Re:The acute suicide crisis among veterinarians: 'You're alw...
by somenameforme on Thursday October 12, 2023 @03:20AM
(#37854376)
Markets can break not only on the supply side, but also on the demand side. When consumers become unaware or uninterested in the baseline cost of what they're purchasing (or in econobabble - when the price elasticity of demand approaches zero), you end up with grossly inefficient markets because companies lose any incentive to meaningfully compete on price.
The point of looking at 'raw materials' cost is that if the costs on top of said raw materials becomes more than the cost of doing business elsewhere (such as in a different country), the one would be wise to do just that. This is the whole reason things like medical tourism exists.
It's not like other countries are getting their machines, medicines, and so on for that much less. It's just they're able to reduce the cost of everything on top of raw materials to the point that one can afford to take a 'holiday' half way around the world, get their issue fixed, and make it back all for less, often vastly less, than it'd cost to do stateside.
If you can’t find someone else to sell to you for less, then yes. Barring broken markets such as due to regulatory capture, etc.
> The point I make is that you might not be able to tell a reasonable price, per se.
>But you can generally tell an unreasonable price.
These strike me as conflicting statements, otherwise I don’t know what per se means.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37846041
> And the reason I think that's particularly relevant is that it's not like the underlying costs really change.
>So developing world costs tend to give you a 'raw materials' cost, where all that's left is labor + profit.
Why are labor costs not underlying costs? How about liability insurance? Real estate?