guy taking one “off road.” I told him I’d take any color except white, black, or green. (That left a shade of blue and a shade of dark gray.)

Waiting for the Car

And then I waited. For more than a week, nothing. I called to see if anything was coming in and he said there was but they were already spoken for. I reminded him I was ready to buy.

I sold 100 shares of Apple stock for a generous downpayment and put the money in my savings account.

After that, every once in a while he’d text me about cars coming in that did not match my criteria. The first was a low-end SE model. Another was a white Woodland. And then there was the XSE model that he said was very rare and he’d have to charge a $5k premium for it. I didn’t want it and now he was pissing me off.

So I started working the phones. I talked to Toyota dealers in Washington, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon. A few said they only sold locally, which honestly made no sense to me. Wouldn’t they rather sell the car to someone out of the area so they wouldn’t have to deal with warranty service and repairs? Some made promises and started sending me info about what was coming in. One guy even called on his private cell phone because he claimed they were required to sell locally but he was willing to make an exception for me.

WTF?

Eventually, I struck a deal with Troy in Boise. He managed to find the car in inventory being prepped for shipping to the US. Did I want it? Blue Toyota RAV4 Plugin Hybrid with moon roof. Yes. Sign this contract and send a $2K deposit. I did.

That was in late June. The car would be ready sometime between July 5 and August 11.

Life went on. My friend Janet came to stay with me for about two weeks at the end of June and into July. We camped with the truck and camper in the North Cascades and then took the boat out around the San Juan Islands and into Canada for 10 days. The local Toyota dealer kept texting me about cars that didn’t match my criteria.

Then I got a date from Troy. The car would be ready on July 13.

The timing couldn’t be better. I would be back from my boat trip and had a full two weeks before my next boat trip. (Long story there.) Plenty of time to get out to Boise and have a nice, leisurely road trip back. We set the pickup date for July 14, exactly two weeks after my 65th birthday.

Picking Up the Car

One of the things few people know about me is that I am a logistics whiz. I quickly determined that the quickest and easiest way for me to get from the Wenatchee area to Boise ID was to rent a car. I got a one-way car rental out of Wenatchee with Enterprise, left my pups with a neighbor, and headed out early in the morning of July 12. By 5 PM local time, I was checking into a nice hotel about a mile from the car dealer.

The next morning, I dropped off my luggage at the dealer, returned the rental car, and made the short walk back to the dealer. By then, my car was out in front of the building.

Troy took this photo of me with my new car before I’d even sat inside it. The funny thing is that I wore that shirt to match the car, thinking the color was the light blue in the shirt. It turned out to match the dark blue in the shirt. The other color was weird, but I was mentally prepped for it. This color is a lot more normal and although I like it, I’m not sure if normal is a good thing for me.

Then there was the paperwork. There was a lot of it. Payment was made more complicated because Toyota Financing’s systems were down and, for some reason, my transfer of $30K from my savings to checking account was delayed. Finally, things were settled. I did buy the 10 year extended warranty — remember, this is probably the last car I’ll ever buy. They got me a good loan rate because my credit score is “exceptional.” By 1 PM, I had all my stuff loaded into the car, shook hands with Troy, and drove out of the lot.

Since Then

That was just over a month ago. I did a 3-day road trip through central Idaho and into the Hells Canyon area before coming home. The car drove great. It was comfortable and had a lot of features. In many ways, it’s a computer with a car attached. I learned a lot about it on that long drive and have learned a lot since.

I stopped at a riverside parking area to eat the lunch I bought at a supermarket after leaving the dealer. From here, I drove up to McCall ID, a place I last visited in 2005 in my Honda.

But this blog post is already long enough. I’ll have to write another one with my observations.

I’ll just say one thing for now: I’m glad I didn’t wait.

A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it's only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.

As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company's Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.

New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle's high cadence have upended the global launch market.

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It is now clear that the war against Iran is going badly for Donald Trump. Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) may be determined to carry on, but Trump is the war leader in deep trouble.

So radical is this unexpected outcome that the United States may even be facing its Suez moment, like the one that saw France and the UK lose status in 1956, hastening decolonisation in the 1960s. If so, the effects of the Iran conflict could last for decades, well beyond the immediate conflict, and have impacts that change the current world order – with unpredictable consequences.

Consider the past month and a half. Iran’s theocratic leadership had been crippled by assassinations within days of the start of the assault, but leaders were quickly replaced, and the much-anticipated popular uprising simply did not happen.

I recently asked why people seem to hate dating apps so much. In response, 80% of you emailed me some version of the following theory:

The thing about dating apps is that if they do a good job and match people up, then the matched people will quit the app and stop paying. So they have an incentive to string people along but not to actually help people find long-term relationships.

May I explain why I don’t find this type of theory very helpful?

I’m not saying that I think it’s wrong, mind you. Rather, my objection is that while the theory is phrased in terms of dating apps, the same basic pattern applies to basically anyone who is trying to make money by doing anything.

For example, consider a pizza restaurant. Try these theories on for size:

• Pizza: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they use expensive ingredients or labor-intensive pizza-making techniques, then it costs more to make pizza. So they have an incentive to use low-cost ingredients and labor-saving shortcuts.”

• Pizza II: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they have nice tables separated at a comfortable distance, then they can’t fit as many customers. So they have an incentive to use tiny tables and cram people in cheek by jowl.”

• Pizza III: “The thing about pizza restaurants is that if they sell big pizzas, then people will eat them and stop being hungry, meaning they don’t buy additional pizza. So they have an incentive to serve tiny low-calorie pizzas.”

See what I mean? You can construct similar theories for other domains, too:

• Cars: “The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars.”

• Videos: “The thing about video streaming is that high-resolution video uses more expensive bandwidth. So they have an incentive to use low-resolution.”

• Blogging: “The thing about bloggers is that research is time-consuming. So they have an incentive to be sloppy about the facts.”

• Durability: “The thing about {lightbulb, car, phone, refrigerator, cargo ship} manufacturing is that if you make a {lightbulb, car, phone, refrigerator, cargo ship} that lasts a long time, then people won’t buy new ones. So there’s an incentive to make {lightbulbs, cars, phones, refrigerators, cargo ships} that break quickly.”

All these theories can be thought of as instances of two general patterns:

• Make product worse, get money: “The thing about selling goods or services is that making goods or services better costs money. So people have an incentive to make goods and services worse.”

• Raise price, get money: “The thing about selling goods and services is that if you raise prices, then you get more money. So people have an incentive to raise prices.”

Are these theories wrong? Not exactly. But it sure seems like something is missing.

I’m sure most pizza restauranteurs would be thrilled to sell lukewarm 5 cm cardboard discs for $300 each. They do in fact have an incentive to do that, just as predicted by these theories! Yet, in reality, pizza restaurants usually sell pizzas that are made out of food. So clearly these theories aren’t telling the whole story.

Say you have a lucrative business selling 5 cm cardboard discs for $300. I am likely to think, “I like money. Why don’t I sell pizzas that are only mostly cardboard, but also partly made of flour? And why don’t I sell them for $200, so I can steal Valued Reader’s customers?” But if I did that, then someone else would probably set prices at only $100, or even introduce cardboard-free pizzas, and this would continue until hitting some kind of equilibrium.

Sure, producers want to charge infinity dollars for things that cost them zero dollars to make. But consumers want to pay zero dollars for stuff that’s infinitely valuable. It’s in the conflict between these desires that all interesting theories live.

This is why I don’t think it’s helpful to point out that people have an incentive to make their products worse. Of course they do. The interesting question is, why are they able to get away with it?

Reasons stuff is bad

First reason stuff is bad: People are cheap

Why are seats so cramped on planes? Is it because airlines are greedy? Sure. But while they might be greedy, I don’t think they’re dumb. If you do a little math, you can calculate that if airlines were to remove a single row of seats, they could add perhaps 2.5 cm (1 in) of extra legroom for everyone, while only decreasing the number of paying customers by around 3%. (This is based on a 737 with single-class, but you get the idea.)

So why don’t airlines rip out a row of seats, raise prices by 3% and enjoy the reduced costs for fuel and customer service? The only answer I can see is that people, on average, aren’t actually willing to pay 3% more for 2.5 cm more legroom. We want a worse but cheaper product, and so that’s what we get.

I think this is the most common reason stuff is “bad”. It’s why Subway sandwiches are so soggy, why video games are so buggy, and why IKEA furniture and Primark clothes fall apart so quickly.

It’s good when things are bad for this reason. Or at least, that’s the premise of capitalism: When companies cut costs, that’s the invisible hand redirecting resources to maximize social value, or whatever. Companies may be motivated by greed. And you may not like it, since you want to pay zero dollars for infinite value. But this is markets working as designed.

Second reason stuff is bad: Information asymmetries

Why is it that almost every book / blog / podcast about longevity is such garbage? Well, we don’t actually know many things that will reliably increase longevity. And those things are mostly all boring / hard / non-fun. And even if you do all of them, it probably only adds a couple of years in expectation. And telling people these facts is not a good way to find suckers who will pay you lots of money for your unproven supplements / seminars / etc.

True! But it doesn’t explain why all longevity stuff is so bad. Why don’t honest people tell the true story and drive all the hucksters out of business? I suspect the answer is that unless you have a lot of scientific training and do a lot of research, it’s basically impossible to figure out just how huckstery all the hucksters really are.

I think this same basic phenomenon explains why some supplements contain heavy metals, why some food contains microplastics, why restaurants use so much butter and salt, why rentals often have crappy insulation, and why most cars seem to only be safe along dimensions included in crash test scores. When consumers can’t tell good from evil, evil triumphs.

Third reason stuff is bad: People have bad taste

Sometimes stuff is bad because people just don’t appreciate the stuff you consider good. Examples are definitionally controversial, but I think this includes restaurants in cities where all restaurants are bad, North American tea, and travel pants. This reason has a blurry boundary with information asymmetries, as seen in ultrasonic humidifiers or products that use Sucralose instead of aspartame for “safety”.

Fourth reason stuff is bad: Pricing power

Finally, sometimes stuff is bad because markets aren’t working. Sometimes a company is selling a product but has some kind of “moat” that makes it hard for anyone else to compete with them, e.g. because of some technological or regulatory barrier, control of some key resource or location, intellectual property, a beloved brand, or network effects.

If that’s true, then those companies don’t have to worry as much about someone else stealing their business, and so (because everyone is axiomatically greedy) they will find ways to make their product cheaper and/or raise prices up until the price is equal to the full value it provides to the marginal consumer.

Conclusion

Why is food so expensive at sporting events? Yes, people have no alternatives. But people know food is expensive at sporting events. And they don’t like it. Instead of selling water for $17, why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people.

So of course dating apps would love to string people along for years instead of finding them long-term relationships, so they keep paying money each month. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people at those companies have literally thought, “Maybe we should string people along for years instead of finding them long-term relationships, so they keep paying money each month, I love money so much.”

But if they are actually doing that (which is unclear to me) or if they are bad in some other way, then how do they get away with it? Why doesn’t someone else create a competing app that’s better and thereby steal all their business? It seems like the answer has to be either “because that’s impossible” or “because people don’t really want that”. That’s where the mystery begins.

Here are a few things that seem to be true:

1. Dating apps are very popular.
2. Lots of people hate dating apps.
3. They hate them so much that there’s supposedly a resurgence in alternatives like speed dating.

None of those are too controversial, I think. (Let’s stress supposedly in #3.) But if you stare at them for a while, it’s hard to see how they can all be true at the same time.

Because, why do people hate dating apps? People complain that they’re bad in various ways, such as being ineffective, dehumanizing, or expensive. (And such small portions!) But if they’re bad, then why? Technologically speaking, a dating app is not difficult to make. If dating apps are so bad, why don’t new non-bad ones emerge and outcompete them?

The typical answer is network effects. A dating app’s value depends on how many other people are on it. So everyone gravitates to the popular ones and eventually most of the market is captured by a few winners. To displace them, you’d have to spend a huge amount of money on advertising. So—the theory goes—the winners are an oligopoly that gleefully focus on extracting money from their clients instead of making those clients happy.

That isn’t obviously wrong. Match Group (which owns Tinder, Match, Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid, Hinge, and many others) has recently had an operating margin of ~25%. That’s more like a crazy-profitable entrenched tech company (Apple manages ~30%) than a nervous business in a crowded market.

But wait a second. How many people go to a speed dating event? Maybe 30? I don’t know if the speed dating “resurgence” is real, but it doesn’t matter. Some people definitely do find love at real-life events with small numbers of people. If that’s possible, then shouldn’t it also be possible to create a dating app that’s useful even with only a small number of users? Meaning good apps should have emerged long ago and displaced the crappy incumbents? And so the surviving dating apps should be non-hated?

We’ve got ourselves a contradiction. So something is wrong with that argument. But what?

Theory 1: Selection

Perhaps speed dating attendees are more likely to be good matches than people on dating apps. This might be true because they tend to be similar in terms of income, education, etc., and people tend to mate assortatively. People who go to such events might also have some similarities in terms of personality or what they’re looking for in a relationship.

You could also theorize that people at speed dating events are higher “quality”. For example, maybe it’s easier to conceal negative traits on dating apps than it is in person. If so, this might lead to some kind of adverse selection where people without secret negative traits get frustrated and stop using the apps.

I’m not sure either of those are true. But even if they are, consider the magnitudes. While a speed dating event might have 30 people, a dating app in a large city could easily have 30,000 users. While the fraction of good matches might be lower on a dating app, the absolute number is still surely far higher.

Theory 2: Bandwidth

Perhaps even if you have fewer potential matches at a speed dating event, you have better odds of actually finding them, because in-person interactions reveals information that dating apps don’t.

People often complain that dating apps are superficial, that there’s too much focus on pictures. Personally, I don’t think pictures deserve so much criticism. Yes, they show how hot you are. But pictures also give lots of information about important non-superficial things, like your personality, values, social class, and lifestyle. I’m convinced people use pictures for all that stuff as much as hotness.

But you know what’s even better than pictures? Actually talking to someone!

Many people seem to think that a few minutes of small talk isn’t enough time to learn anything about someone. Personally, I think evolution spent millions of years training us to do exactly that. I’d even claim that this is why small talk exists.

(I have friends with varying levels of extroversion and agreeableness, but all of my friends seem to have high openness to experience. When I meet someone new, I’m convinced I can guess their openness to ±10% by the time they’ve completed five sentences.)

So maybe the information a dating app provides just isn’t all that useful compared to a few minutes of casual conversation. If so, then dating apps might be incredibly inefficient. You have to go through some silly texting courtship ritual, set up a time to meet, physically go there, and then pretend to smile for an hour even if you immediately hate them.

Under this theory, dating apps provide a tiny amount of information about a gigantic pool of people, while speed dating provides a ton of information about a small number of people. Maybe that’s a win, at least sometimes.

Theory 3: Behavior

Maybe the benefit of real-life events isn’t that they provide more information, but that they change how we behave.

For example, maybe people are nicer in person? Because only then can we sense that others are also sentient beings with internal lives and so on?

I’m pretty sure that’s true. But it’s not obvious it helps with our mystery, since people from dating apps eventually meet in person, too. If they’re still nice when they do, then this just resolves into “in-person interactions provide more information”, and is already covered by the previous theory. To help resolve our mystery, you’d need to claim that people at real-life events act differently than they do when meeting up as a result of a dating app.

That could happen as a result of a “behavioral equilibrium”. Some people take dating apps seriously and some take them casually. But it’s hard to tell what category someone else is in, so everyone proceeds with caution. But by showing up at an in-person event, everyone has demonstrated some level of seriousness. And maybe this makes everyone behave differently? Perhaps, but I don’t really see it.

Obscure theories

I can think of a few other possible explanations.

1. Maybe speed dating serves a niche. Just like Fitafy / Bristlr / High There! serve people who love fitness / beards / marijuana, maybe speed dating just serves some small-ish fraction of the population but not others.

2. Maybe the people who succeed at speed dating would also have succeeded no matter what. So they don’t offer any general lessons.

3. Maybe creating a dating app is in fact very technologically difficult. So while the dating apps are profit-extracting oligopolies, that’s because of technological moat, not network effects.

I don’t really buy any of these.

Drumroll

So what’s really happening? I am not confident, but here’s my best guess:

1. Selection is not a major factor.

2. The high bandwidth of in-person interactions is a major factor.

3. The fact that people are nicer or more open-minded in person is not a major factor, other than through making in-person interactions higher bandwidth.

4. None of the obscure theories are major factors.

5. Dating apps are an oligopoly, driven by network effects.

Basically, a key “filter” in finding love is finding someone where you both feel optimistic after talking for five minutes. Speed dating is (somewhat / sometimes) effective because it efficiently crams a lot of people into the top of that filter.

Meanwhile, because dating apps are low-bandwidth, they need a large pool to be viable. Thus, they’re subject to network effects, and the winners can turn the screws to extract maximum profits from their users.

Partly I’m not confident in that story just because it has so many moving parts. But something else worries me too. If it’s true, then why aren’t dating apps trying harder to provide that same information that in-person interactions do?

If anything, I understand they’re moving in the opposite direction. Maybe Match Group would have no interest in that, since they’re busy enjoying their precious network effects. But why not startups? Hell, why not philanthropies? (Think of all the utility you could create!) For the above story to hold together, you have to believe that it’s a very difficult problem.

In a recent post about trading stuff for money, I mentioned:

Europe had a [blood plasma] shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% of all exports by value.

The internet’s reaction was: “TWO PERCENT?” “TWO PERCENT OF U.S. EXPORTS ARE BLOOD!?”

Well, I took that 2% number from a 2024 article in the Economist:

Last year American blood-product exports accounted for 1.8% of the country’s total goods exports, up from just 0.5% a decade ago—and were worth $37bn. That makes blood the country’s ninth-largest goods export, ahead of coal and gold. All told, America now supplies 70% or so of the plasma used to make medicine.

I figured the Economist was trustworthy on matters of economics. But note:

1. That 1.8% number is for blood products, not just blood.
2. It’s a percentage of goods exported, excluding services.
3. It’s wrong.

The article doesn’t explain how they arrived at 1.8%. And since the Economist speaks in the voice of God (without bylines), I can’t corner and harass the actual journalist. I’d have liked to reverse-engineer their calculations, but this was impossible since the world hasn’t yet caught on that they should always show lots of digits.

So what’s the right number? In 2023, total US goods exports were $2,045 billion, almost exactly ⅔ of all exports, including services.

How much of that involves blood? Well, the government keeps statistics on trade based on an insanely detailed classification scheme. All goods get some number. For example, dirigibles fall under HTS 8801.90.0000:

Leg warmers fall under HTS 6406.99.1530:

So what about blood? Well, HTS 3002 is the category for:

Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera and other blood fractions and modified immunological products, whether or not obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products:

The total exports in this category in 2023 were 41.977 billion, or 2.05% of all goods exports. But that category includes many products that don’t require human blood such as most vaccines.

To get the actual data, you need to go through a website maintained by the US Trade Commission. This website has good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it’s slow and clunky and confusing and often randomly fails to deliver any results. On the other hand, when you re-submit, it clears your query and then blocks you for submitting too many requests, which is nice.

But after a lot of tearing of hair, I got what seems to be the most detailed breakdown of that category available. There are some finer subcategories in the taxonomy, but they don’t seem to have any data.

So let’s go through those categories. To start, here are some that would seem to almost always contain human blood:

Next, there are several categories that would seem to essentially never contain human blood:

Finally, there are categories that include some products that might contain human blood:

The biggest contributor here is IMMUNOLOGICAL PRODUCTS (be they MIXED or UNMIXED, PUT UP or NOT PUT UP). The largest fraction of these is probably antibodies.

Antibodies are sometimes made from human blood. You may remember that in 2020, some organizations collected human blood from people who’d recovered from Covid to make antibodies. But it’s important to stress that this is quite rare. Human blood, after all, is expensive. So—because capitalism—whenever possible animals are used instead, often rabbits, goats, sheep, or humanized mice.

I can’t find any hard statistics on this. But I know several people who work in this industry. So I asked them to just guess what fraction might include human blood. Biologists don’t like numbers, so this took a lot of pleading, but my best estimate is 8%.

When looking at similar data a few years ago, Market Design suggested that immunoglobulin products might also fall under this category. But as far as I can tell this is not true. I looked up the tariff codes for a few immunoglobulin products, and they all seem to fall under 3002.90 (“HUMAN BLOOD; ANIMAL BLOOD PREPARED FOR THERAPEUTIC, PROPHYLATIC OR DIAGNOSTIC USES; ANTISERA AND OTHER BLOOD FRACTIONS, ETC. NESOI”).

What about vaccines or cell therapy products? These almost never contain human blood. But they are sometimes made by growing human cell lines, and sometimes those cell lines require human blood serum to grow. More pleading with the biologists produced a guess that this is true for 5% of vaccines and 80% of cell therapies.

Aside: Even if they do require blood serum, it’s somewhat debatable if they should count as “blood products”. How far down the supply chain does that classification apply? If I make cars, and one of my employees gets injured and needs a blood transfusion, are my cars now “blood products”?

Anyway, here’s my best guess for the percentage of products in this middle category that use human blood:

So 0.5298% of goods exports almost certainly use blood, and my best guess is that another 0.1569% of exports also include blood, for a total of 0.6867%.

Obviously, this is a rough cut. But I couldn’t find any other source that shows their work in any detail, so I hoped that by publishing this I could at least prod Cunningham’s law into action. Sorry for all the numbers.

Examples are good. Let’s start with some examples:

1. We all need kidneys, or at least one kidney. Donating a kidney sucks, but having zero working kidneys really sucks. Paying people for kidneys would increase the number available, but it seems gross to pay people for part of their body. Donating a kidney is low-risk, but not zero risk. If you pay for kidneys, the extra kidneys tend to come from poorer people. So we don’t pay, and every day people die for lack of a kidney.

2. Except for Iran. Yes, in Iran you can legally buy or sell a kidney for a few thousand dollars. There is no waiting list for transplants, but most sellers seem driven by desperation and overall it doesn’t sound super awesome.

3. We all need a heart. Paying someone for their heart would mean paying for suicide. If we were to auction off hearts from organ donors, they would tend to go to rich people. People die every day from lack of a heart, but you don’t hear much about trading hearts for money.

4. Many people need blood plasma. For some people (me) donating blood plasma is a psychological nightmare. For other people it’s fine. Not getting plasma when you need it is very bad. Paying people for plasma means more plasma, mostly from low-income people. Much of Europe has long prohibited paying for plasma. Denmark and Italy met their needs with altruistic donors (Edit: Incorrect, Thanks to The Plasma Professor), but overall Europe had a shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% 0.7% of all (goods) exports by value.

5. The EU recently legalized limited payments for blood donations. The French government opposed this change. The French government owns a company that runs paid plasma centers in the United States.

6. Some people want hair. Prohibiting people from selling their hair is stupid. You should be allowed to sell your hair.

7. We all need a liver. You can—amazingly—give away half your liver and re-grow the rest in a few months. This is pretty safe, but compared to donating a kidney is a more complex surgery with a longer recovery period and 3-10× the mortality risk.

8. Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer in 2003. This was a rare form that often responds to treatment, but Jobs initially refused surgery and spent almost a year doing “alternative” treatments. Finally in 2004 he had surgery. In 2009, he had a liver transplant. This may have been needed as a consequence of Jobs’ decision to delay treatment in 2003. Tim Cook offered half his liver, but Jobs angrily refused. Most people in this situation would not have been eligible for a liver from the public donor registry, but Jobs was able to leverage his wealth and connections to both get classified as eligible and jump the queue. Jobs died two years later.

9. We all need food. Food that is healthier or tastier is often more expensive. Rich people get to eat more of it. Our for-profit food production system is really efficient and in rich countries the main problem is eating too much food.

10. We all need somewhere to live. Housing that is closer to high-paying jobs or larger/nicer is more expensive. Richer people get to live in nicer homes. The cost of housing means many people need to accept long commutes or live with lots of roommates or cities with worse job opportunities.

11. Buildings needs roofs. In North America, roofs are most often made of asphalt shingles, which need to be replaced every 10-30 years. Roofing work is exhausting and miserable and dangerous. People would rather not do roofing. Roofing is well-paid given the qualifications. We have the technology to make roofs that last for 100 years, at a lower long-term cost. Nobody suggests making it illegal to pay people to do roofing.

12. Large pink diamonds are rare. Only rich people get to have large pink diamonds. This is fine.

13. If there’s a sudden shortage of fuel, then you can either ration or let prices go up. If you let prices go up, then rich people get to drive more, but if you need fuel to drive grandma to the hospital, you can buy some.

14. Cars need to park. If there’s a shortage of parking, you can either raise prices or let people fight for spots. If you raise prices, then rich people get to park more, but if you need to park next to the hospital to drop off grandma, you can do so. If you don’t raise prices, people drive around endlessly looking for spots, wasting energy, creating pollution, and slowing traffic.

15. We all want to buy goods and services. People sell these to us for money. They do that because they can use the money to buy other stuff they want. If money didn’t provide any advantage, they wouldn’t do that.

16. Many people want babies. The idea of auctioning off babies is gross. Nobody wants to auction off babies.

17. Many people want babies, but can’t biologically carry a baby to term. Carrying a baby to term is hard on your body and deeply personal. In much of the world, it’s illegal to have someone else to do this for you. In most of the rest, it’s illegal to pay someone to do it. In a few places it’s legal to pay. (Contemplate this list: Arkansas, Belarus, California, Florida, Illinois, Kazakhstan, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, Russia, Ukraine, Vermont, Washington.) The people who purchase this service are usually richer than the women they buy it from. If you’re willing to pay a woman to be a surrogate, some third party might coerce her and steal the money. People who live in places where commercial surrogacy is illegal often buy it from places where it’s legal.

18. Most adults want sex. Some have difficulty accessing it. Paying for sex increases the supply of sex. Some people believe paid sex is degrading or has harmful cultural effects. If you’re willing to pay someone for sex, some third party might coerce them and steal the money. Paying for sex is illegal in most of the world. In places where it’s legal, organized brothels are often illegal. In a few places (Canada, France, Ireland, Norway, Sweden) it’s legal to sell sex but not buy it.

19. Sometimes on planes I think about offering the person in front of me some money to not recline their seat. I don’t do this because I’m pretty sure it would end with them either (A) refusing and thinking I’m a huge jerk or (B) doing it for free and thinking I’m a huge jerk.

20. Lots of people want to move to rich countries. Some rich countries let people based on employment, some based on family, and some on “points”. If you auctioned off the right to move to a rich country, you’d get a mixture of people who (A) have lots of money, and (B) would economically benefit from moving. A few places—including arguably the United States—do this already.

21. Lots of people want their kids to get better grades. Lots of people pay for tutors or extra after-school education. You could directly pay your kids to get good grades. This seems strange and possibly bad, though I’m not sure why.

OK, but how do you feel?

After working through these kinds of cases, I feel: Squishy.

I’m attracted to simple rules that can rise to tame the complexity of the real world. But the more I think about these cases, the less optimistic I feel about such rules.

Like every rationalist-adjacent blogger, I lean vaguely libertarian and consequentialist. (I wish I was more unique and interesting.) So I sometimes find myself thinking in high-handed slogans. Things like, “The government should not intrude in arrangements between consenting adults”, or “The right policy is whatever makes the outcome as good as possible.” I like how those words sound. But are they actually useful?

For example: Paid sex is not my thing. But there are some scenarios (e.g. people with certain disabilities) where prohibiting it seems downright cruel and providing this service downright noble.

On the other hand, when you talk about “arrangements between consenting adults”, it seems to call to mind a sort of theoretical idealized society. Like most people, I like to blithely imagine the Netherlands are such a society. After formally legalizing sex work in 2000, they’ve been creative and tenacious in trying to address organized crime and coercion. It sounds like it’s going OK, but not exactly great? I guess almost every other country has lower state capacity and would do somewhat worse.

Or take kidneys again. Say we had a total free market libertarian utopia/dystopia: If a rich person wants a kidney, they can go find a drug addict, hustle them into a clinic, get them to sign some forms, hand them some cash, and then take their kidney. That sounds gross. I’m not 100% confident I could win a debate arguing from first-principles that it’s grosser than our current system in which thousands of people die every year for lack of a kidney. But I’m not too worried about that, because it has zero chance of happening.

The Coalition to modify the National Organ Transplant Act wants to pay people to donate kidneys. They suggest a months-long screening process that only the 10% of people at lowest risk would pass. Donors would get no money up front, but would get $10,000 per year when they file their taxes for the next five years. This seems less gross than the libertarian {u,dys}topia because people couldn’t donate if they were high risk, because there’s a long waiting period, and because the resulting kidneys would be given out according to the current (non-market) system based on need and potential benefit.

The Coalition points also out that lower-income people would benefit the most from extra kidneys, since rich people tend to have healthy friends and family who are willing and able to give a directed donation. They also point out that the lowest-income people are the least likely to qualify as low-risk donors. But common sense still says the extra donors you get by paying people will tend to be lower income.

I don’t love that. But I think it’s silly to look at the flaws of one system without comparing to the flaws of the alternatives. As far as I can tell, those are: (1) Do nothing and let thousands of people continue to die every year. (2) Pay rich people extra when they donate. (3) Force everyone to register for some kind of kidney donation “lottery”. (4) Reeducation campaigns. (5) Marxism. Maybe the Coalition’s proposal is the “worst system other than all the other systems”.

In both cases (paid sex and paid kidneys) rules and slogans are weak. The action is in details.

The grossness spectrum

What makes some things seem grosser than others? There seem to be many factors. Do some people need the stuff more than others? Will trading for money get the stuff to the people who need it more? Will money increase production? Do we want more production?

Here’s a case I find particularly confounding: Why does paying a surrogate mother seem not-that-bad (at worst), but auctioning off a baby seem horrific? Sure, surrogate mothers usually use genetic material from the clients, but even with an embryo from third parties, it still seems OK. Yet, if I buy an embryo and then pay a surrogate mother, haven’t I just bought a baby in advance? I can’t find any clear distinction, but I also can’t get myself to bite the bullet and say the two are equivalent.

But I do have one theory.

In terms of how gross it is to sell body parts like normal market products, I think everyone agrees the order is hair < blood ≪ kidney < liver ≪ heart.

I don’t think that order is controversial. The main way people differ is in terms of where they’d draw the line.

As you’ve surely surmised, I lean somewhere right of “kidney”. While this is a minority view in the world, I suspect it’s a majority view among people reading this. So I thought I should make the case for drawing the line near the left end of the spectrum.

Here goes: When I picture paying someone for a kidney, I picture someone who is healthy and hearty. They’re thriving in life and don’t need money, but they drive a Honda and they really want an Acura, so they sell a kidney and buy an Acura and live happily ever after. When I think of paid surrogates, I picture a woman who loves being pregnant so much she’d almost do it for fun.

Lovely. But in the existing organ industry in Iran sounds grim. Many sellers seem motivated by extreme poverty and financial desperation.

If someone does something out of desperation, you can argue that—almost by definition—this means it helps them, and removing the option would hurt them.

But suppose that if everyone had their basic needs met, then almost no one would donate their kidneys for money. Then you can argue that paying for kidneys is a step in the wrong direction. We should be moving towards a society where no one is desperate and people donate out of altruism. Paying for donations calcifies the current systems and papers over our problems instead of correcting them.

I don’t really agree, because I like incremental progress and I’m allergic to anything that verges on “the worse the better”. But I see where it’s coming from.

Please understand the differences in what you’re finding online.

It’s March 2025 and eggs — the kind that come out of chickens and are a staple in American breakfasts — are not only in short supply, but more expensive than ever. This is a fact that you can confirm for yourself by visiting any supermarket or grocery store that sells them.

Bird flu is spreading throughout the US. It has caused the death or destruction of millions of commercial egg farm hens. This is also a fact. Here are some recent trustworthy references to support this:

• “USDA rolls out 5-step plan to battle avian flu in poultry,” University of Minnesota
• “ICYMI: Bird Flu Is Roiling Egg Farms Across The Country,” NPR 1A (podcast)
• “Hickman’s Family Farms struggles to meet egg demand after losing a million birds,” Arizona Republic

Hens lay eggs. Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. This is a combination of fact and logic. As someone who has had a backyard flock of hens on and off for the past 30 years, I can assure you that the more hens I have in my flock, the more eggs I get.

The economic concept of supply and demand states that, well, you can read it for yourself in this quote from the Supply and Demand entry in Britannica Money:

supply and demand, in economics, [is the] relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. It is the main model of price determination used in economic theory. The price of a commodity is determined by the interaction of supply and demand in a market. The resulting price is referred to as the equilibrium price and represents an agreement between producers and consumers of the good. In equilibrium the quantity of a good supplied by producers equals the quantity demanded by consumers.

I was a business major in college so I took Economics 101 and 102. I know this stuff. It makes sense to me. And if you think about it, it should make sense to you. Prices on items that are scarce but in demand are generally higher than the same item if it’s available in higher quantities. This can be a natural result of marketplace economics, as the above paragraph suggests, or it can be manipulated by sellers to either increase profits on scarce commodities or control the sale of them.

An example of using price to control sales is what I recently saw in a local supermarket that had some eggs available for sale. If you bought one or two dozen, they were about $7/dozen. But if you bought more than two dozen, the price went up to about $10/dozen. Hoarding has become a problem with the egg shortage and this supermarket was trying to discourage that behavior by jacking up the prices for hoarders.

That’s not to say that some producers, wholesalers, or retailers aren’t trying to cash in on the shortages. There will always be people and organizations that take advantage of a situation.

In the case of producers, I don’t blame them one bit. If you had a flock of a 10,000 chickens and lost 7,500 of them to bird flu — science says it’s 75% to 100% deadly to birds — you’d not only have to spend a boatload of cash to make sure your facility was free of the pathogens, but you’d have to buy 7,500 replacement birds. Commercial hens might be different, but I know I had to wait four to five months for any of the chicks I obtained to start laying in my backyard. That’s a huge cash outlay and reduced productivity for months. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to cash in on the eggs being laid by the 2,500 birds I have left. Supply and demand supports this, especially since the loss of hens is so widespread.

But this is still an opinion. You might think it’s fine for farmers to take a hit that might actually drive them out of business. That’s your opinion.

The farther you go up the chain from the producer with suddenly less product to sell, the less acceptable it is to cash in on the scarcity. But that’s still a moral judgement or opinion. It is not a fact.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Big Henhouse is controlling the price of eggs and using bird flu as an excuse. There really isn’t a shortage at all. They’re just pretending it is to separate consumers from their money.

Is this a fact? No. Is it based on facts? Perhaps a few. Maybe egg prices are unreasonably high in an area that hasn’t been hit by bird flu. But maybe those producers are also sending their eggs out to areas that have been devastated by bird flu.

What is the truth? What are the facts? Are these Big Henhouse price gouging conspiracy theories what’s actually going on? Or are they just a tool to focus your hate and anger on big business?

If you’re actually trying to answer what I’ve posed as rhetorical questions, don’t just share the first Google hit that supports your view. Look at the source of the information. Far left? Far right? Anti-big business? Or a news outlet that tends to focus on fact-based reporting? Don’t respond to this post with something you read on the New Republic or in Mother Jones or in a blog post in a popular blog. That’s not news. It’s opinion and/or theory based on cherry-picked data.

I don’t know about you, but now that I’m not producing my own eggs and feeling forced to eat them every day just to keep up with production, a dozen lasts me more than a week. Yes, I’m one person and I understand that larger households probably eat more eggs. Although the prices will never get down to what they used to be — ever heard of inflation? — they should eventually come down as the bird flu problems are resolved and flocks are rebuilt. Until then, if you find them too expensive for your household, eat fewer eggs. You don’t need them for breakfast every morning. And you don’t need as many as you think you might.

Otherwise, just stop stressing over the price of eggs and worrying about who is profiting in the current situation. Despite what your super socialist friends might think, price fixing by the government is not a reasonable long term solution — especially with the current government. Buy only what you need to help prevent scarcity. If everyone did this — remember supply and demand? — the prices will likely come down sooner than later.