Al Roth on Why People Should Be Free to Sell Their Kidneys

One of the thought experiments I talked about in my book is to think about why it's so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Should we allow people to buy and sell kidneys? What about Prostitution.

Should that be legal or illegal? Is it a good idea to prohibit the sale of hard drugs like meth or heroin? Or should we legalize all drugs? How should we think about people who struggle with fertility and pay somebody to carry their child to term? Is surrogacy

a good idea that empowers people to start a family or is it a form of uh exploitation of vulnerable women who are actually doing that work that should be outlawed? Well, the best person to talk to these questions is Alvin Roth. Al is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Stanford University who has uh pioneered the field of designing markets. If you were a resident after medical school, if you sent your kid to a public school in a big American city, Earl probably helped to design the mechanism by which you were allocated or your child was allocated to a place in those institutions.

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