Moral Economics: Al Roth and Ray Fisman at Cambridge Public Library, Monday May 11

 Here's the invitation to a discussion I'll have in May with Ray Fisman, about Moral Economics.

Some of my Boston/Cambridge friends asked how to get tickets now because they're afraid it will sell out (the price is right), and others because they're afraid that if they don't come Ray and I will be speaking to an empty hall...

Alvin E. Roth at the Cambridge Public Library   Monday, May 11 at 6 pm

You can get tickets at this link. 

 

"Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Alvin E. Roth—Nobel Prize–⁠winning economist, the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University—for a discussion of his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. He will be joined in conversation by Ray Fisman—who holds the Slater Family Chair in Behavioral Economics at Boston University.
Ticketing

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Moral Economics and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing." 

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever (New Republic)

 As an author with a forthcoming non-fiction book, it's both depressing to read that non-fiction book sales are down, but inspiring to read of the importance of books.

The New Republic considers the (diminishing) prospects and (continuing) importance of non-fiction books.

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever
Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around us.  by Paul Elie

 “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”

... 

"Fretful narratives about the demise of books and the rise of devices have been in play for half a century or longer. “Our world of books, like most other worlds now, is the arena of an increasingly bitter struggle for space, and for the limited reading time that a busy citizen in this electronic age can afford,” John Updike lamented when accepting the American Book Award in 1982. Narrative nonfiction in particular has faced headwinds in mass culture before. And in many respects, the challenges it faces are built in. Long fact is hard to publish and always has been. Reportage and research take time, resources, attention, and fortitude. A book can require several years to write and another year and a half to be edited, checked, printed, and publicized—only to wind up coming out during a news cycle dominated by a sex scandal, school shooting, pandemic, or war. It was as true half a century ago as it is today that readers expect to pay for fiction but are used to getting nonfiction passively through the media. 

...

"In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative—in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore—with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current—is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated." 

The innovative supply chain of illegal drugs--even in prisons

 Strategy sets are big, so we’re not going to be able to end illegal drug use by spraying defoliants on fields of poppies, or arresting dealers, or attacking speedboats. If we can’t stop the spread of drugs even in prisons, the chance of purely police/military solutions for stopping drugs on the streets isn’t looking good.

The NYT has the story:

No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing
Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators. By Azam Ahmed and Matt Richtel 

" Today, fringe chemists are ushering in a total transformation of the illicit drug market. Operating from clandestine labs, they are churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl, but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids. Sometimes, several unknown drugs appear on the streets in a single month. Many are so new they are not even illegal yet.

"Nearly all of them are harder to trace than conventional drugs, less expensive to produce, much more potent and far deadlier, according to scientists and law enforcement officials across the globe.

...

"After that first death in the Cook County jail in January 2023, it took months for Mr. Wilks’s team to realize that these mysterious new drugs were being sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs.

"The sheets of drugs, worth thousands of dollars a page, were being torn into strips and smoked by inmates 

...

"But the traffickers were cunning. When regular mail got checked more closely, smugglers began lacing legal correspondence. Soon, officers discovered sealed packages that looked as if they had been shipped directly from Amazon, with drug-soaked books inside. "

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It’s hard to shut down markets that people want to participate in.
Someone should write a book about this. 

Paid plasma donations are becoming more middle-class

 The NYT has the story:

The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By.  Across the United States, plasma centers are opening in wealthier areas as more people struggle with the high cost of housing, groceries and health care.   By Kurtis Lee and Robert Gebeloff   March 20, 2026

"Every day, an estimated 215,000 people donate plasma, the yellowish liquid component of blood. Mr. Briseño is among them. He is not jobless or facing eviction, but, like many in the American middle class, he is caught in the vise of rising expenses and wages that aren’t growing fast enough to cover them. So he is turning to a method more commonly associated with the lowest-income Americans. For people like him, an extra $600 or so a month can mean making a mortgage payment or covering increased health-insurance costs.

"A recent study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, observed that while older plasma centers are clustered in low-income areas, newer centers were increasingly likely to open in middle-class neighborhoods. A New York Times analysis shows the trend has continued: Centers have sprung up in more than 100 such neighborhoods, in suburbs and wealthier sections of cities, since researchers finished collecting their data in 2021."

 

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Here's an earlier post on the study that sparked the NYT report:

Wednesday, November 16, 2022  Blood Money, by John Dooley and Emily Gallagher

 

Pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly

Another small adventure in publishing:) 

Here's the pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly. "

TL;DR "Bringing balanced, evidence-based analyses to emotionally fraught debates, Roth reveals the power of markets to inspire solutions. This is trailblazing"

 

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work

Alvin E. Roth. Basic Venture, $35 (368p) ISBN 978-1-5417-0201-1

"Nobel Prize–winning economist Roth (Who Gets What—and Why) delivers a stimulating study of morally contested products and services, such as abortion, assisted suicide, and marijuana. He refers to these as “repugnant transactions,” as they spark objections primarily on religious or moral grounds but don’t cause easily measurable harms to those seeking to ban them. Viewing these transactions as markets, or systems that can be designed to “allocate scarce resources efficiently and equitably,” can help people make progress on challenging topics, he argues. For example, analyses of legal prostiution show it can increase the market for paid sex but can also reduce rape and the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Another topic discussed is kidney donation. There is a nearly universal ban on compensating donors based on the concern that payments might lead to poor or vulnerable people being coerced into selling their organs. Meanwhile, there is an extreme shortage of donors, and loved ones are often incompatible with those they want to help (kidney disease runs in families). Roth and his colleagues designed a kidney exchange, in which incompatible patient-donor pairs exchange kidneys with other such pairs. Because no money changes hands, the problem of paying donors can be avoided. Bringing balanced, evidence-based analyses to emotionally fraught debates, Roth reveals the power of markets to inspire solutions. This is trailblazing. (May) 

 

 

Moral Economics: Book cover and jackets

 Getting a book out involves some tedium (e.g. trying to proofread the index) as well as many small excitements: here's the full book cover and jackets for Moral Economics:) 

 

 

 

Moral Economics: back-cover blurbs

 I now know what blurbs will likely be on the back cover of Moral Economics when it comes out in May. They are by Peter Singer, Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo, Claudia Goldin, and Paul Milgrom & Bob Wilson, all people whose work I admire more than I can say.

    “Alvin Roth received the Nobel Prize for work in economics that has saved thousands of lives. In Moral Economics, Roth applies his open-minded, evidence-based thinking to controversial issues at the intersection of markets and morals, where his way of thinking could save even more lives.”
    Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World

    “A surprising large part of economics is about things money can't buy, for many good and bad and complicated reasons. This wonderful book by the leading scholar in that area of economics is something else that just money could never buy. It's a labor of love, a testament from a lifetime of thought and research.”
    Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel laureates and authors of Poor Economics

    “With clarity and compassion, Al Roth explores the transactions society cannot escape—surrogacy, the purchase of body parts, the sale of sex, and a host of ‘repugnant’ relationships. What should be regulated? What should be banned? What are the limits of using price in the marketplace? Be prepared to think in new ways and gain from the insights of a great market designer.”
    Claudia Goldin, Nobel laureate and author of Career and Family

    “From the right to sell a kidney to the cost of a surrogate birth, our sense of ‘right and wrong’ shapes the economy more than we realize. Nobel laureate Alvin Roth—the world's leading ‘philosopher-economist’—unpacks the hidden moral codes that govern our most intimate transactions. This is a clear-eyed guide to understanding where the market ends, where morality begins, and how we can design a world that honors both.”
    Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, Nobel laureates, Stanford University
 

Spam invitation to be featured in a book club

 As the author of a forthcoming book (Moral Economics) I now get book-related emails from publicists, podcasters and others.  But I suspect I was the first human to see the email below, inviting me to be featured in a book club, which began with this sentence:

"I’m writing because "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining" has stayed with me, thoughtful, layered, and resonant in a way that invites real conversation. It felt like the kind of book our readers would want to spend time with."

 It purported to come from the organizer of an apparently real book club (Bellatrist), but alas the return email didn't pass the smell test (despite coming from such a perceptive reader of the paper below...)

 Roth, Alvin E. "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining." Econometrica (1978)

 Abstract: "It has recently been shown that the utility of playing a game with side payments depends on a parameter called strategic risk posture. The Shapley value is the risk neutral utility function for games with side payments. In this paper, utility functions are derived for bargaining games without side payments, and it is shown that these functions are also determined by the strategic risk posture. The Nash solution is the risk neutral utility function for bargaining games without side payments."

 

Thoughtful, layered and resonant.   

Yuck! and the long journey to a book title

 

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm working on the galleys of my forthcoming book, Moral Economics. This has reminded me of the long journey to a book title.

 

For one thing, the British title isn't exactly  the same as the American title--they have different subtitles. British readers will have to open the book to discover that prostitution and organ sales are among the topics covered, while American readers can see this on the cover.

 

  

My original, working title was "Controversial Markets and Repugnant  Transactions," based in part on my 2007 article  "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets".  But I soon realized that when non-economists heard me mention that a transaction was repugnant, they thought I meant that I didn't like it and that they shouldn't either, when what I did mean was merely that some people object to it, often on moral grounds.

So for a while my working title became "Controversial Markets and Morally Contested Transactions." 

That's descriptive, but clunky.  So I didn't resist too much when my publisher suggested "Moral Economics," although I worried that was too cryptic, so a sub-title would be needed.

And all of this is stored in a folder with the title "Yuck" that I opened on my hard drive when I first started to think about writing a book on repugnant transactions. 

New book! Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work--forthcoming!

 

 I have a forthcoming book, (at long last) and it now even has a cover. (Note the halo:)  I'm reading the galleys right now...

 

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work    forthcoming – May 12, 2026

also available to preorder at other fine bookstores. (I'll be happy to autograph pre-orders that are mailed to me, btw...)

 

"A Nobel Prize–⁠winning economist shows us why we have to deal in trade-offs when we can’t agree on what’s right and what’s wrong

"Some of the most intractable controversies in our divided society are, at bottom, about what actions and transactions should be banned. Should women and couples be able to purchase contraception, access in vitro fertilization, and end pregnancy by obtaining an abortion? Should people be able to buy marijuana? What about fentanyl? Can someone be paid to donate blood plasma, or a kidney?

"Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize–winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets—tools to help decide who gets what—and understand how those markets can be fine-tuned to be more functional. Markets don’t have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people’s rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harm.

"Combining Roth’s unparalleled expertise as market design pioneer with his incisive, witty accounts of complicated issues, Moral Economics offers a powerful and innovative new framework for resolving today’s hardest controversies. "