Why Doing the “Right Thing” Can Make Everything Worse (#316)

What can we do when doing the morally “right” thing produces worse outcomes? And what if some of society’s strongest moral instincts are preventing us from solving problems we all agree are terrible? Alvin Roth is a Stanford professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has helped redesign real-world systems, including kidney exchanges and the way doctors are matched with hospitals. His new book, Moral Economics, tackles a harder category of problems: markets and behaviors we find ...