How can two people being prevented to perform an exchange make things better globally? I don’t think that obvious at all. In fact allowing the exchange will make things better globally, by definition, because more people will be better off, while no one not engaging in the exchange will be worse off (unless you consider maybe envy).
The same possible dynamic with schools is, according to the article, one reason school trades aren't allowed. Strategizing traders could mimic interest in attending popular school X, but really intend to trade a school X place for their true preference later. Everyone who isn't strategizing that way is worse-off or no-better-off when the strategic behavior is allowed.
Note that more complex rules with more potential for strategizing don't just inconvenience individuals. More complex tax codes or regulatory codes, too, tend to disadvantage e.g. small businesses that can't afford legal teams to strategically take advantage of non-obvious consequences of the rules. The small businesses aren't "envious" that bigger ones have a higher laywer-to-engineer ratio. Small business employees aren't necessarily any more foolish than big-co employees, except in specific matters of legal interpretation and strategizing. They just want less exploitable rules so that facially-optimal and actually-optimal behaviors stay closer to each other.
That's true, but the existence of resellers signals that the band and the venue could have made more money by structuring their prices differently
It being valid in one instance does not justify it at every instance.
> How can two people being prevented to perform an exchange make things better globally? I don’t think that obvious at all.
It is an instance of an optimization problem. It is algorithmically true that there are instances of optimization problems where local strategies, e.g hill climbing or trade between individuals, can only find local optima. Since the real world is far more complicated than any particular optimization problem...
This does not even touch market failures such as externalities where exchange isn't even aware of all the interested parties involved.
Frankly, this whole business about trade being better than any other way of distributing resources is so naive it boggles the mind how it can be such a widespread meme. Except, of course, for the fact that millions of dollars of propaganda are pumped into it by institutions far larger than individuals who have an interest in individuals thinking they're playing the same game and it's the best game in town.
You follow with angry anti-market rethoric but you never explain how a number of people trading places in schools, according to their own interest, makes anything worse for those not involved in an exchange.
Your assertion that trade always implies that both parties are better off is just wrong, that's my only point. That you build an ideology around that premise is none of my business; I didn't propose any normative philosophy about trade.
> You follow with angry anti-market rethoric but you never explain how a number of people trading places in schools, according to their own interest, makes anything worse for those not involved in an exchange.
I just pointed out that the premise to your reasoning did not really hold. If the premise doesn't hold then your position might be justified, but it hasn't been justified. If you can't entertain the possibility that you're wrong, then I don't know what to say; perhaps peruse the other lines of reasoning that were considered in this submission's comments?
P.S. just because i'm dismissive doesn't mean i'm angry
I have never made such an assertion, I've only said that in this specific instance free trade would have made both parties come out better off (which is indisputable -- both students would then be in their preferred school!), and that the judge's rationalization for forbidding students to swap their lottery results can be extrapolated as an anti-free trade argument.
We can discuss whether free trade always leads to better outcomes if you want, but that is not the point I am making in this thread. But in this instance it clearly does.
On the other hand you never explain WHY you think what I'm saying is wrong. You mentioned local optima, but the exchange pushes the end result towards the global optimum! What does exchange have to be "aware of all the interested parties involved"? If it is consensual and mutually beneficial to the parties involved, why do other parties even matter?
You said my premise doesn't hold, but you never explained why do you think so. I can't accept that just because you say so.
Explain to me what is wrong in this reasoning:
1) We got each other's preferred school; 2) We swap schools; 3) Now two students are happier than they were before; the rest remains the same as they were. 4) Repeat this process for more pairs of students and each time two people will emerge happier than they were before the exchange.
How does that not lead to a better global outcome?
If you can trade, then the right strategy is to rank the most popular school first so that you can trade it for the school you actually want.
No, the definition of consensual trade is that they would think they were better off. That people know their exact preferences and calculate with ease whether a transaction brings them closer to those preferences is a charade.
> The judges are keeping them unhappy in the name of “fairness”, but is it fair that this exchange among willing individuals is forbidden?
If you only focus on the individual level, maybe. But it's at least plausible that preventing locally favorable actions can create globally superior conditions for everyone in aggregate. This is obvious and arguments that center on "two individuals engaging in consensual trade" are trying to distract from that fundamental aspect of reality, either knowingly or unknowingly.