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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So as a society, we treat trying to hire a hitman much different than trying to buy or sell drugs, whereas our laws about the two things are very similar.
If we catch drug dealers or hitmen, we put them in jail as long as we can.
Well, no, I mean, legal and moral are different things.
But a good way to find controversial markets is to find markets that are legal in some places and illegal in others.
So a lot of the markets I talk about in my book have that property.
But another way is to find markets that are illegal maybe almost everywhere but have active black markets.
So heroin is a good example.
It's illegal almost everywhere to produce, to consume, but there's a lot of it.
And we're struggling.
Of the controversial markets I consider in my book, I think that's the most difficult one because I don't have good suggestions about what to do about that one.
We're losing the war on drugs, but neither does it accept our surrender.
In Portland, we tried decriminalizing opioids, and that turns out to have bad effects on cities and not such good effects on opioid overdose deaths.
So
So we need to experiment.
We need to think about what to do and to judge our policies not by our intentions, which are pure.
We would like there to be no heroin addicts.
But there are.
So I think that the discussion of what to do has to take that into account.
And we have to start at least thinking of how to treat, somewhat, how to treat addicts more like patients than like criminals.
But on the other hand, we can't just...
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