Alvin Roth, Nobel Memorial Prize–winning economist, invites us to contemplate how freedoms that provoke controversy can eventually become ordinary.
At present, tens of thousands of Americans with end-stage kidney disease endure protracted waits for a viable transplant, which are scarce and typically originate from deceased donors or relatives. Yet Roth maintains that there isn’t truly a kidney shortage, telling Reason‘s Nick Gillespie in a recent interview. “You have two. You only need one. There’s a failure of price mechanisms.”
If those requiring kidneys could purchase surplus organs from the broader population, interminable waiting lists—and the deaths associated with them—would rapidly disappear. But such a market is not permitted, because the kidney trade is taboo and banned in the United States. It exemplifies what Roth labels a “repugnant market…which consists of repugnant transactions,” exchanges “that some people would like to engage in, and others who aren’t obviously harmed by [them] feel should not be allowed.”
When those who “aren’t obviously harmed” succeed, governments move to shut the market down.
And once you start looking, repugnant markets appear in many corners. Gambling is one area that has sparked controversy lately: Last Monday, Gov. Tim Walz (D–Minn.) signed legislation prohibiting prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket within his state. Anyone found hosting, promoting, or aiding the operation of a prediction market could face felony charges under the new law.
Supporters of the measure may argue that gambling is a vice and a pathway to addiction that wrecks lives, yet bans on repugnant markets often yield unforeseen results. In Minnesota’s case, a possible consequence could be that a former Polymarket participant ends up wagering with a bookmaker who is less trustworthy and less inclined toward peaceful dealings.
The war on drugs presents another, perhaps more extreme, illustration. “I’d love to eradicate heroin entirely,” Roth remarks, “and I’m willing to concede that heroin is immoral.” Yet after decades of stringent criminalization, expanded state authority, and civil liberties infringements, heroin use persists, sustained by a violent underground market. “There’s a lot of heroin. There are many overdoses. There’s extensive disruption of communities. There’s a losses in human welfare,” Roth notes.
Banning the kidney trade likewise results in “lost human welfare.” So how can we restore that welfare?
Legitimizing a repugnant market requires not only legal support, Roth argues, but broad “social backing” as well, to sustain its legal protection and to ensure there are enough participants to keep the market viable. “Like a lot of things,” he adds, the process of building consensus “moves slowly.”
But precedent exists: social backing for previously forbidden practices can surge dramatically. Gay marriage, once outlawed nationwide, had support below 30 percent well into the 1990s. Today it is legal and recognized everywhere in the United States, with broad public approval—now, fewer than 30 percent oppose it, according to Gallup.
The shift is often aided by new technologies as well: abortion pills, for example, have helped improve opportunities for women in conservative states following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Even as the state continues to limit numerous freedoms and clamp down on repugnant markets of all kinds, notable progress is being made in certain areas. The movement toward liberating repugnant markets tends to be lengthy and arduous—but freedom, Roth argues, can arrive quickly at the end.
