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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

> There is no such thing as a shortage in a free market, by definition.

Nonsense. Supply and demand are not perfectly elastic. Consider a simplified hypothetical world where Alice harvests carrots that magically fall from heaven, Alice and Bob need 10 carrots per day to survive, and a total of 15 carrots fall from heaven every day. There is no other source of food. Alice eats ten carrots, and sells five to Bob. Bob's carrot-demand is at least ten carrots, but he can't buy them at any price, no matter how desperately he may need them to keep starvation at bay.

Yes, there is such a thing as a shortage.

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Go back and read what I wrote again. What you are describing is a market with artificially constrained supply, not a free market.

If you're defining "free market" that strictly, then I don't see how your original post has any relevance. Shortages might not exist under your definition of "free market", but if that's the case then we clearly don't have a free market and properties of a free market are irrelevant to discussions of any real economy in existence.

The article is about the job market for engineers in the SF area. What specifically about that market is not free?

I have been a hiring manager in that market since 1999 and know from direct experience that there has never been a shortage during the period. I can hire as many as I want, provided my bosses are willing to pay the market rate. The federal government stopped imposing maximum wage controls decades ago. The state government blocks most non-compete employment contracts. There is a huge supply of potential engineering employees currently living in other parts of the country or working in non-engineering fields who would take SF area engineering jobs at the right price. I have met plenty of locals who used to work as engineers and are now homemakers, lawyers, schoolteachers, writers, EMTs, scuba instructors, etc.

This is a real economy that exists right now and it looks pretty close to free.

There are only a finite number of people in the world. So even if all of them knew how to program, a task requiring 10 billion programmers would have a supply shortage. Therefore, the statement "there cannot be a shortage of programmers" is false. Therefore, the market for programmers cannot be a free market.

BTW, I still agree with you that it's "pretty free." And I definitely agree with you that it's generally possible to find qualified programmers. I've never tried to hire and not found at least one qualified candidate that wanted to do the job, mainly by being honest about how our offer stacks up against the others. If we can't pay enough to hire an expert, we hire a potential expert that would take the wage and train them. The lower the wage, the longer we are going to have to train them.

But there's still a difference between "a pretty darn free market" and "the living avatar of the ideal free market," which is what it sounded like you were trying to assert. :)

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