A Nobel laureate in economics argues the bans we pass to protect our morals are quietly killing people and the data backs him up. Why the line between a market we allow and one we forbid is mostly an accident of disgust. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

My guest won the 2012 Nobel Prize for designing the systems that match kidney donors to patients who would otherwise die waiting.

We cover why it’s easy to buy heroin but hard to hire a hitman, what surrogacy bans actually do to the babies they’re meant to protect, why paying kidney donors could end a shortage that kills thousands a year, and the trade-off statement he wants every lawmaker to say out loud.

He has been called an organ trafficker. He explains why that’s the point.

What you’ll hear:

Why banning something that people want often makes it more dangerous

The kidney market America won’t build and what that silence costs

What the hitman vs. heroin ban asymmetry tells us about effective prohibition

The McCormick statement: the trade-off acknowledgment most policy debates refuse to make

How prediction markets are eroding the boundary between public and private information

Whether Milton Friedman was right to be embarrassed by the economics Nobel

There’s no such thing as a solution. There are only trade-offs.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Who gets called an organ trafficker?

02:26 What makes a transaction repugnant?

03:14 Why bans without support create black markets

03:36 Heroin is easy. Hitmen are not. Why?

04:44 Prohibition, NASCAR, and moonshine

07:26 Surrogacy: legal here, criminal in Europe

12:30 When money turns something legal into a crime

14:28 Can religion corrupt a market?

15:56 Who actually pays for college?

21:38 The Enhanced Games: drugs as a marketing platform

25:30 Adderall, Erd0151s, and the science of getting sharper

30:58 Why AI makes market congestion worse before better

35:00 100,000 kidney failures a year. 30,000 transplants.

36:44 Portland decriminalized heroin. It failed.

39:22 The trade-off statement politicians refuse to make

41:14 Can you legalize sex work and shrink trafficking?

47:42 Kahneman chose to die. Who should decide?

48:30 Should we put GLP-1 drugs in the water?

56:12 America is the Saudi Arabia of blood plasma

01:00:54 Prediction markets and inside information

01:01:34 Sports gambling is more addictive than it looks

01:11:40 Peter Nobel called economics a marketing stunt

01:13:32 Is economics a real science?

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Featured Guest:

Alvin Roth website: https://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/

Moral Economics (book): https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Economics-Prostitution-Controversial-Transactions/dp/1541702018

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

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