Horsemeat, Prostitution and Kidney Sales, interview by Peter Coy

 Peter Coy interviewed me about Moral Economics for his substack Economics for Everyone.

You can find the video and the transcript at this link: 

Horsemeat, Prostitution and Kidney Sales  by Peter Coy 
"Nobel laureate Al Roth tackles them all in a fine new book. I interviewed him."

"I asked Roth if he’s a libertarian, since libertarians say people should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others. No, Roth told me.

“People who call themselves libertarians often don’t like market regulation of any sort, but I’m a market designer,” Roth said. “I think that good regulations help markets work well.”

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 Peter C. interviewd me once before:

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Kidney exchange (and other bits of market design) in the New York Times

" Peter Coy, the veteran New York Times economics columnist, writes about kidney exchange, after an interview/conversation sparked by a recent working paper of mine, Market Design and Maintenance. (He's a rare economic journalist who reads economists' papers.)

Here's his column, published yesterday afternoon:

The Economist Who Helped Patients Get New Kidneys, Feb. 5, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET, By Peter Coy

He's also a rare interviewer: his column includes the names of more of my coauthors than I can recall in any other interview. In order of appearance: Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver, Frank Delmonico, Susan Saidman, Mike Rees (implicitly) when he names Mike's nonprofit Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, and Elliott Peranson.  Market design is, after all, a team sport."

 

Best books of 2026 so far (a small publishing adventure, with pictures)

 At one month post-publication of Moral Economics, I continue to get small bits of feedback.  Here's one, from the editors of Amazon.

Best Business & Leadership Books of 2026 So Far 

 

 Neither first nor last on the list:

 ,,,

And that list is one among many that Amazon compiles:

 

 

With so many best books, I asked Microsoft Copilot for an estimate of total numbers of new books annually, and got this table, which notes that the vast majority of new books are self-published. (I wonder how many are written by A.I....):

 

 

While I'm on the subject, here's a picture a friend sent me from a bookstore in Chicago's OHare airport. (Maybe Moral Economics is an airport book after all:)

 

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Afternoon update (this just in, still June 12): It turns out Moral Economics is a Best  Book Club book too:)

 

Two audio podcasts about Moral Economics, interviews by a Texan, and by a libertarian

 First, from NPR radio station KERA for North Texas, the Think talk show podcast (interview by Krys Boyd):

What black markets can teach us about the economy
June 3, 2026 

  "To really understand the nuts and bolts of economics, look to the black market. Alvin E. Roth is Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his work on organ donation which led him to study what he called “repugnant transactions” like sex and drugs and why he feels banning them completely doesn’t always have the effect we think it does. His book is “Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.”


    Transcript (also at the above link)

Here's a very contemporary Texas question: 

"Krys Boyd [00:25:48] I’m really curious, Alvin, about whether making things illegal has much of an effect on things. I live in Texas, where recreational marijuana is against the law. I can tell you just anecdotally that it appears to not stop very many people. You pose this interesting question about why the laws work pretty well to keep people from committing murder for hire, but not so well at all from buying and selling illegal drugs. "

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And here, from the libertarian think tank Cato is the  Cato Podcast • June 4, 2026   The Markets We Love to Ban (audio only, interview by Ryan Bourne)

"Kidneys, surrogacy, prostitution, gambling, price gouging, assisted dying: some transactions make people recoil, even when all parties consent. Cato’s Ryan Bourne talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth about his new book, Moral Economics, what makes markets “repugnant,” what economists can add to moral debates, and why banning exchange rarely makes scarcity, exploitation, or hard trade-offs disappear." 

 

Some major themes in Moral Economics (posted by the Next Big Idea Club)

 The Next Big Idea Club asked me to summarize some of the themes in Moral Economics, and has now published them here:

A Nobel Economist Explains Why Some Markets Make Us Uneasy 

Below, Alvin Roth shares five key insights from his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

Alvin is 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. A pioneering expert in the field of market design, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and past president of the American Economic Association.

What’s the big idea?

There’s an old joke about economics and sociology that says economists try to understand the choices people make, and sociologists try to understand why people don’t really have any choices. Alvin looks at how societies try to decide whether to allow some choices and ban others.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Alvin himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

1. Morally contested markets.

There are lots of morally contested markets and transactions that some people would like to engage in, but others think shouldn’t be allowed. Often, the objections are stated in terms of moral or religious reasons. And the transactions that the opponents seek to ban don’t harm them personally—they might not even know the transactions had occurred unless someone tells them.

For example, same-sex marriage is a morally contested transaction: two people want to marry each other, and some other people don’t think same-sex marriages should be allowed—even though you can’t tell if someone is married unless they tell you, for instance, by wearing a wedding ring. For centuries, marriage was regarded as inherently heterosexual. But, after considerable controversy, the U.S. and many other countries have legalized same-sex unions.

This isn’t a unique situation. Lots of controversial markets are connected to reproduction. There have been bans at different times and places on contraceptives, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and surrogacy. That is, there have been laws enshrining opposing views about whether a woman should be able to prevent becoming pregnant during sex (by buying contraception), should be able to initiate a pregnancy without sexual intercourse (via IVF), or be able to terminate a pregnancy via abortion, not to mention being a surrogate or having a surrogate bear a baby. In the U.S., all those things have been through the courts multiple times and with different results.

Notice that reliable contraception and IVF involve modern disputes about modern technologies. Before reliable contraception, sex between a man and a woman often resulted in pregnancy, and before assisted reproductive technology, like IVF, sex was the only avenue to pregnancy. Many traditional laws and norms that attempted to keep sex within the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman were attempts to ensure that babies would be born into families. But if pregnancy becomes a choice, and if there are other ways to have a child than intercourse between a man and a woman, then the door opens to more expansive views about who can have sex with whom, and who can start a family. So, while expanding marriage to include same-sex couples doesn’t depend on modern technology, we can see that the changes in reproductive technology may have moved the needle on what kinds of marriages and related transactions receive social support.

Of course, bans on extra-marital sex, prostitution, or abortion never succeeded in making those things disappear, even though they raised barriers.

2. Bans on markets need social support to work well.

Some bans work well while others give rise to active black markets. For example, why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hitman? U.S. laws aren’t so different for drug dealers and hitmen: if we catch them, we send them to prison for a long time. Yet our prisons are filled with drug dealers, and there have been years in which more than 100,000 people died from opioid overdoses. But murder for hire is so rare that it doesn’t even make it into the national crime statistics, and homicides from any cause are vastly fewer than drug overdose deaths.

At least some of the difference has to do with how people think about drugs and murder. If I told you I was looking to buy some heroin, you would be surprised, but you wouldn’t call the police (and if you did, they would tell you that they were busy with more pressing calls). But if I told you I was looking to hire a killer, you might very well call the police, and when you did, they would encourage you to tell me that I might find an available hitman at a certain bar, where I would find myself trying to hire an undercover detective. To put it another way, there are neighborhoods where drugs are readily available, and the neighbors look away, but not so many neighborhoods where killers are the norm, in part reflecting that the social norm against drugs is much more porous than against murder.

“At least some of the difference has to do with how people think about drugs and murder.”

I don’t know how we should best make progress in dealing with the markets for addictive, lethal drugs. Not only are we losing the “War on Drugs,” but it won’t even accept our surrender: experiments with decriminalizing drug use have shown the potential to make cities less livable. We’re going to need to experiment, to find better ways to proceed.

It’s worth noticing that we’ve learned to live with legal markets for tobacco and alcohol, even though each of those causes more deaths than are due to drug overdoses. And we’re wrestling with some other kinds of addiction, such as gambling (particularly on your phone, during a game).

The drug epidemic teaches us that well-intentioned policies can fail. By and large no one approves of heroin, but we haven’t succeeded in vanquishing it any more than we succeeded in making alcohol disappear during Prohibition.

3. Moral intuitions aren’t enough by themselves.

We need to gather and pay attention to evidence about the consequences of particular policies. This is hard when moral intuitions collide, partly because much moral argumentation rests on weak or no evidence. But we can’t afford to judge our policies just by their intentions. We have to at least look at their consequences, too.

Nevertheless, moral intuitions are important and consequential, so we need to understand them better. There are some things that many moral intuitions have in common. For example, concern about the possible exploitation of vulnerable people is often an issue.

4. Sometimes adding money to a transaction arouses repugnance.

For example, paying in cash is what turns sex into prostitution. Often, the objection to introducing money into transactions is that it might be an undue influence that could coerce the poor into transactions that they (or we) would prefer not to take part in. But that’s over-broad: many people work for financial pay at jobs they wouldn’t otherwise do. And many goods and services that we need wouldn’t be available if they couldn’t be paid for.

“Many people work for financial pay at jobs they wouldn’t otherwise do.”

Pharmaceuticals made from blood plasma are a good example. Many countries ban payments to plasma donors and try (almost always unsuccessfully) to generate as much as they need of the large amounts of plasma required to treat many diseases from unpaid donors. How do they make up for the shortfall? Fortunately, you can buy plasma and plasma-derived medicines from the U.S. We’re the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma, exporting tens of billions of dollars of plasma products each year, collected largely from plasma donors who are paid.

5. Religion remains important in many controversies.

It plays a large role in the growth of legal medical aid in dying, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Overall, in pursuing moral economics, we have to keep in mind the maxim that ought implies can, and the things we feel morally obligated to do, whether by supporting them or banning them, have to be things that we can do. To understand those limits, we need evidence, including experimentation, to figure out how to proceed when we’re worried by all our options.

 

Mary Childs, formerly of Planet Money, has a new podcast, called Mary in America (on which we talk about Moral Economics)

 Mary Childs, formerly of Planet Money, has a new podcast, called Mary in America.

I was the guest on her first interview: 

Organs, Sex Work, and Drugs: A Nobel Economist on Why Banning Things Can Backfire, Mary in America
 

"A Nobel Prize-winning economist makes the case that our moral objections to controversial markets are getting people killed. Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize in Economics for figuring out how to build markets that work. Now he's turned his attention to the markets we refuse to build, and why that refusal has consequences nobody wants to talk about. In this episode, Mary and Al dig into what he calls "repugnant transactions" — the deals that some people want to make and others think shouldn't be allowed. They get into why banning organ sales creates black markets where donors get operated on in apartments, why the same logic that ended Prohibition applies to the war on drugs, how surrogacy bans in Europe are turning babies into stateless people, and why it's easy to buy heroin but nearly impossible to hire a hit man. Al's argument isn't that everything should be for sale. It's that if you care about outcomes more than intentions, you have to confront what your bans are actually doing. Subscribe for new episodes every week. Chapters: 00:00 Friendship Isn't A Market 00:32 Meet Nobel Economist Al Roth 01:02 What Makes a Market "Repugnant"? 02:58 Should We Pay People for Kidneys? 08:31 Why Drugs Thrive But Hit Men Don't 15:58 Surrogacy, Politics, and Unintended Consequences 21:45 Why Prohibition Keeps Failing 25:19 Markets, Morality, and Reality 28:19 The Rise of Prediction Markets 34:30 What Money Can't Buy"

"How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets," interview by Nick Gillespie about Moral Economics

Nick Gillespie, from Reason Magazine,  interviews me about "How Moral Panic Creates Black Markets"

"Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth discusses the moral limits of markets, how bans create black markets, and why harm reduction often works better than prohibition."

"Today's guest is Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth, the author of Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about why some voluntary transactions provoke moral outrage even when no one is being directly harmed. Roth explains why black markets often emerge when governments try to ban activities with persistent demand, why both markets and prohibitions require social support to function, and how unintended consequences can make moralistic policies backfire. They discuss the war on drugs, prostitution, surrogacy, same-sex marriage, price gouging, and why Iran remains the only country in the world with a legal market for kidney donors.

They also explore Roth's work designing kidney exchange networks and school choice systems, how digital technology and private transactions make certain bans harder to enforce, and why harm reduction may work better than prohibition in areas ranging from drug policy to sex work."

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Mark Granovetter and I discuss Moral Economics

 Speaking with the great sociologist Mark Granovetter gave me the opportunity to tell the joke "“Economists study how people make choices; sociologists study why people don’t have choices," since Moral Economics is about the controversial markets over which society struggles with which choices should be allowed and which should be banned.

 Stanford's Center for the History of Capitalism sponsored the conversation, and here it is on YouTube, but it's just a podcast, there's audio of our conversation, but no video. 

 

Here's an alternative photo from  Stanford's History of Capitalism program:

 

Work and Moral Economics: Two Podcasts (Dart Lindsley's "Work for Humans" and Ben Zweig's "The Economics of Work).

Two podcasts interview me about Moral Economics, starting from a concern with work. 

 Dart Lindsley interviews me on his Podcast "Work for Humans":

Moral Economics: Where Human Values Shape Markets | Alvin Roth
Work For Humans 

Here it is on every platform.  

 

"A kidney transplant does not work like buying a gallon of milk. Neither does hiring or getting into a medical residency. In these markets, both sides care deeply about who they end up with, and a good outcome depends on more than money. 

Alvin Roth has spent his career studying what makes those systems succeed or fail. His work designing kidney exchange programs showed that even when people desperately want to help each other, the market can still break down unless the rules create the right kind of match. In this episode, Dart and Al discuss matching markets, moral economics, and the hidden rules that shape opportunity, fairness, and work itself.

Alvin Roth is an economist and professor at Stanford University best known for his work on market design and matching theory. He received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on stable matching and the design of markets used in medical residencies, school choice, and kidney exchange.

In this episode, Dart and Al discuss:
- Why some markets depend on matching
- Why fit matters more than money
- What makes a market stable
- Why real markets are messy
- The difference between theory and engineering
- What “repugnant transactions” are
- Why societies ban some exchanges
- How social norms shape markets
- Why work is also a matching problem
- And other topics…

Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded with Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. His work has helped design matching systems for medical residencies, public school admissions, and kidney exchange programs. He is the author of Who Gets What — and Why and Moral Economics: Why Good and Bad Markets Exist.

Resources Mentioned:
Al’s Book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work

Al’s Book, Who Gets What — and Why

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And here's Ben Zweig's The Economics of Work:

  "It was so fun talking to Alvin Roth, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. "One of my favorite books of all time is Who Gets What and Why, which has shaped the way I view labor markets. His second book, Moral Economics, came out last week and it’s so so good - endlessly thought provoking, funny, and sharp. In the podcast, we talk about controversial markets and what makes something repugnant, how to think about exploitation and coercion, and what that means for labor markets. "Check out the latest episode of The Economics of Work and Al's new book Moral Economics! "Moral Economics from Basic Books: Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cu6ZCLm Podcast Episode: Apple: https://lnkd.in/esVGQQx5 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e4sr844Q Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eif7DHMS"