Kidney Update

The (second) kidney paper was written and presented, has been revised, and needs to be revised some more. My goal is to finish the revisions by the end of January and to post the resulting paper on SSRN. Then we will think about potential publishing outlets. Incidentally, the first kidney paper is now published. So, that is the kidney plan for the nonce: revised version, not too embarrassing, due on January 31.

I should report that I have yet to tackle the book I mentioned in the previous post, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm, by Rene Almeling. I don't think that I will be able to get to it in the next few months, alas.

Kidney Failure

Oh no, my deadlines have come and gone. Work on the kidney transplant paper has been minimal. I did make progress on my larger project, however, so I won't claim that all has been unproductive. It does mean that I am well behind on the kidney paper, though. I'd like to have a very rough draft in  a few days.

One goal I did reach was to finish reading The Kidney Sellers, by Sigrid Fry-Revere, on the Iranian system(s) of compensated donations. I learned a heap from this fine book. My next reading goal is to take on Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm, by Rene Almeling, but I will need a few weeks for this one, I think.

Draft Three(a)? Draft Four(a)?

The attentive Five Drafts reader will note that a couple of deadlines have passed without any reported progress. Do these developments (or absence of developments) suggest that the Five Drafts commitment device is not working? No, I maintain. It isn't perfect, but it is better than the alternatives. At any rate, I soon (promise?) will post what will hence be known as Draft 3.5(a).

A Fast Retreat

Well, Draft Two(a) was due a couple weeks ago, and Draft Three(a) was due today. But that was under the old, outmoded deadlines! The new, improved (ahem) deadlines call for Draft Two(a) to be posted today. Except for the last section and the References, I hope to indeed post a really raw Draft Two(a).

The current Table of Contents of the paper -- which itself has the working title "Regulating Vice," looks like this:

1. Vice
2. Why Regulate Vice?
3. Surveying the Range of Controls
     a. Prohibition

     b. Licensing and other Controls on Manufacturers and Sellers

     c. Taxation

     d. Prescription
     e. Time, Place, and Manner Controls
     f. Individual-level controls
4. One Potential Guiding Principle to Vice Regulation
5. Robustly Regulating Casino Gambling
6. Changing Times
7. Vice 3.0 [no draft available]
References [no draft available]

OK, time to post what exists, with the usual caveats that it is incomplete, missing references, and often wrong; therefore (?), comments are welcome.

OK, OK

OK, I know today is the deadline for Draft Four, but those deadlines are basically arbitrary, right? At least no need to fetishize them. Anyway, some progress is being made, really, but other demands are slowing forward movement. Nonetheless, within the next few days, Draft Four will be ready and posted. Promise.

Thank you for your consideration, and Happy Bloomsday.

A Shameful Start

The assiduous reader of Five Drafts will recall that the deadline for Draft One is January 31, 2011. I trust that such a reader also will recall my weaselwording, the qualifier "This might be a well-less-than-complete draft." Well, it certainly is -- well less than complete, that is. Not even hinting at completion, really.

But here is a capsule summary of what has taken place. I have followed to some extent the plan as laid out in the previous post. I have looked at what I think have been some milestones in terms of designing legal regimes for prohibited drugs. I have not written much about them (the entire "draft" is less than 1800 words), in part because I have not read them fully and carefully yet. At this point, I have only a short introduction and a few sentences on some of the previous contributions. But one of the nice surprises for me was how interesting I find the 1933 guide to alcohol re-legalization, Toward Liquor Control. My working title for my paper, therefore, is Toward Drug Control.

So my progress has been limited, and I expect that some of the writing that has taken place will not survive through to the final draft. (The eventual literature review should be more about creating a context for my paper than simply summarizing earlier contributions.) I have not started to write what I think will be the heart of the paper, the discussion of consumer licensing and self-exclusion. Nevertheless, this blog managed to help me make more progress than I would have made in its absence, so I am not entirely disheartened. I think that I will try to offer weekly progress reports up to the deadline for the second draft, which occurs on the Ides of March. In the meantime, I will post what little I have, in three posts. I imagine.