The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate

  Felix Salmon talked to me about Moral Economics:

Money Talks: The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate.

"Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions." 

Transcript here 

Here's one snippet: 

"Speaker A: You have a pretty long chapter on same sex marriage in the book where you go through the sort of legislative history both in various states and the country. And after, like reading so much of the history of this, I would say, like, this is so Slate, I’m going to just come out and say that 95% plus of our listeners are perfectly fine with same sex marriage. It seems perfectly normal to us. It’s kind of hard for us to imagine why it was that we ever had a problem with it in the first place. But you went back, you Were looking at a bunch of contemporaneous literature. Do you have a sympathy for the anti side of the debate? Do you see where they were coming from?

Speaker B: Well, I think I see where they were coming from. I can do that without having necessarily a lot of sympathy for them. But they were tooled up quite early on. So for a long time in the United States, there were laws against sex that sometimes had the names unnatural acts in them. And in California, and I’m going to fudge the dates now, but sometime in the 1970s, long before there was any same sex marriage, they decided that laws against same sex sex violated the equal rights provisions of the California constitution. And so they changed them. They made those laws unconstitutional. And almost immediately after, like two years after, in the 1970s, the California legislature passed a law against same sex marriage. That is, the people who were looking into the far future and thinking that they really hated same sex marriage had felt protected by the laws against consensual sex between adults of, you know, say, sodomy. And all of a sudden they felt unprotected. So long before any same sex marriage became legal in the United States, there started to be laws against it.

Speaker A: That’s kind of wild. You’re just, you’re sort of like cutting it off at the past. It’s not legal anywhere. No one’s even trying to make it legal. We’re going to make it illegal just in case. And we saw that at the federal level as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. When the state of Massachusetts finally, when its courts finally legalized same sex marriage in Massachusetts, the federal government passed a law called the defense of marriage act, which was intended to defend marriage against same sex marriage. So that’s a really unusual state of affairs. And again, when I say that’s a repugnant transaction, One of the things I emphasize in the book is I don’t mean that I disapprove of it or that you should, but that some people do. And the long political fight makes it clear that the people who objected to it objected very strongly. 

Speaker A: I mean, I was around for a lot of these court cases and legislative moves, but even at the time, I didn’t entirely understand where the opponents were coming from. So is it mostly like a biblical thing?

Speaker B: So I think it’s partly a religious thing and some of that is biblical. There were some passages in Hebrew Bible even that could be interpreted as disapproving of same sex relations. And when you look back at the long history of humanity, there were lots of taboos about sex. And I think one way to think of them is, for most of human history, sex between a man and a woman often resulted in pregnancy, and pregnancy often resulted in a live birth in a baby. And society has and had some interest in making sure that babies were taken care of. And one way to do that is to say babies should be born into families, and therefore before people have sex, they should be married to each other. And so there are a whole set of taboos that might be thought of as society’s way of trying to take care of babies. But of course, technology changes. And contraception, reliable contraception, means that it’s possible to have sex without too much risk of a baby. In vitro fertilization, IVF means that it’s possible to have babies without sex. So all of a sudden, some of those barriers that may have seem essential to the orderly running of society didn’t seem so essential. And I think that opened up room for us to think more about who could have sex with whom and who could form a family with whom.