Three takeaways on Moral Economics, with Lynn Thoman

 Lynn Thoman and I discuss three takeaways from Moral Economics (and hers are different than mine):

 You can listen here:

Why Doing the “Right Thing” Can Make Everything Worse 

 and you can watch as well as listen here:

"What can we do when doing the morally “right” thing produces worse outcomes?

And what if some of society’s strongest moral instincts are preventing us from solving problems we all agree are terrible?

Alvin Roth is a Stanford professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has helped redesign real-world systems, including kidney exchanges and the way doctors are matched with hospitals. His new book, Moral Economics, tackles a harder category of problems: markets and behaviors we find morally objectionable, even when banning them may create consequences we don’t want.

He discusses:

    Why nearly 100,000 Americans can be waiting for a kidney 

    What prohibitions of alcohol and heroin can teach us 

    What happened when Rhode Island accidentally legalized indoor prostitution

    Whether paying kidney donors could save lives without creating an ethically unacceptable market

    Why evidence becomes especially important when reasonable people disagree about morality

    Whether performance-enhancing drugs could eventually become as ordinary as coffee

Some policies sound obviously right when judged by their intentions. But what happens when you judge them by their actual consequences?

Roth pushes into the uncomfortable territory between those two questions: when banning something creates a black market, when changing a rule may save more lives than inventing a new technology, and what we should do when the outcome we believe is morally necessary turns out to be something we cannot actually achieve."