> Markets become the primary tool of societal organisation
Another way to frame that is people buying what they want and people making and selling what other people want.
Sounds good to me!
Another way to frame that is people buying what they want and people making and selling what other people want.
Sounds good to me!
Markets are a tool in service of humanity, but market dominated thinking abounds and we get this tweeted with a straight face by think-tank people:
> I still believe in markets. Markets do not fail us. We fail markets.
1. https://twitter.com/AmityShlaes/status/1315793783951327234
Edit: I thought I recognised your username, and bet that you're the most upvoted user that's replied to me on this site. If you've written about your time on this site and how you got started on it, I'd be interested to read it.
But we already have a distribution system for vaccines. Where did you get your last flu shot? The local drug store, a market based system. I see the government busy trying to reproduce overnight an efficient, working system that's already there sitting idle. Of course they'll fail.
I phoned my local drug store and asked if I can make an appointment for a covid vaccination. They replied they have no idea when or if they'd ever get any vaccination supply. Meanwhile, the state says they have a severe lack of people who can give vaccinations. (I know where they are hiding, they're behind the counter at your local pharmacy.)
The solution is simple and stupidly obvious. Distribute vaccines to the zillion pharmacies, and pay them per vaccination in arm. They're not going to waste any time vaccinating people.
I seriously do not see why the wheel has to be reinvented here.
I live in the UK. I compare the vaccination distribution (run by the NHS and Public Health) and the Test and Trace system (contracted out at huge expense) and I see that private provision fucked it up.
For vaccination we've don over 5% of the population, over 4 million people, have received at least one dose and it's working well although there is tension between vaccinating the most at risk (old people and people living in poverty) vs people at lower risk.
For test and trace, well, read this: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...
---begin quote---
Contracts worth £7 billion have been signed with 217 public and private organisations to provide supplies, services and infrastructure, including test laboratories and call handlers for tracing. NHST&T has plans to sign a further 154 contracts, worth £16.2 billion, by March 2021. In total, 70% of early contracts by value were directly awarded without competition under emergency measures that were in use across government.
International comparisons show that outsourcing is a part of many testing systems but is unusual for tracing. A range of stakeholders have queried why the government did not involve local authorities more in its initial approach to tracing, given their previous experience in this area. The government did not document with a business case the basis for the delivery model it initially chose until September.
A target to provide results within 24 hours of in-person testing in the community has not been met. Turnaround within 24 hours peaked in June at 93% but subsequently deteriorated to reach a low of 14% in mid-October before rising to 38% in early November.
NHST&T did not plan for the sharp rise in testing demand in September when schools and universities reopened. Laboratories processing community swab tests were unable to keep pace with the volume of tests and experienced large backlogs, which meant NHST&T had to limit the number of tests available and commission extra help from other laboratories. Rationing of tests meant some people were told to visit test sites hundreds of miles away.
It is important to get hold of people with COVID-19 or who might have been exposed to it quickly so they can self-isolate, but the service saw increases in the time taken to reach people between May and mid-October, before improvements in the last two weeks of October.
At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.
National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.
Whereas for vaccination the goal is clearer & easier to track. Which is not to say that you can't mess it up, of course, witness almost every other country.
Although I don't actually know whether they handle the flu vaccine, or if this is something you get at private pharmacies instead.
As for making an appointment; here in Norway people will be notified by the local authority when they can get it. Doses are being dealt out in age groups, oldest first plus those especially at risk.
Here in WA state, only one third of the doses delivered have been administered.
Heck, Amazon is headquartered here. If I was the governor, I'd have gotten Jeff Bezos on the horn 6 weeks ago with "halp!" I bet Amazon would love to help out, they'd make some money and it'd be great PR.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-vaccine/amazon...
Good grief! Norway is slower than neighbouring countries because we have a decentralised health system because we have such a scattered population and the health service has decided to use the existing infrastructure rather than try to create a new more centralised system on the fly. In addition a substantial fraction of the doses are held back to ensure that all those who have had one dose will get the second within a reasonable time.
The average is about half of the distributed doses have been administered
But pretty much all European health systems are performing faster than your example and they are pretty much all using the existing public health system. At least here, Norway, there seems to be no evidence that involving private actors would do any better. In the UK they have vaccinated (first dose) 8.5% of the population just using the NHS. The US doesn't seem that far behind on average with 5.7%. Norway is 1.4%
And also surely adding more organizations to the existing system risks running into a version of Brook's law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
ETA: looks like you edited your comment. The original (and rather tone deaf) comment was: "I'm curious what is lost by people doing what they want to do."
Your examples are not examples of a properly set up market system. They are spinning off what are called "externalities", which are costs not born by either the buyer or the seller. A properly set up market would apply those costs to the producer.
An example of this is CO2 emission should be taxed, not regulated.
We are not blessed to be living in a perfect world that can be set up for an ideal market system. For the last four decades, these externalities have gotten ramped up to fever pitch. I'm interested in your take on how, in this world, we get to a point where ALL of the above consequences can be forestalled through HN's favourite hard-on: deregulation and market forces run amok.
Basically, taxing the externalities is the market based solution. Banning is a ham-fisted inefficient method.
Two things governments are good at: taxing, and starting wars. Why not take advantage of the first?
It even has the advantage of being a revenue source for the government, rather than a revenue sink. The government has to tax something, why not externalities?
Around here, the government decided to tax plastic shopping bags. Geez, just put a tax on it instead. Raise the tax until plastic shopping bags become scarce enough. Then if someone really wants a plastic shopping bag to use, say, to clean up after their dog, they can if they're willing to pay. Much better than being charged with a crime.
Also, many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market. Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues (we'd agree on that). However, the existence of such participants in the discussion needs to be acknowledged, and it very quickly feels like you're pointless talking about semantics.
Well, yeah.
“Free market” doesn't mean “free of regulation of which I personally disapprove”. If government has a thumb on the scale deliberately skewing outcomes, it's not a free market.
> Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues
What does ideology have to do with that? One can oppose l’aissez faire capitalism (which Info, heartily) and recognize that Pigovian taxes are contrary to it.
It isn't considered that by economists. It's a means of internalizing the externalities, not deciding what, when, how and by whom to provide goods and services.
> many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market.
They're wrong. Externalities are pushing costs onto other people without their consent, which is not free market.
Every market has rules, and the term "free market" tends to degenerate into "market with rules that I happen to like", which isn't particularly useful.
Same for the "central planning" thing. It's always a matter of degree.
1989 called, they want their dichotomies back.
People are not machines, we are members of a community and just because someone will pay you to do something doesn't mean you should.
In any case, the example is not compelling. It seems that making drugs illegal exacerbates the crime problems associated with drugs. It doesn't fix things. The War on Drugs is a near total failure.
> What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
This is still the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's not that markets lose or destroy human experience, it's that it gets lost when we organize our society only via markets.
It's also a bit of a silly question because everybody will have a different answer depending on their personal moral and value system, but generally it will be things that are not easily priced.
Sticking with the theme of literacy of the overall discussion here, poetry comes to mind.
Poetry has notoriously low market value, and really poems are almost inherently not a good to be traded on a market. They are rooted in an oral tradition of poems being shared in social settings. At least in my personal experience, this is still largely the case. And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent, perhaps because there are some poems they find beautiful, or they tickle the brain in just the right way.
But again, poetry is just one example and I'm not even saying that it's the most important one, it's just that they fit particularly well into the larger discussion here.
> not a good to be traded on a market
Sure it is. Mostly in the form of music lyrics, but also people make and sell poetry books all the time.
> And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent
I don't know anyone who doesn't like poetry in the form of a song. People still sing along in social settings, too, like concerts, church services and birthday parties.
> It's also a bit of a silly question
Not at all. I would expect someone posing the theory to at least have something at the top of their mind they're regarding as a problem example. For you it's poetry, and I showed that poetry isn't suffering in the least under the yoke of a market system.
Right, but people end up writing and sharing poetry despite the market, not because of it. Poets tend to be rather poor, they aren't incentivized by money.
If we organized our society in a way where money and markets were the only incentives, then poetry would be lost.
That's what I keep repeating in the hope that maybe it will sink in eventually: It's not that markets actively destroy things like poetry. It's that markets don't help those things thrive despite people valuing them highly (which can of course lead to destruction indirectly by crowding out, but that's a separate point).
This is because the correlation between what people value and what ends up having monetary value is too weak.[0] In theory one could try to fix that, but that has never worked in practice and there are good reasons why it never will. Trying to make it so is the same type of folly as trying to implement pure communism: it doesn't take human nature into account.[1]
[0] As was also observed in a sibling thread where the discussion went to pricing externalities.
[1] For what it's worth, this is a very common criticism of traditional microeconomics, i.e. humans really don't "work" in the way that traditional microeconomics says they do. The theory is built on a broken foundation. This is actually really well known among economists and why subfields like behavioural economics exist. For some reason this knowledge just doesn't percolate to the wider public.
Why are you doing those things?
And are you really going to pretend that manipulative marketing isn't a thing? Wow.
But I'll gladly make my point once more: manipulative marketing is a thing.
And you're either plain ignorant or blinded by ideology if you really needed all those examples.
What is the most important social setting that markets obliterate?
Friendly societies (a type of customer owned insurer) Building societies (which used to be local, but are now essentially national scale banks) Various types of sports and social clubs (which often put on entertainment but also hosted lots of recreational activities)
There is more, too, but these things got in the way of the financialised, neoliberal world that was under construction. What happened was policies then allowed them to change unrecognisably or just atrophy away to nothing. They all represented ways of being involved in the running of your community. Most are now irrelevant or gone.
But yes, there are new things and they are good. The internet pretty much raised me as a teenager.
RE: pints, think I'd trade a finger for a pint with some good company at the moment. Alas.
I, too, miss hefting a pint with my friends. Sigh.