Alvin Roth
speaker
677 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 11 May
Alvin Roth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But on the contrary, there are people who like to eat horse meat.
There are parts of the world where it's considered delicious food.
And the reason we have a law against it in California is –
We don't like it collectively when people eat horse meat.
And repugnance is a funny thing because the people who I think organized the referendum –
really liked horses, but some of the people who supported it happened to sell beef.
Well, you know, economists have the bad habit of whenever there's a difficult question saying, oh, that's politics.
But it's too important to be left to the politicians.
You know, there's an old joke about economists and sociologists which says economists study how we make choices and sociologists study how we really don't have any choices.
And my book is about how, as a society, we try to legislate which choices you're allowed to have and which you're not allowed to make and which you're not.
But it turns out that to work well – and speaking as a market designer – to work well, markets need social support.
Hmm.
And it turns out that bans on markets also need social support.
That is, we can ban things, but that doesn't mean they vanish, right?
We don't like heroin and we have lots of laws against it, but there's lots of heroin and lots of overdose deaths every year.
So one thing I explore a little bit in the book is I say, how come it's so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman?
And
The way to think about that is, supposing I were to say to you, I'm going to come visit you where you live, and I'm not going to take heroin on the plane with me.
That seems risky, but you look like you would know where I could buy some heroin, which I like to buy.
Could you give me some advice?
Showing 181–200 of 677 · page 10 of 34
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