Re:I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than...
by gruez on Sunday March 20, 2022 @08:43PM
(#30748618)
> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.
I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.
>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.
I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.