This is one of this things that really trips my ethics wire. On surface analysis of course we don’t want things to cost more when people need them most. However, something like Ubers surge pricing can help allocate a scare resource so that the people who only kind of want it don’t use it and instead leave it for those who really need it.
For the things like sanitizer and masks right now I don’t hate the idea of them being more expensive to dissuade those who don’t really need them thereby leaving them for those who do.
Of course some sector of society will both need them and not be able to afford the higher price.
It’s one of those things I haven’t really been able to land on.
I genuinely don’t know the answer to this one so curious of other people’s takes.
Of course not. The idea is that two people with equal money will pay a different price based on need.
It’s a bad snow storm. Person A wants to take the only Uber left to go to a movie. Person B needs to take it to a medical appointment. Person A would pay regular price but not the surge price thereby leaving the only Uber for person B to take to the doctor.
This of course assumes A and B can afford to pay the same.
I think the idea is that the movie person isn’t making his decision knowing anything about the doctor person. He just won’t spend the money on the higher price to see a movie which happens to leave the last Uber available for the doctor person. Both are making a rational choice that wouldn’t be available if there wasn’t a price surge.
Not really though. In your scenario there was already an Uber at the location. I’m talking about Ubers coming in from from other location, or drivers who weren’t planning to drive, logging in because of the increased fares.
I suspect like most capitalistic fantasies the situations in which this is a positive are mostly theoretical and the ones where it is a negative are far more common and realistic.
Economists probably overwhelmingly agree that price gouging and surge pricing maximize efficiency and I don’t see a reason to doubt them, so one way in which those action would always be evil would be if it is always evil to prioritize maximizing efficiency over other concerns.
If you want to argue against price gouging, you probably need to identify which principles are more important than efficiency and show that price gouging violates those principles.
I don’t think I’m any different. I don’t think I ever really argued for violence; I just pointed out the conditions where political violence made sense. It just happened that at least some of those conditions actually exist, so it made people uncomfortable that I was creating space for things they don’t like to be considered rational.
I really doubt that and it’s probably close to a decent way to separate price gouging from surge pricing. What we generally think of as gouging happens during unpredictable short-term events where it’s impossible for production to meet demand before demand disappears.
There are several reasons why price gouging could be more efficient. It discourages hoarders by making it more expensive to buy too much of scarce resources. It encourages sellers to redirect those resources to areas in need by using higher prices to signal that their goods and services are in greater demand.
In theory, that forces people to consider how much they need a thing and to only buy it if they really need it. When there is not a lot to go around, price gouging makes a good more likely to go to people who really need it. And that’s what economists mean by efficiency. Efficient doesn’t mean good. It especially doesn’t mean morally good.
However, maximizing efficiency doesn’t necessarily result in the same outcomes as maximizing justice, such as a Rawlsian preference for benefiting the least advantaged members of society. Price gouging, arguably, makes poor people even worse off in times of crisis, since they are the least likely to be able to afford exorbitant prices. This seems especially unfair when the increased prices are for basic goods deemed necessary for survival. Banning price gouging creates some sort of socialization of suffering, redistributing the pain of scarcity so that all segments of society feel some pain.
Yeah prices surging when supply doesn’t meet demand is more about convincing people to provide more supply than it is about demand. It’s fine and not especially immoral. Immoral is having enough money to buy up a huge amount of the in demand item and doing it just because.
There is no such thing as price gouging. Price gouging laws are like rent control laws. They act as a good litmus test to see if someone is a totally unserious and unthinking person. There is no case for them. Settled issue.
I have a sneaking suspicion that you and I don’t agree on much… but on rent control and price gouging laws we absolutely do. Both are pretty dumb and don’t do much but give one random group of people a payment at the expense of another group of people. And the winners of each exchange aren’t who liberals think they are either.