If it was possible to produce apartments for you for half the price, or deliver food, or an fda approved ventilator, and still have a profit investors would be jumping over themselves to do so.
Businesses are hoarding cash because they predict a drop in revenue and want to save as much as they can so they can continue operations and realign for the new economy.
The large number of empty apartments being rented 3-4 nights a month on AirBnb in most large cities seems to indicate otherwise.
The CPAP machine "jailbreak" posted here yesterday seems to indicate otherwise.
The large quantity of food going to the trash every day seems to indicate otherwise.
I agree that there is a "fixed" amount of stuff out there, but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.
These are all kind of bad examples, but I'll go with this one. Food takes time to grow or produce, so you have to accurately predict months out how much food you can sell. So, who is to blame for imperfect predictions of future demand? We could donate all this food instead of just binning it, so then who's to blame for not building the mass infrastructure required to coordinate such distribution, and then running it all for free? And then if such an individual did do this, why didn't they spend their considerable resources instead on a project that could have benefited humanity way more?
We don't want the government doing anything in our lives, so we don't expect any sort of mass infrastructure to be built to support for food distribution. We expect the wealthy and corporations to be philanthropists.
But being a philanthropist costs money. So instead we have a bunch of farms and food producers instead tossing out food because it's cheaper to throw it away than it is to donate it.
So how can you claim it's a bad example when people would rather throw food away for profit?
In fact, with a little tweaking, most food businesses can profit from throwing away less food: garbage disposal isn't free, and food donations are a tax writeoff.
Someone I knew in Philadelphia used to trash pick food from the Trader Joe's dumpster. But they caught him on camera and then put up signs, and eventually put a lock on the dumpster. They literally spent money to buy signs and a lock, and pay people to put up the signs and lock the dumpster every night.
High rent for shitty apartments has been part of SF and NYC life for 30 years before Airbnb. This is more of a NIMBY problem. It’s politically easier to blame Airbnb then to build high rises with affordable rent and change the “culture” of the neighborhood /barf
> but it's far from allocated efficiently. I think it's time we recognized that.
Who hasn’t recognized there can be inefficiency in the current system? The argument is that a central planning committee is going to do much worse.
They most certainly are. Vast amounts of private real estate in the most prime locations are sitting empty. See the Royal Family's property in Mayfair London for example.
They literally are actually. Buying expensive houses and leaving them empty is an incredibly common way of hoarding wealth. https://londonist.com/london/housing/how-many-vacant-empty-h...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/upshot/when-the-empty-apa...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
Well actually, at least two of your examples are clearly wrong. In NYC, one of the most competitive housing markets in the world, one in four luxury apartments is vacant[1] while the homeless freeze to death outside each winter. Any shortage of food is hard to argue when we're turning corn into fuel instead of food[2]. The only reason people aren't sitting on piles of ventilators yet is that the high demand is new enough that a way of making money by letting people die of suffocation hasn't yet emerged.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/realestate/new-developmen...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2016/04/25/why-a...
Getting laid off isn't wealth hoarding, but does that mean there isn't wealth hoarding?
People are literally spending all their money on food and rent, not stuffing it in their mattress. The only ones doing that are the ones on top, hoarding wealth and exploiting their underlings.
> ability to make products people want
Wealthy investors have decided this isn't important, all that's important is cutting costs so they can hoard more wealth, which usually means exporting production out of the country so they can exploit laborers in other countries where they don't have protection through the law. This is why we currently don't have enough masks and rely on foreign countries to produce them for us.
The "world economy" only seems to measure things that make rich people richer, and how effective these things are at doing so.