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* 00:28:12 California’s ban on horse meat, and the loophole New York doesn’t have* 00:35:59 How a PhD in operations research became a career in game theory* 00:37:02 The 3 a.m. phone call that announced his Nobel Prize* 00:40:40 The kidney transplant shortage and what it will take to fix it* 00:41:51 OutroGet tickets to see Paul in Sarasota, Florida here.Follow Paul on Instagram here and on X (i.e. Twitter) here. Rate and Review Reasonably Happy here. Get full access to Reasonably Happy at words.paulollinger.com/subscribe