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
So we see proposals like banning giant soda bottles
Cups of soda because once you fill it up with this sugary liquid, you feel like you should drink it all.
And sometimes those are defeated.
Mayor Bloomberg in New York tried to have such a rule and he wasn't able to because people say, well, it's paternalistic.
But you could imagine that –
that many of us need some protection.
And that's what consumer affairs bureaus are for.
You know, there might be financial products that are hard to parse and that maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission should have rules to protect you from making investments in pyramid schemes, things like that.
So paternalism
You know, the idea that we want to protect vulnerable people but also each other because we're vulnerable people is not crazy.
There are giant markets, for instance, for prescription drugs.
So prescription drugs are drugs that are good for somebody, but we don't think you should decide for yourself whether they're good for you.
You should have a prescription from your doctor who says, you know, here's this drug that could have side effects but might be good for some disease you're suffering from.
So we have plenty of
markets that are not, let's say, fair.
If we talk about decriminalizing narcotics, we're not talking about having vending machines in elementary schools.
You can do something in between, let's say, fair and banning a market.
So is it Jonathan Swift who wrote a modest proposal years ago in which he proposed eating children?
You know, the way to solve a famine is to buy children and eat them.
So, you know, I'll see you're buying children.
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