Horsemeat, Prostitution and Kidney Sales

Nobel laureate Al Roth tackles them all in a fine new book. I interviewed him.

Source: Stanford University

Alvin Roth isn’t just a fine economist. He’s a great author and a fun person to interview. I can confirm this after having read his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work, and having interviewed him by Zoom for this Substack.

Roth, of Stanford, shared the Nobel in economics in 2012 for his work on market design. As the Nobel committee wrote, “How to bring different players together in the best possible way is a key economic problem.” Roth helped solve that problem, devising methods to match “doctors with hospitals, school children with schools, and organ donors with patients,” to quote the Nobel committee.

Some markets that could exist don’t because people—some people, anyway—are repulsed by them. Three that Roth discusses in his new book, and talked about with me, are horsemeat, prostitution, and kidney sales.

You can get the complete version of what he told me by watching the video below or reading the transcript. Here are some of the points that jumped out at me.

California bans the sale of horsemeat. Why? It’s not just because some people, think eating horsemeat is repulsive. It’s because others don’t think it’s repulsive and would very much like to do it if they could. There wouldn’t need to be a ban on selling horsemeat if nobody wanted to eat it. (For that reason, there’s no ban on selling drinks of other people’s spit, as Roth told me. Yuck.)

We can argue about whether the horsemeat ban makes sense. On one hand, horses are intelligent, caring creatures. On the other hand, so are cows and pigs, and California doesn’t ban the sale of their meat. But fewer people keep cows and pigs as pets, so they are raised for slaughter, often in inhumane conditions.

Now, prostitution. Prostitution exists in a cloud of evil. Women and girls are often pressed into service by abusive men. They’re beaten up by their customers. All kinds of bad stuff. But imagine if all of that could be regulated away, and we were left with one willing person paying another willing person for sex. Would that still be evil? Some would say yes. Others would disagree—in fact, they disagree every day, because prostitution, even in its currently ugly state, is a huge business.

Roth got interested in what he calls “repugnant” markets because of his work on building kidney exchanges, which have saved many lives by making it easier for people to get kidney transplants even if no immediate relatives are tissue matches. Far more lives could be saved, he told me, if it were legal for people to sell one of their two kidneys and live on the other. There is only one country in which that is legal: Iran. In the United States, “Some people think that not only is that a bad idea, but it’s the kind of bad idea that only bad people have.”

I asked Roth if he’s a libertarian, since libertarians say people should be free to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others. No, Roth told me.

“People who call themselves libertarians often don’t like market regulation of any sort, but I’m a market designer,” Roth said. “I think that good regulations help markets work well.”

Fascinating stuff.

TRANSCRIPT

Peter Coy

Okay, hello everybody. I’m Peter Coy on the Substack Economics for Everyone. Today, I’m very honored to be speaking with Al Roth, Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of a new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. Al, welcome to the podcast.

Al Roth

Thank you.

Peter Coy

Really honored to have you on. When I was at the New York Times Opinion section, I interviewed you on kidney exchange, which is something that was hugely beneficial technology. Well, I guess you could call it a technology, right? It was sort of an algorithm that you helped design that has saved many lives, and in the process of working on that, as you described in the book, you got more and more interested in this topic of some people call repugnant transactions, and I want to start right out by first of all thanking you for being on, and asking you about just having your own words. I’ve read the book, and I really enjoyed it, and I recommend it to others. By the way, it’s written. It’s written for a general audience. You were very good about that. It’s written for people who are, I’m sure, be interesting to economists, but you don’t have to be an economist to understand it. I think the first question I would ask you, and I think I warned you I might be asking about this, you’re wading into issues that are often considered to be the domain of philosophers and ethicists, perhaps medical doctors. As an economist, do you bring a different perspective to it? So, I wonder if you could talk first of all just about the issue of how it felt for you to be bringing your training as an economist to bear on issues that are not necessarily considered to be primarily economic issues.

Al Roth

Well, I guess it depends who you ask. What are economic issues? But I think of economics as a social science that’s broadly concerned with human activity, and you know what things we allow and what things we don’t allow when it comes to people interacting with each other are natural subjects for an economist to study, and the way I got into this, of course, was as you say, through kidneys, and there’s a way of extending, expanding the scope of kidney transplants that’s called kidney exchange, and it’s important because there’s a big shortage of kidneys for transplants. Most people who need a transplant will die without getting one, but the business of economics is to think about how to allocate scarce resources efficiently and equitably, and how to make them less scarce, and among the comes up when you’re doing that is that is that markets of all sorts need social support to work well, and so, so early on I encountered the fact that that not everyone agrees on. On how we should allocate kidneys for transplant, so that’s how I got into it.

Peter Coy

Well, do you think, though, just continuing on this theme, that an economist, and of course economists are not all alike, but there’s certain principles that economists tend to share. Do you think you bring a different perspective to this than, as I say, a philosopher and ethicist religious person might.

Al Roth

Oh, absolutely. I think philosophy, which also tries to study all of human human interactions, does so in a more abstract way than economists do, and so you can spend time thinking about what you think the just society would look like, without necessarily worrying whether you can achieve that vision of a just society, and the things I talk about in the book is that economics deals with trade-offs, when there’s scarcity, we can’t do all the things that we would do if, in the absence of scarcity, in the presence of abundance, so, so we necessarily think about trade-offs, what to do when, when some resources are scarce, and how to make them less scarce. Yeah, and philosophers often don’t have to confront those issues.

Peter Coy

Now, you, you use the word repugnant in a way that I think is not necessarily the way it’s understood by the general public in general usage. Repugnant just kind of means awful, some just whereas you make a distinction between I think repugnant and just I think disgusting. Can you talk about what you mean by that, maybe with some examples?

Al Roth

Sure, so I use repugnance as a technical term. I find it useful to do, and I define it very early in the book, but incidentally, the book is about controversial markets of all sorts, not just those that involve what I call repugnant transactions. But repugnant transactions are transactions that some people would like to engage in, and other people think they shouldn’t be allowed to, without having, without those other people experiencing direct harm, so often the reason they think these transactions shouldn’t be allowed is for religious or moral reasons, and I point out to emphasize that, that that sometimes these are transactions that you can’t even tell have happened unless someone tells you so, so it’s not necessarily a transaction that hurts the objectors, so for example, it’s illegal in California to sell horse meat for human consumption, and it’s not because no one wants to eat horse meat, it’s precisely because in some parts of the world horse meat is delicious, and people would like to eat horse meat, but it’s against the law in California, because of a 1998 popular referendum, but there’s no law against restaurants serving drinks made of other people’s spit, for example, and that’s because that would be disgusting. There’s no demand for it, so you don’t need to make a law against that. The reason there’s a law in California against eating horse meat, against selling horse meat for human consumption. Is that some people would like to eat horse meat, but you can’t do it in California, and in fact it’s very hard to do it anywhere in the United States, because while the Congress has on several occasions unsuccessfully tried to outlaw the sale of horse meat, they did succeed in lining out the Department of Agriculture budget for inspecting horse meat, and you can’t eat easily eat any meat in the United States that isn’t USDA Grade A, United States Department of Agriculture Grade A. So it’s quite hard to eat horse meat in the United States.

Peter Coy

Meanwhile, we have no problem eating cows, pigs, chicken, sheep, which are also sentient beings, not in an entirely different category from a horse, right.

Al Roth

Well, that’s exactly right. So, not the people who, who were responsible for the, for putting the ballot, the referendum on the ballot, were not vegans. There are people who think that it would be nice if we, if we didn’t eat meat to take, we’d like to take killing out of the out of the food chain, but that was not the impetus for horses, which were regarded as pets. The same law that makes it illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption in California also makes it illegal to sell dog meat for human consumption, but incidentally it’s not illegal to sell horse meat for consumption by pets.

Peter Coy

How do you make of that? It’s so complicated. Now, the thing I loved about your book is that you go through that example, but so many others, and you poke at our preconceptions, and kind of betray that there’s not necessarily undergirded by ironclad logic.

Al Roth

Well, you know, I don’t know that you need. Logic to think about the ban on eating horse meat in California. There are some people who think of horses as pets, and they wouldn’t like you eating their pets or relatives of their pets. They are offended by it, and they succeeded in passing a law against it. So, you can’t, right?

Peter Coy

Yeah, yeah, but I think we maybe we should. We could talk about prostitution being an example. There are places, there are few counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal. Most of the country is not. You could go into organs, organ sales. So, I think maybe that’s a natural place to go, because you, your kidney exchange, as I said in the intro, really helped get more kidneys into more people who needed them, but it’s still there’s still a lot of people who die on dialysis because they can’t get life-saving kidneys, and there those lives could be saved if people could be paid for their kidneys, which is now illegal in the United States. Just talk a little bit about why you think that we’re in the situation we are now, and what it would take to change that.

Al Roth

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about the current situation. There are about 130,000 new cases of kidney failure in the United States each year, and kidney failure is a lethal disease, but people can be kept alive for some time on dialysis, but dialysis is tough, and the average, you know, half the people who are on dialysis die after five years, so it’s not, it’s not a cure by any means. So, the treatment of choice for kidney failure is transplantation, and as I say, there are 130,000 new cases of kidney failure each year in the United States, but we do a bit fewer than 30,000 transplants a year, so most people who need a transplant or could benefit from a transplant will die without receiving one. And you can get kidneys from two sources: one is from deceased donors who give two kidneys. We get about 22 23,000 kidneys a year from deceased donors for transplant, and you can also get a kidney from a living donor, because healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one, and we get somewhat fewer than 7000 living donor transplants, so that’s that’s about 29,000 transplants a year, roughly, not nearly enough. Now, as you point out, one, and something that strikes economists quite often is when you see people queuing for a scarce resource, so there are there are going on 100,000 people on the formerly on the waiting list for a deceased donor kidney, of which there are only 20 something 1000 a year, when you see people queuing for a scarce resource, you suspect that prices aren’t being allowed to adjust to increase supply, and that’s exactly the case. It’s against the law in the United States to pay the family of a deceased donor a deceased potential donor, or an individual who gives one of their own kidneys. It’s against the law to pay them, so kidney exchange was a way of increasing the the set of transplants that are available without paying donors, right, because it turns out you might be healthy enough to give someone a kidney and there’s someone you love who you’d like to give a kidney to to save their life, but you might not be able to give them a kidney because kidneys have to be compatible with the with the recipient, then, and your kidney might not be compatible. It might be that the person who you love has developed antibodies to some of the proteins that that are in your kidney, and they can’t take your kidney. So, before kidney exchange, that you would just be sent home. If you tried to donate to that person, they would test you and find you were incompatible, and they’d send you home, and you’re the patient you love would would go back on the waiting list for a deceased donor kidney, the long, dangerous waiting list where 1000s on which 1000s of people die each year. But instead, what kidney exchange is about is supposing you’re in that situation and I’m in the same situation. I would like to give a kidney to someone, and the and the person I’m healthy enough to give a kidney to someone, but the person I want to want to give it to, I’m incompatible with, but it might be that I’m compatible with your patient and you’re compatible with my patient, and so these two patient donor pairs could can exchange kidneys, so that each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient’s intended donor, so that’s the idea of kidney exchange. There are more complicated exchanges than that, but that scale up at a national level, and the donors aren’t paid, so it doesn’t run into the repugnance of painting kidneys. And we’ve done 1000s of kidney exchange transplants over the years, we do a.

When you count non-directed donors and the who can create chains of kidney exchange transplants together with the exchange transplants themselves, we’re I think we’re at around 1500 transplants a year through kidney exchange, but that’s not enough over the course of the time that I’ve been involved in kidney exchange since the turn of the century, the waiting list for deceased donor kidneys went from around 40,000 people on it to about 100,000 and a lot more people would be on the waiting list if, if the waiting list worked better, if it produced more transplants, right. So, so, so, there, you know, I could tell you about victory after victory in kidney exchange, but it’s in a war that we’re losing, which is the war against kidney disease. So, so there’s some thought about maybe we should find ways to be more generous to kidney donors and increase the supply of kidneys.

Peter Coy

And why is that not happening?

Al Roth

Well, it’s against the law, and some people think that compensating kidney donors or the families of deceased donors. Some people think that not only is that a bad idea, but it’s the kind of bad idea that only bad people have. They think it’s a really bad idea that it would be immoral to do that. Very similar laws are in place in much of the world against paying blood donors and donors of blood plasma, but the situation there is very different, because in the United States we pay donors of blood plasma, and so the United States exports 10s of billions of dollars a year of plasma pharmaceuticals, and that’s why there aren’t terrible shortages of plasma treatments around the world as there are of kidney transplants.

Peter Coy

It’s just fascinating that, as you said, there are big differences in belief about kidneys and about blood. The United States is in one side of the equation on blood, but on the other side of the equation on kidneys, and it’s kind of hard to come up with, as I said, the iron, ironclad logic for why one would be, which is these are just social circumstances and cultural norms.

Al Roth

Well, of course, kidneys aren’t the same as blood, right? A kidney, you can only give one kidney and it’s permanent, whereas you regenerate your blood and your plasma, right? Yeah, but you’re right, we’re on the opposite side. In most countries, many countries don’t allow blood and plasma donors to be paid, but, but it’s illegal to pay kidney donors almost everywhere in the world, with the significant single exception of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in Iran there is a legal market in which kidney donors can be paid, and there’s lots of disputes, even in Iran, about whether that’s a good thing, but there’s no dispute that the, the surgeries, the nephrectomy to remove a kidney and the transplants to put one in, that the surgeries in Iran take place at real hospitals, high-quality hospitals, transplant hospitals, and that’s not something that can be said about the black markets that exist in some places around the world, in which donors are illegally paid and, and their kidneys are illegally transplanted, and because of the laws that try to keep those kinds of things out of hospitals, those transplants sometimes take place outside of hospitals, where, where the conditions are much less good, so the quality of medical care, if you get a transplant in an apartment, in a villa, in a hotel room, the quality of the medical care is much lower, so, so there’s lots of reasons not to like those black markets, they, they would, it would be good to be able to shut them down, but they exist because of the terrible shortage of kidneys, so that’s an issue that comes up, and it’s an issue that one of the things I talk about in the book is the American experience with trying to prohibit sales of most alcoholic beverages during Prohibition, and so in the 1920s we, we tried to ban the sale of almost all alcoholic beverages, and with, we made a constitutional amendment, you know, big change in the law, but over the next decade, alcohol consumption didn’t collapse at all, and organized crime grew up to supply alcohol to Americans who, who might therefore feel that they were accomplices in the crime, although prohibition didn’t make it illegal to drink alcohol, but to produce and sell it. So, in the early 1930s we repealed that amendment to the Constitution with it, with another amendment. These were giant changes in the law, constitutional changes, and now there’s a legal market, heavily regulated legal market for alcohol, and of course, a legal market for alcohol doesn’t solve all the problems of alcohol. There’s still alcoholism and drunk driving, and organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous, which try to help people. Will struggle with, with their alcoholism, with their, their alcohol addiction, but one thing that has happened is you can’t buy bootleg whiskey from gangsters anymore, right? The whiskey you can buy on, you know, in main street liquor stores is expensively produced in oak casts in Scotland, or, or the United States, or Japan, and it’s not the people who produce it, don’t compete for market share by shooting at each other with machine guns, as, as they did during Prohibition. Yeah, so,

Peter Coy

yeah, so

Al Roth

the black market for alcohol that existed during Prohibition has been defeated by legalizing alcohol, or the problems of alcohol haven’t, haven’t all gone away, so, so I think that, and it’s because the, the black market has, for alcohol has been out competed by the legal market for alcohol, so, so one of the things to think about when we think about whether we want to allow ourselves to be more generous to donors, organ donors, kidney donors, is that’s also a way of competing with the black market, which no one likes,

Peter Coy

and this goes across other spheres as well. You don’t solve if there is a problem, you don’t solve it all by legalizing commercial transactions, but you can solve some of the problems, and then use other tools to solve other problems. For example, if we could stop kidney disease in the first place, we wouldn’t need so many kidney transplants.

Al Roth

That would be great. I’m ready,

Peter Coy

right?

Al Roth

Yeah, you know, it’s gonna take a long time, right? We have a diabetes epidemic, we have hypertension epidemics now.

Peter Coy

Al, as a Nobel laureate, you’ve had probably a bigger platform to discuss these things than maybe you had before you got to Nobel, and now you have a book out, which is getting a lot of attention. What kind of reaction are you, have you gotten in the past, and are you getting now to the ideas in your book?

Al Roth

Well, I get different reactions from different people and different reactions about different markets. I have some suggestions and thoughts on many markets, and there are some markets where I don’t have concrete ideas about what we should do, except that we should experiment to try to find ways to make things work better than they are, so for instance, the market for heroin, and similarly opioids, is a lot like the gangster-led market for alcohol during Prohibition, right? The, you know, if you want to buy heroin, and a lot of people do, there’s a lot of heroin on this on the American streets, you necessarily deal with giant organized crime of international scope, and it’s violent organized crime in some places, it competes with governments for sovereignty, and in places where organ and not organ heroin trafficking is organized, so, so one of the big themes of the book, as I talk about many different markets, is that just as markets need social support to work well, so do bans on markets, and we’re trying as hard as we can to ban heroin and similar drugs, and we’re failing, we can’t even keep those drugs out of our prisons, which are the places where the state can exert the most police power, and so the idea that that we’re somehow turn a corner and and eliminate them from our streets just through police and maybe now military action, I think is a an idea doomed to fail. We’ve tried hard to get rid of drugs and we’ve failed, but neat, so we’re losing the war on drugs, but unfortunately it’s a problem that doesn’t accept our surrender either. In places that have tried to decriminalize use of small amounts of drugs, they’ve sometimes had to walk those decriminalizations back, because in places like Portland, Oregon, it turns out it has a negative effect on cities to have people using drugs on the streets and needles near parks and playgrounds, so we don’t know what to do, but that’s a reason to experiment more, not less. And in the US, we’ve had experiments, mostly at municipal levels, at city levels, to try to reduce the harm of addiction. There are many harms of addiction, but one of them, of course, is drug overdose deaths. Another is that people who use intravenous drugs used to be at very high risk of getting hepatitis and AIDS from from dirty needles that they shared. So one thing that many American cities now have on the edge of the law is clean needle exchange, that is, if someone is a heroin addict and is using needles to inject heroin, they can exchange their needles for clean ones, so that they’re not forced to share needles with other addicts, and and that has cut down the rate of hepatitis and AIDS infection among addicts and. There are other things that places are trying to try to cut down the rate of overdose deaths, so there are in some American cities there are experimental safe injection places, you know, places where someone can go and there’ll be a nurse available to help revive people who lose consciousness and are at risk of dying. The way opioids kill you is through hypoxia. You, you forget to breathe, so you can be torn out of the grave with, with, you know, an injection of a drug that, that temporarily reverses that condition, doesn’t cure you by any means. You wake up hungry for drugs, you’re in withdrawal, but, but, but one of the things we don’t like about the heroin epidemic is the deaths, and we might be able to address them more effectively through ways other than than police action.

Peter Coy

This goes back to what I asked you about right at the start, which is what’s different about an economic analysis. There are people who would just come in and say heroin is bad, it’s wrong for people to consume heroin. We must stop that. We’re going to ban it. We’re going to put people in prison, and okay, except it’s not working. So, what else can we do?

Al Roth

Yeah, well, I think we often have to experiment. One of the things I ask in the book is why is it so easy to buy drugs, but so hard to hire a hit man, and hiring a hitman, of course, is, you know, it’s not a repugnant transaction, it’s a criminal assault, murder, but, but we have very few hit men. We try to ban hit men the same way we try to ban heroin sales. If it works, dealer or hit men, we put them in prison for a long time,

Peter Coy

right? And it’s because there’s more of a shared moral understanding that it’s wrong, it’s just wrong. You shouldn’t do that.

Al Roth

Well, it’s, it’s more support for the ban. And so the way I put it in the book is, is supposing I were to ask you, you know, I’m coming to visit some place near where you live, and I’m interested in buying heroin, but I don’t want to take it on the airplane because TSA might, you know, discover my heroin, but you look to me like the kind of guy who would know where I can buy heroin in your neighborhood. Can you give me a tip? Well, you’d be surprised, you know. You’d sort of say to your friends that substate, that sub stack that I’m recording, it took an odd turn when, when Al asked me where he could buy heroin, and but that would be the end of it. I mean, you’d be surprised and disappointed that I had asked you, but supposing I said to you, you know, I’ve discovered that referee number two, who rejected my last paper, lives near you, and I can’t take it anymore. I want him dead, and you look to me like the kind of person who would know where I could hire a hitman in your neighborhood. Can you give me a tip? Well, you may not actually know where I could hire a hitman, and in any event, you wouldn’t tell me, but but after you closed the sub stack and said to your friends, you know that was such an odd moment in the sub stack when Al asked me where I could, where he could hire a hitman.

Peter Coy

This is hypothetical, by the way.

Al Roth

Yes, yes, yes,

Peter Coy

really hypothetical number two.

Al Roth

Yeah, that’s right, but, but what your friends would say to you is, maybe you should call the police.

Peter Coy

Yeah, right. This is

Al Roth

This is really serious. And when you call the police, they would take you with great seriousness. and tell him on second thought, you do know where he could hire a hitman, and direct him to some bar, and at that bar, he tell him to ask for Sam, and Sam will take care of him. And indeed, many of the arrests that are made of people trying to hire a hitman are trying to hire an undercover police person, undercover marshal of some sort, and that, you know, that’s how we catch them, and that’s how that’s why we have so little commercial murder in the United States, but, but on the other hand, heroin, we, you know, if you called them and said Al wants to know where he could buy heroin, they’d say to you, we’re a very busy police department, you know, we can’t, some that someone asks you where to buy heroin in your neighborhood is not the kind of crime that we can devote resources to transaction by transaction trying to stop, so, but on the other hand, we have many more opioid overdose deaths each year than we have homicides of any sort, and hit men are just a tiny fraction of the homicides we have. They don’t even make it into the national crime statistics, so, so we’re doing great at banning hitmen. We should keep it up, you know. So, so, for people who think that hit men are immoral, and that the way we ought to fight it is by putting them in prison when we catch them, I agree that’s what we should do. We’re doing a great job. We should keep it up, but the same formula is not working for drugs. We have lots more overdose deaths than we have hit men and homicides. So, so I think that takes it away from the purely moral discussion into the economic discussion, that is, we have to say, given that it’s not working, what else might we do to help reduce the harm, and there’s a big interest in harm reduction when we talk about addiction and drug crime, but, but I think we have to let the cities explore this and try to find out what works. It hasn’t really - no one has really found a solution anywhere in the world yet for drugs. Some of these other markets we talk about, I think we can come up with with more concrete solutions, because once you legalize a market, you can start to regulate it, and just incidentally, part of the difficulty of the illegal drug market is drugs are complicated, mostly we have a big prescription drug market in the United States, where there are lots of drugs that people would like to take, but you can’t take without a doctor’s supervision, and of course then you get your drugs from a pharmacist, and if you were diagnosed as a heroin addict and allowed to go to a pharmacy and get a prescribed dose of heroin that would reduce the overdose risk quite a bit, because you would, because the pharmacist would always give you the same strength dose each time, whereas the criminals from whom you buy heroin now might lace your heroin with fentanyl and make it much more potent in ways that would cause you to inadvertently kill yourself.

Peter Coy

Yeah, yeah. Wow. So I really think you’re on a good track here. The, the, there’s, there’s a feeling that I guess, would you call yourself a libertarian in some respects, or no, not really.

Al Roth

No, I don’t call myself a libertarian. Libertarians, people who call themselves libertarians, often don’t like market regulation of any sort, but I’m a market designer. I think that good regulations help markets work well. So, so, so, I’m not opposed to regulated markets, and neither you know when you talk to libertarians, often they’ve read The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, but he wasn’t in favor of laissez-faire. He writes quite eloquently about how markets need good rules in order to work well,

Peter Coy

so you’re more, if anything, you would be a Hayekian rather than dyed in the wool, pure libertarian.

Al Roth

Yeah, well, I’m a market designer. I think we have

Peter Coy

designer, yeah, here we are. It’s a little bit like engineering in a way, right?

Al Roth

It is, and I have a well-known paper called The Economist as Engineer.

Peter Coy

Yeah, yeah, yeah, fascinating. Well, Al, I’m not going to take too long here. You’ve been very generous with your time. I want to just tell readers once again that the name of the book is Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. It’s a great read, and it’s been great having a chance to speak to Nobel laureate Al Roth about it. Al, thanks for being on the show.

Al Roth

Thanks for having me.