“ Lets start with the most important question in the field: is it pronounced 'EKonomics' or 'EEKonomics'?

 I was interviewed about Moral Economics by the comedian Paul Ollinger on his podcast Reasonably Happy.

Here's a link to the audio recording, which I can hear quite clearly.

And here's a link to the video, which I can see clearly enough, but can't manage to turn on the audio, but maybe you can. (It's not a stirring video, I'm at home on zoom and he's in a studio...) 

 

He began "Lets start with the most important question in the field: is it pronounced "EKonomics or EEKonomics"? 

And here's his rundown of what's on: 

"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 Outro 

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