Alvin E. Roth

In 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, using randomized controlled trials to test what actually works in education and healthcare rather than relying on theory alone.

And Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won the prize for their work on market design and matching theory, which led to practical systems for things like efficiently matching kidney donors with patients who need them.

These are economists designing systems that literally allocate resources to people based on the value those people assign to them, in the most efficient way possible, and the results are measurable and replicable.

That is science working the way it should.

Because the problem with swapping is I want what you have, but you don't want what I have.

So I created a swapping chain, which is, uh, I borrowed from a gentleman called Alvin Roth, who won the Nobel Prize for economics, and he created something called a kidney chain, where he saved thousands of people's lives by pooling kidneys and then connecting the pooled kidneys with all the people.

So instead of me giving you my kidney, Joe, um, I'll give my kidney to Bob, Bob will give hers to, Bob will give his to, and so on, as it became a Became a chain.

So that was, um, that was that solution.

It's, it's virtually impossible- To feel like we matter or to make anyone else feel like they matter, or to express mattering to others if you fundamentally do not feel you matter.

And another one that was eye-opening to me is I, I happened to have Nobel laureate Alvin Roth on the podcast, and he's known for his research on markets, financial markets.

Well, I had been speaking with Jamil Zaki.

They're, they're both out of Stanford, and Jamil kind of studies cynicism, and he, he... as he and I were, were talking about my book, the marketplace of mattering came up, that we are living in a mattering marketplace where we are constantly having to prove every single day.

With AI, I think, you know, you do have powerful tools that could use properly, you know, solve matching problems that are very difficult to solve otherwise.

You know, Al Roth has thought deeply about these things.

Former guest on the pod.

Now, you know, he probably, you know, and as this wonderful new book, I mean, you know, there's a lot of things going on in addition to sort of solving the matching problem and having to do with incentives and even norms and values in the world that he lives in.

Smash.

I want to add that my college thesis advisor, Al Roth, who is an economist, did a lot of the design for this chained, altruistic kidney donation.

Amazing.

So

It might be putting more weight on quantitative rather than qualitative information.

So just in, in all other fields and all other types of markets, if we are like to be like Al Roth and expand it to other types of markets, let's say the sports players market.

Yes, people are using Moneyball-type strategies, being inspired by Billy Beane, but there will always be then advances, thinking, "Well, what is the next generation of statistics which people haven't looked at?" So with baseball, I think what Billy Beane was about was looking at walks, not just hits.

And then now people are looking at, well, what is the character of this baseball player? Is this somebody who will live up to their potential? Or to use the analogy that we just looked at, get caught up in their own hype and think, "I'm a great young athlete and I don't need to try anymore." There's been so many stories of people with great potentials which are not fulfilled.

Thank you.

And in the book, you write about the future being man plus human rather than man versus machine, and I...

It made me think of another observation that Al Roth shared with me.

He argued that when we ban markets, we rarely eliminate demand.