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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 353 | Alvin Roth on the Economics of Morally Contested Markets · 11 May 2026 podcast

And one of the reasons I wrote the book is when you see people making moral arguments, often they don't do the thing that economists do all the time, which is think about tradeoffs.

So we might not like tradeoffs.

the idea of paying people for kidneys or for blood plasma, but neither would we like lots of people dying of hemophilia or immunodeficiencies and, you know, plasma saves lives.

So, you know, I personally have no problem with people selling plasma and with the U S exporting it.

Um,

So we have to think about consequences.

We might really hate heroin because we think no one should be addicted.

Being addicted is like being a slave and we just don't like it.

So we passed a law that says if anyone sells, we catch them selling heroin, we're going to put them in jail for a long time.

But it hasn't worked.

We have lots of addiction.

So I think the idea that it's a moral position that we should just

try to solve drug problems by policing and now military action shouldn't ignore the fact that we failed to solve those problems.

There was recently an article in The New York Times about drugs in prisons and that people are soaking paper

with drugs that can then be smoked in prison.

And what it said is this is really a hard problem to solve because they were getting deliveries that seemed to be books from Amazon that were in fact, you know, pages were...

We're full of drugs.

So I think the lesson that we have to take there is if we can't even keep drugs out of prisons, what's the chance that that will figure out a way to keep them off the streets using purely police methods and military methods?

And I think the answer is it's hard because.

People, human beings, are resourceful.

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