The Nobel Laureate Who’d Buy Your Kidney

Welcome to Two Drinks, the column where The Free Press catches up with a newsmaker, trendsetter, or power broker. This week, Peter Coy speaks to Al Roth, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose latest book asks all of the most provocative moral questions: Why is it easy to buy drugs but hard to hire a hit man? Who decides it’s wrong to eat horses? Why is Iran the world’s only country where selling your kidney is legal? “I use ‘repugnance’ as a technical term,” he said.

I first spoke with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth two years ago. He had invented a lifesaving algorithm for matching unrelated kidney donors and recipients, and I was writing about it. We bantered a bit—I found out that he never graduated from high school and that he has an honorary seventh-degree black belt from the Japan Karate Association—but mostly he talked about market design, his favorite topic, in the respectful way a civil engineer talks about a particularly fine bridge.

So I was a little surprised to find out that Roth has a wide streak of provocation in his personality. It comes across in his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work, published in May. In a mild, just-asking-questions tone, Roth digs into one prohibited or controversial activity after another: buying sex, eating horses, selling organs, assisting suicide, carrying a stranger’s baby. He asks why many of these activities are prohibited or restricted even though some people clearly want them. And he thinks about whether it’s possible to design markets for them in a way that preserves people’s freedom to transact while protecting those who don’t want to.