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Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

economist.com

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Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#451

Post by Kaiyou »

charlesu wrote: post #425
Kaiyou wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity", emphasis on _limited_. Scarcity does not mean shortage. It means you do not have infinite of something.

Scarcity: the state of being scarce or in short supply; shortage. That's the common definition. There's also an economic definition having something to do with limited supply and limitless wants. I'll leave that to the academics. My argument is that there is enough food to feed the hungry and enough shelter to house the poor in the US. If someone has evidence to show otherwise, I'm open to it.

What I'm saying is that it would be self-destructive behavior to give people things for free. It is much better to let people starve in the streets, then to give them both food and housing for free. You'd completely destroy the entire country by facilitating this.

You can give them your own money if it pleases you.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#452

Post by Kaiyou »

ceejayoz wrote: post #399
Kaiyou wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying stuff doesn't facilitate growth. Look at all the toilet paper people buy recently. Where's your growth?

I'm sure toilet paper manufacturers are doing OK right now. The growth in that sector is swallowed up by the overall hard-stop of the entire economy.

They were doing okay before, but they cannot grow, since the increase in demand will not be sustained.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#453

Post by missedthecue »

ceejayoz wrote: post #397
missedthecue wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investment drives growth, not consumption.

Investment requires returns, which mean people have to consume the resulting product, be it goods or services.

Yes, one can't exist without the other, but economically speaking, it's impossible to consume your way to prosperity. You must increase productivity, and this is done through investment.

We tried consuming our way to prosperity during the housing bubble in the early 2000s. That turned out how you might expect.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#454

Post by valuearb »

goatinaboat wrote: post #408
valuearb wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coronavirus wasn’t created by cheap Chinese manufacturing.

You’ve got it backwards. China’s lack of regulation is what makes both cheap manufacturing possible and spread of pandemics inevitable. The wet markets have gone straight back into business.

Wet markets existed when it was a communist economy.

Cheap manufacturing cones from cheap labor, which comes from recently being a third world nation.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#455

Post by perl4ever »

someguydave wrote: post #411
perl4ever wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think the core belief is that supply and demand is a force that can actually cause more supply to come into a market" Everybody believes that, in general. But in the short term, the elasticity of supply with respect to price approaches zero. If we ramped up production though, it would be too late, and then there would be a glut.

How about we let the suppliers and buyers figure that out, rather than having the government get between them with restrictions on how they can contract?

Who are the suppliers? The management of the supermarket figured out that the appropriate thing to do was to ration the product. Are you implying they are not suppliers? There's a whole chain of people that work to bring products to people, hence the phrase "supply chain".

If some other store did not ration the product, then they would have empty shelves, so I'd go to the one that did.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#456

Post by perl4ever »

lettergram wrote: post #66
perl4ever wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to get kleenex and paper towels saturday because the grocery store is now limiting people to one purchase per day. I am sure there are people who need more than that, and any system of rationing should allow for exceptions. But when people insist that a "free" market is inherently correct, it's no different from insisting that your OS scheduler is perfect even though some processes never get to run https:/…

If they had allowed dynamic pricing then people who needed more would probably be willing to pay $10/roll of paper towels Vs the fixed $2/roll. They aren’t necessary for life, so setting fixed prices are why they need hard limits. Seems crazy to me we aren’t seeing a “free market” at play, where both inherently the stores “win” and the people receive the goods they need / can justify.

A grocery store is a "market" and yet it never has been and never will be a "free market" in the idealized sense. You know, everybody knows, that it isn't some sort of free-for-all with product placement on the shelves, right?

The store is competing with other stores, but the management determines what to do within the store without either voting or unregulated competition.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#457

Post by danans »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #396
danans wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was mandated for everyone, for the purpose of rendering those with lower-paying jobs (people of color, immigrants) unemployed So it was mandated for "everyone", but by your own description, not really, because it adjusted another variable - who had a job - by race, which is practically the same thing as being racially exclusionary. This is not so different to how black people in theory got the right to vote afte…

No, it is very different from that. The right to vote in that case was denied purely based upon racial boundaries - it's not like poor white people couldn't vote in the South. Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition. These labor protections in the US are what initially go…

> Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition.

was much more underhanded, not is.

Who cares how it started? Again, many rights we have today started out either explicitly or implicitly limited by race.

Today, the minimum wage is very much about fairness to low wage workers of any race, but especially low income people of color, who are over-represented at the bottom end of the income ladder.

If you arguing against that, you'd be arguing that today's progressive movement is secretly about preserving jobs only for white people, which would be extremely far fetched. It seems more like you are trying to foist the racist rationale for minimum wage from yesteryear upon the far more equitable purpose it serves today, in an perhaps underhanded attempt to discredit today's version.

If you're going to argue against today's minimum wage, you should use arguments relevant to today, i.e. the usual ones you hear from its opponents about how it will bankrupt businesses, and rob the poor of the incentive to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#458

Post by jbay »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #443
jbay wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, who was proposing or even talking about central planning in this thread? I think you're the first. I was going to propose we allocate resources by sacrificing goats to the thirteen forgotten gods of the underworld, and then interpret their bones for wisdom. I just wanted to clarify that when you said higher prices discourage those with lower needs, what you really meant is that it discourages those with lower m…

The other alternatives proposed all over this thread such as purchase quotas, price fixing (stopping gouging), etc. are all central planning solutions. And those types of solutions are worse at efficient resource allocation than pricing and are less likely to get resources where they're needed most regardless of means or desperation. Pricing spreads the capability of resource allocation around. In the central plannin…

You sound very certain about this. Where does that certainty come from?

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#459

Post by quotemstr »

fatbird wrote: post #445
someguydave wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only alternative to “highest bidder wins” is “third party decides”. If people need charity, seeking that charity should be a private matter, not one enforced out the barrel of a gun by uninformed third parties.

Except the whole point of human governance is to delegate that enforcement to a third party that is a just and neutral arbiter. Unless you want to revert to a state of nature and anarchy without laws or money, you're going to have that third party, and if you have it, then you have other options than "highest bidder", which is itself a value choice enforced on other, non-consenting citizens at the the point of a gun.

Too much delegation to a third party is called a command economy and history is full of examples of that approach not working, examples going all the way back to the palace economies of the ancient Minoans. The problem is that no third party has enough information or the right incentives to decide fully who should produce what when --- the problem is called "the calculation problem" and has a huge literature. Decentralizing resource allocation decisions using pricing is the only approach that's been shown to work.

Re: Economists who defend disaster profiteers are wrong

#460

Post by quotemstr »

viklove wrote: post #433
someguydave wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please propose a system of distributing goods that is more "moral" or "fair" than the "highest bidder wins".

Provide a UBI so half the population isn't locked out of bidding entirely. The problem with capitalism is that 1% of the population ends up mega-wealthy, and 50% of the population ends up dirt poor, literally unable to afford food. When that happens, the 1% shouldn't get to decide who gets to eat and who gets to starve (by choosing which ones to employ). There should be some form of basic income to ensure everyone ha…

> In the current situation, if a business owner decides to drop you on the ground, you're literally gonna starve to death in the next month.

That's not true at all. We have an extensive network of assistance programs. Of course these programs can be better in numerous ways. Nevertheless, nobody is starving in the street in the US.

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