Nobel Prize Winner on "Moral Economics"

This week, I sit down with Dr. Alvin Roth, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Stanford professor, and author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. Al lays out why so-called repugnant markets like kidney sales, prostitution, horse meat aren't moral failures so much as trade-offs we refuse to name, and argues we should judge controversial markets by their real-world consequences instead of instinct alone. We cover why it's easier to buy heroin than hire a hitman, Iran's legal kidney market versus America's black market, the actual winners and losers of rent control in New York, why I can't buy a horse meat hamburger in California, and what a real accounting of scarcity and trade-offs actually looks like.

Timestamps:

* 00:00:00 Trailer

* 00:01:07 Intro

* 00:03:48 What market design actually means

* 00:06:57 Markets are better at producing efficiency than equality

* 00:10:08 What makes a transaction “repugnant”

* 00:11:45 Same-sex marriage as the textbook repugnant transaction

* 00:15:45 Why it’s easy to buy drugs but nearly impossible to hire a hitman

* 00:17:32 Iran’s legal kidney market and America’s black-market problem

* 00:22:10 The case against price-gouging bans, from Sydney to snow shovels

* 00:27:07 The real winners and losers of rent control