The moral dilemmas of the market economy go beyond environmental damage and inequality.

In some cases, all parties to a transaction agree.

They want to do the deal, and that deal has no direct

effect on anybody who's not involved. And yet there are people who think their disapproval

of someone else's business should be grounds for banning that activity. Think selling sex or

drugs or selling organs for transplantation. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. My guest became

fascinated by what he calls repugnant transactions, deals that some people want to engage in,

and others find morally objectionable when he was working at a better way to do kidney donations

so that fewer people have to wait for a suitable organ.

Alvin E. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University

and the George Gunn Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 and his past president of the American Economic Association.

His new book is called Moral Economics, from prostitution to organ sales, what controversial

transactions reveal about how markets work. Alvin, welcome to think. Thank you. You stress here,

repugnant transactions are not the ones people want banned because they

cause obvious harms, right?

These are things people object to because they seem wrong even if nobody is harmed.

Well, I think that's part of the controversy is sometimes that people who object to them

think that someone is harmed, but the harms aren't easily measurable.

And these things we find objectionable are not necessarily the same in every culture, right?

So the U.S. is the world's leading exporter of human plasma. Explain why.

Well, in the U.S., we allow people to be paid for plasma, but in many parts of the world

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