Nobel Economist: The Market That Lets People Die

A Nobel laureate in economics argues the bans we pass to protect our morals are quietly killing people, and the data backs him up. Why the line between a market we allow and one we forbid is mostly an accident of disgust.

My guest won the 2012 Nobel Prize for designing the systems that match kidney donors to patients who would otherwise die waiting. We cover why it's easy to buy heroin but hard to hire a hitman, what surrogacy bans actually do to the babies they're meant to protect, why paying kidney donors could end a shortage that kills thousands a year, and the trade-off statement he wants every lawmaker to say out loud.

He has been called an organ trafficker. He explains why that's the point.

What you'll hear:
- Why banning something people want often makes it more dangerous
- The kidney market America won't build, and what that silence costs
- What the hitman vs. heroin asymmetry reveals about prohibition that works
- The McCormick statement: the trade-off most policy debates refuse to make
- How prediction markets are eroding the line between public and private information
- Whether Milton Friedman was right to be embarrassed by the economics Nobel

There's no such thing as a solution. There are only trade-offs.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Heroin is easy. Hitmen are not. Why?
01:05 Why bans without social support build black markets
03:30 The man they called an organ trafficker
06:00 Prohibition, NASCAR, and the limits of a ban
08:30 Surrogacy: legal here, criminal in Europe
11:00 When adding money turns the legal into a crime
13:30 Can religion corrupt a market?
15:30 Who actually pays for college?
19:00 The Enhanced Games: doping as a marketing platform
21:30 Adderall, Erdős, and the science of getting sharper
26:00 Why AI makes market congestion worse before it gets better
31:00 130,000 kidney failures a year. Fewer than 30,000 transplants.
35:00 Portland decriminalized drugs. Why it failed.
38:00 The trade-off statement politicians refuse to make
42:00 Can you legalize sex work and shrink trafficking?
48:00 Kahneman chose how he died. Who should decide?
54:00 America is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma
58:00 Prediction markets and the inside-information problem
60:00 Why phone-based sports gambling is built to addict
66:00 Peter Nobel called the economics prize a marketing stunt
70:00 Is economics a real science?

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Featured Guest: Alvin Roth
Website: https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/
Moral Economics (book): https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Economics-Prostitution-Controversial-Transactions/dp/1541702018

My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
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Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast