A picture of a tweet of a picture of a New Yorker Article.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/persons-of-interest/what-if-were-thinking-about-inflation-all-wrong
Welcome to 2023 internet! Where everything is now a screenshot from one of the four social media sites sharing a screenshot from another of the four social media sites!
Consider yourself lucky this wasn’t also a screenshot taken from Reddit.
Cory Doctorow, is that you?
Difference is was that we were in a the middle of a global war. I’m not an economist so I don’t know how to make the economy and money just “work” but I would say that a wartime economy is different from a peacetime economy.
Look at the tax setup in the late '40s and early '50s. I think that’s when the max bracket was like 93% for the 1%.
That’s how we get an interstate.
It will all just trickle down…
Any day now… you just wait…
This stuff continued after the war, but there were also costs. Corn syrup and caves full of cheese are a result of agricultural business interventionism in this same period. If you keep going, eventually you become Japan.
I’m a firm believer that there is an answer that results in neither hyper-accumulation of wealth nor red-tape dysfunction, but solutions that sound good to wonks don’t always do well in public politics.
What happens when you have price caps is that there is nothing to scare people away from buying something. Normally, if supply is running low then price will go up, which sees some people start to look for alternatives, reliving pressure on the supply. But if the price is fixed there is no reason to change course, even as the supply dwindles. This is formally known as a shortage.
We already do impose price caps during times of distress, known as price gouging laws. Toilet paper during early COVID is a recent example of what happens when those price caps come into force. That’s what a shortage looks like, and applying price caps more broadly would see that play out across many more goods and services.
What the original text missed is that the US also implemented rationing alongside those price caps to ensure that the shelves weren’t left bare. That is how they were able to manage the shortage. We could do the same, but I think you have a point that the wartime made it easy to claim it is a necessity: “There is a war, so we need to ration” is digestable. “Everything is going well, so we need to ration” is going to raise eyebrows and no doubt see a lot of pushback.
It’s really not that different from a worldwide global pandemic.
Of course it has guts: portions of it are full of crap.
Your government has guts. It’s just a government representing corporations and not people.
No that’s actually caving in to corporate pressure and money instead of standing up for the little guy being oppressed by said corporations. Siding with oppressors is the absolute opposite of having guts.
“caving” is a stretch, one results in much more money in their pocket including funding for their reelection campaigns
The formal definition of shortage is: A situation where an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
Of course, the US didn’t miss the obvious fact that price controls would create a shortage situation – of the real kind, not the pretend “Wah, I can’t find anyone to work for me. There must be a shortage of workers!!” kind that we have to listen to in the news these days.
As such, it recognized that rationing also was necessary to manage the shortage. Are we prepared to do that?
That’s a bizzare-o libertarian definition of “shortage.”
Most people would say that there’s a shortage if there’s an insufficient supply to meet the needs of society. If there’s a shortage of food but there’s no lines at the grocery store because an apple costs $1 million, and so poor people starve at home because they can’t afford the food anyway, libertarians would say that there’s no shortage because the market has found the market clearing price. People who aren’t ideological nutjobs would say there is a shortage because people are staving.
Most people would say that there’s a shortage if there’s an insufficient supply to meet the needs of society.
That is the colloquial use, but it cannot be resolved into anything meaningful. The “needs of society” is completely arbitrary. In fact, the tone of what people think a society needs expands as the supply expands. There is really no end to what a society can come to “need”. You can say there is a shortage of everything by that definition, which makes it a completely useless term.
Which is why the formal definition differs. It actually draws a clear distinction between what is and isn’t a shortage. It can be used to communicate ideas. Your definition, being unresolvable, cannot. Obviously it gets thrown into conversation that way, but only as a shock word to conjure up emotions in the audience, not to tell something to the listener.
People who aren’t ideological nutjobs would say there is a shortage because people are staving.
People starve everyday. I’ve never heard anyone say that we have a shortage (by your definition) of food. How could they? They say 50% of food is wasted, which would imply that we actually have a massive surplus of food.
I think a lot of the opposition to your ‘formal definition’ of a shortage would disappear if you gave examples of credible institutions using that definition.
Also I don’t think it’s true that there were price caps put on toilet paper by the government everywhere there was a TP shortage.
I would propose that a shortage is when inventory is depleted or prices rise such that buyers seek sources previously considered outside the market.
The shortage ends when the novel sources are no longer sought. (Either because novel sources have been normalized and inventory/ prices restored to equilibrium, or traditional sources manage to restore equilibrium making the previouslt novel sources irrelevant).
Note that in my definition it’s only a shortage if it’s inability to buy [or perception/concern therof] that’s motivating the search for novel sources.
Craigslist was considered outside the TP market before the pandemic, and is again considered outside the TP market. During March 2020, it was very much in the market. The shortage had nothing to do with price caps and everything to do with supply chains being unable to handle spikes in demand.
A food shortage is when food inventory in a market is diminished or prices increased to the point that people seek novel sources. Like if people are eating mud in order to not feel hungry, that’s a food shortage.
Wikipedia does indeed refer to a shortage the way he described it. The very next paragraph gave the colloquial definition, which you’ve described. Your response is the direct result of his decision to be obtuse. Don’t feed the trolls.
Ah yes, I’ve been trolled. He is conveniently omitting the part of the definition which specifies in ‘prefect markets’.
I think a lot of the opposition to your ‘formal definition’ of a shortage would disappear if you gave examples of credible institutions using that definition.
I’m afraid I’m not sure what you are trying to get at here.
I would propose that a shortage is when inventory is depleted or prices rise such that buyers seek sources previously considered outside the market.
Sure. I wasn’t referring to you when I said formal, but English is definitely fluid – you can define anything however you want. Restaurants notably have seen a sharp decline in patronage in the last year as rising prices have pushed people to find other, more affordable, places to eat outside of the food service market. Does your definition mean there is a shortage of restaurants?
The shortage had nothing to do with price caps and everything to do with supply chains being unable to handle spikes in demand.
These are inseparable concepts. It’s supply and demand, not supply or demand. In a normally functioning market, a supply chain struggling to produce something people want to have will raise prices to start to scare some buyers away. All else equal, a rise in price will see a decrease in demand. At some point an equilibrium will be found.
Formally speaking, a shortage occurs when that price is unable to rise. This means demand has no reason to change, but the supply issues persist. Instead, you have to use some other control mechanism to deal with the scarcity. First come first served, need-based, and a lottery are some other mechanisms used to work around price not being a functional tool.
If you have ever visited a medical doctor in Canada, which for patients are capped at zero (they are prohibited from accepting payment from you), you may have also felt a shortage. They typically utilize a mixture of first come first served and need-based control mechanisms to determine who gets to see the doctor and who might not. If there was such no cap, the rich would roll in and drop some big money to push themselves to the front of the line, but as you know that’s not allowed to give poor people equal access.
First come first served or a lottery probably isn’t how you want to choose who gets food. That implies someone is going to miss out. Rationing works quite well, though, as proven by the US during the period they imposed price caps.
There has to be some other control mechanism if you remove price as the control mechanism. Rationing is a perfectly fine solution for controlling something like food, but the question remains: Are we prepared to accept that? I struggle to see a “food will now be rationed” declaration going over well.
My first point was about part of the reason you’re getting a negative reaction is that you’re declaring your personal definition of a shortage is a formal definition which is basically claiming that experts agree with you. Please support this claim or stop making it.
Does your definition mean there is a shortage of restaurants?
Restaurant patrons aren’t buying the restaurant, they’re buying food and ambiance etc. Can you give some examples of people looking for what restaurants provide outside of the conventional market?
These are inseparable concepts. It’s supply and demand, not supply or demand. In a normally functioning market…
Yes shortages don’t occur in an ideal market, but ideal markets don’t occur in reality.
…a supply chain struggling to produce something people want to have will raise prices to start to scare some buyers away.
Stores can only raise their prices so many times per day (like physically). Toilet paper factories can only make so much toilet paper in a day they can’t increase production much at the drop of a hat. If I went to the pharmacy and there wasn’t any toilet paper and I went grocery store and there wasn’t any toilet paper, the normal market can’t meet demand so I have to go outside the normal market to get some, that’s a shortage. It’s a shortage whether or not there was a price cap, the fact of the matter was that there was no inventory in the conventional market, that market had a shortage. It doesn’t matter what the price tag on the shelf says, if there is nothing on the shelf, there is a shortage. Yes price caps often create shortages, but they aren’t identical to shortages.
Formally speaking, a shortage occurs when that price is unable to rise.
Formally according to whom? Shortages seem to occur even when price are allowed to rise.
If you have ever visited a medical doctor in Canada, which for patients are capped at zero (they are prohibited from accepting payment from you), you may have also felt a shortage.
Medical salaries aren’t what cause doctor shortages in Canada. The shortages are caused by supply restrictions. The government and college of physicians in medicine restrict the number of doctors allowed to enter the work force (to limit expenditure, and keep individual earnings high respectively). Many physicians operate on a fee for service model so while the fees are fixed (renegotiated every few years) so in many cases there isn’t really a limit to how much a doctor can earn. In fact increasing doctor pay sometimes reduces doctor supply, because now they don’t need to work over time to maintain their level of spending.
My first point was about part of the reason you’re getting a negative reaction is that you’re declaring your personal definition of a shortage is a formal definition
I’m still not sure I understand. I feel no negativity. I have no feelings towards this at all. One would have to be quite unhinged to have feelings about a definition of a word. There was that really super strange, emotionally-packed “Neo-liberal” rant above, but that was not me. Perhaps that is the mixup?
Restaurant patrons aren’t buying the restaurant
That is quite true. What I mean is a shortage of the service a restaurant provides. I indicated it was a food service market, not a business market, so it seemed clear enough from my vantage point. I don’t see how a food service market could sell a business? Is it fair to say a food market sells farm businesses? But, indeed, communication is hard.
Stores can only raise their prices so many times per day (like physically).
Totally. That is another possible external mechanism which could see price being prevented from rising.
Medical salaries aren’t what cause doctor shortages in Canada.
Nobody said anything about salaries. In fact, the majority of doctors in Canada are self-employed, so a doctor collecting a salary, while not completely unheard of, would not be common enough to speak to around doctors broadly absent of a declaration of a personal definition which includes the self-employed. Formally, salary only refers to employee -> employer relationships.
Are these repetitive misinterpretations a result of me not being clear? I stated the cap was zero, which alone should indicate that it is not in reference to any kind of salary or billing, and I gave even more detail about what was meant in the parenthesis, so it again seemed like there was enough information there. How can I do better to make myself more clear next time?
The accusation someone made that you were a crazy neoliberal was because when you said:
The formal definition of shortage is: A situation where an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
You were saying that price caps ARE shortages. Which is ridiculous and untrue. It seemed you were saying that there wouldn’t be shortages if there were no regulations. Which is ridiculous and untrue. You probably should have decried the injustice of our food distribution system before saying there isn’t a food shortage. Like when Haitians were eating mud so they wouldn’t feel hungry while starving to death, you should acknowledge the injustice and dysfunction of the market, and propose better terminology.
If you had said where you were getting your definition from I could have understood why you were insisting your definition is correct while failing to capture some pretty obvious failures of the market.
I think you believe you’re using the definition as it’s given in Wikipedia for example. But read what it says carefully:
In economic terminology, a shortage occurs when for some reason (such as government intervention, or decisions by sellers not to raise prices) the price does not rise to reach equilibrium. In this circumstance, buyers want to purchase more at the market price than the quantity of the good or service that is available, and some non-price mechanism (such as “first come, first served” or a lottery) determines which buyers are served.
It’s the second sentence that’s the definition of a shortage. The first sentence is a cause of shortages, but the shortage is inadequacy of supply described in the second sentence.
I was lazy with terminology re doctor salaries I understand the distinction but didn’t think it was important. I thought you were saying that if doctors could be paid more there would be more doctors this alleviating the shortage. You were actually saying that if people had to pay incrementally for medical care, there wouldn’t be a shortage because people would decide they didn’t want it.
It wasn’t clear because you didn’t specify price cap. Medical service doesn’t really occur in classical market at all. There is a price but it’s paid through insurance contributions implemented through the tax system. Medical service is also a terrible example of basic market principals because medical service isn’t a commodity. The value of critical life saving treatment is all the money the buyer has.
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