The Economist reviews Moral Economics

 It appears that even a week after book-publication week, I'm not finished with book news.

This week The Economist reviewed Moral Economics.  

Here's the short version, from the issue's overview in World in Brief.

"Alvin Roth investigates repugnant markets

"Would you like to buy a kidney? How about heroin? Or sex? Don’t worry: you haven’t wandered down the wrong alley—these and other morally questionable transactions are the subject of a new book by Alvin Roth, a Nobel-prize winning economist. Published in Britain on Thursday, “Moral Economics” looks at the murky world of “repugnant transactions”: deals in which buyers and sellers happily transact, but which onlookers would rather ban on moral grounds.

"For Mr Roth, moral economics is about trade-offs. Are the harms of allowing an activity greater than those of disallowing it? Policy, he argues, should weigh both. Two principles emerge. First, bans never fully work: motivated buyers and sellers find workarounds. Second, prohibition generally reduces the size of the market; it would be cheaper and easier to buy heroin if it was legal. It might also be safer. That leaves Mr Roth asking whether the restrictions or the market cause more harm. Here, too, the answer is that it depends." 

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And here's a link to the longer review, from the Free Exchange column. That column is unsigned, but others on the web have attributed it to Gavin Jackson, who did interview me about the book.  Here is the resulting review:

How should economists treat morality? 

 My review of the review is that it missed some of the nuances in my book, but many aspects of the big picture came through clearly:

"The picture that emerges from the book is of a deeply moral person, who believes in bodily autonomy, in not subordinating individual lives to a collective and in not accepting unnecessary deaths to spare some people from feeling squeamish." 

Felix Salmon, at Bloomberg, reviews Moral Economics

  Felix Salmon, at Bloomberg, reviews Moral Economics, which starting today is now sold in stores (at least in the U.S.):

An Economist’s Case for Selling a Kidney.  In a new book, Nobel laureate Alvin Roth argues that decriminalizing taboo markets can save lives.  

He tells this story from the book:

"Roth gave a talk in 2017 at the Organ Donation Congress in Geneva about one such chain that started in 2015. A woman from the Philippines, known in the literature as FW, was willing to give up one of her kidneys to save the life of her husband, FM. The two flew to the US, where FM received a kidney from an altruistic donor in Georgia, and FW’s kidney was transplanted into a man in Minnesota. A friend of the Minnesota man, who had been willing to give up one of her kidneys to save his life, instead gave one to a man in Washington, whose father-in-law gave a kidney to a woman in Georgia, and so on. By the end of the year there had been 11 successful transplants, and the chain was still continuing.

" After his talk, Roth was confronted by a Spanish doctor who was deeply concerned about the potentially problematic implications of the economic inequality between the Philippines and the US. Roth pointed out that without the transplant, the patient would surely have died. Replied the Spanish nephrologist: “He should be dead!” Spain’s National Transplant Organization later denounced Roth as an organ trafficker.

"Roth tells this story in his most recent book, Moral Economics (Basic Venture, May 12), which, at least in part, is an attempt to apply the empiricism of economics to domains that are often resistant to such analysis. The opposition to the 2015 kidney chain, for instance, comes from nephrologists who have no problem with chains but who draw the line at international chains, or at least chains linking poor and rich countries."

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Much of the objection to cross-border kidney exchange appears to be fading, some of it was based on the idea that countries should be self-sufficient in transplants.

See earlier posts:

Friday, January 9, 2026  WHO Says Countries Should Be Self-Sufficient In (Unremunerated) Organs And Blood by Krawiec and Roth (now open source)

 

Friday, September 11, 2020  Global Kidney Exchange supported by the European Society of Transplantation's committee on Ethical, Legal, and Psychosocial Aspects of Transplantation .

Moral Economics: a brief review in the Sunday Times ("fascinating and very different":)

 A column (on unemployment) in the Sunday Times by it's economics editor  David Smith, ends with a brief review of Moral Economics, as a postscript:

 PS
"A lot of economics books cross my desk, but a new one, by the Nobel prize-winning economist Alvin Roth, grabbed my attention. Called Moral Economics: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work, to be published soon by Basic Books, it is not a title designed to send it racing off the shelves.

However, it starts in an arresting way with a story I had not heard before of another celebrated Nobel prize-winning behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, known to many for his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Two years ago, he celebrated his 90th birthday with family in Paris before flying to Zurich and ending his life in an assisted suicide clinic. “Danny,” Roth recalls, “was still in relatively good health, but he wanted to avoid the prospect of a long, disabling decline.”

...

It is a fascinating and very different economics book, from which I may bring you more as I find it."