Morally questionable, economically efficient

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

There are tons of markets that don't exist because people just don't want to allow a market – for whatever reason, people feel icky about putting a price on something. For example: Surrogacy is a legal industry in parts of the United States, but not in much of the rest of the world. Assisted end-of-life is a legal medical transaction in some states, but is illegal in others.

When we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering something apparently icky, economics asks us to look a little more closely.

Today on the show, we have three recommendations of things that may feel kinda wrong but economics suggests may actually be the better way. First: Could the matching process of organ donation be more efficient if people could buy and sell organs? Then: Should women seek revenge more often in the workplace? And finally, what if insider trading is actually useful?

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Greg Rosalsky. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.
0:08.5	With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next. Learn more at concur.com.
0:17.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:22.0	A couple decades ago, Al Roth was working on solving this problem.
0:28.0	People who needed kidneys weren't getting matched effectively with people who had kidneys to donate.
0:35.0	Part of the kind of work I do is called matching theory.
0:38.0	Al helped create this like beautiful elegant algorithm that would match kidney donors with recipients.
0:46.1	You obviously won a pretty big prize for this work.
0:49.3	I did, I recommend it.
0:52.0	You like the prize, it's a good prize.
0:53.2	Yeah, a week long of parties.
0:55.4	The prize he won?
0:56.5	It was the Nobel Prize in economics.
0:59.2	As you might know, Al's matching work vastly improved the way people get kidneys and saved literally thousands of lives.
1:07.2	Like in the year 2000 before Al's work there were only two paired kidney transplants.
1:13.6	Two, thanks to Al's algorithm,
1:16.1	there are now about a thousand per year.
1:18.9	But, Al says, his Nobel Prize winning algorithm, it isn't even the best way to get people kidneys.
1:26.4	Technically he says the best way is to grow kidneys in a lab so it's not even the second best way.
1:31.3	I'm just envisioning you doing all this matching work knowing that
1:36.0	this is like a little goofy like there's a easier way. I hope it's a lot goofy
1:41.3	the work I'm going anyway.
	...

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