Some ideas are downright repugnant. Like …paying for human organs.
On the other hand, is it any less repugnant to let thousands of people die every year for want of a kidney that a lot of people might be willing to give up if they were able to be compensated?
Our new podcast ventures into the realm of repugnant ideas. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed or listen live via the link in box at right.) The fact is that the repugnance border shifts over time. Selling eggs or sperm, "renting" a womb — not long ago, all of this was considered way out of bounds. So was birth control and adoption. Go back a bit further in history: currency speculation, charging interest on loans, even selling life insurance — these practices, too, were almost universally felt to be repugnant.
Will the border shift for human organs as well? Should there be a legal market for organs? (At the moment, only Iran has one.) And if not, what should we be doing to help alleviate the massive world demand for transplantable organs, especially as the increase in diseases like diabetes continue to drive kidney failure?
Steve Levitt kicks off our journey through the repugnant by describing why economists can be useful in such conversations:
Economists are pretty much immune to repugnance. Either by birth or by training, economists have their mind open, or skewed in just such a way that instead of thinking about something in terms whether something it's right or wrong, they think about it in terms of whether it's efficient whether it makes sense…and many times the things that are most repugnant are the things that are quite efficient — but for other reasons, subtle reasons sometimes, are completely and utterly unacceptable.
The star of the podcast is Harvard economist Al Roth (the dean of repugnant ideas), who has thought a great deal about the organ problem. But more than that, he has actually done his part to help, helping to found the New England Program for Kidney Exchange.
