[braythwayt]

“Scalpers make Benefit X possible” says nothing about whether “Scalpers create Harm Y.”

For example, you say "If reselling tickets was impossible and the price remained the same, then people who didn't manage to get one would be out of luck; now, they can pay more and still get one.”

But if there is a fixed supply of tickets, then there are a fixed number of people getting tickets. All you are changing is which people get the tickets.

Yes, people with more money and less time to stand in line or whatever will get a ticket. Yay! But people with less money can no longer stand in line and get a ticket. Boo?

[ikeboy]

>But if there is a fixed supply of tickets, then there are a fixed number of people getting tickets. All you are changing is which people get the tickets.

To be precise, you're allocating the tickets to those who value them the most, under the objective criteria of "who's willing to pay the most for them" (which may not be fair, but in the same way that capitalism favors those capable of getting money).

>But people with less money can no longer stand in line and get a ticket. Boo?

Those people value their tickets less than the people who actually get them. If you're only willing to pay X for a ticket, and someone else will pay Y>X, then the situation where you get a ticket for X and they don't isn't Pareto optimal; you'd prefer to sell your ticket for Y, and they'd prefer to buy your ticket for Y. (This does assume something about utility of money, which isn't strictly justified. To wit, I'm assuming that an unwillingness to pay more than X<Y for something implies a willingness to sell it for Y after you've gotten it. For X and Y sufficiently far apart, this should be true, but it might not be if they're close. On the other hand, if they're close then the harm here is very low.)

[skybrian]

Okay as far as it goes, but the problem with that sort of analysis is that willingness to pay is only a good proxy for how much the ticket is valued for people with similar incomes. If you have enough money, being thrifty is optional. For someone barely breaking even, it's a requirement and there is a much higher threshold for spending money.

Taken too seriously, the result of ignoring this issue is absurdities like rich people caring more about anything they happen to spend money on than poor people care about eating.

[ikeboy]

Guess what happens if a rich man and a poor man try to eat in a restaurant.

Generally society's answer is to have the government give necessities to the poor, and otherwise let the rich buy what they want.

Edit: if you really want to untangle the money abstraction, look at it like this: person A has $X. They have $X because ultimately, other people gave them $X because A provided value to them worth at least $X. If they had a job, they got wages; if they sold a product, they got the sale; if it was A's ancestor's money, A's ancestor provided >$X value to someone or someones. (This is an abstraction, and obviously not always true; but we try to outlaw ways of making money that don't provide value to anyone, like stealing, or colluding with competitors. To the extent someone earned money illegitimately, that's a problem with how they got the money, not how they used it; the solution is to take away that money or prevent them from getting it, not prevent money from being used altogether. Also ignoring rents, interest rate/inflation, etc.)

So A's desire to pay $X to get a ticket is actually cashing in on society's "debt" to them of $X or the equivalent in happiness/utility. That's what needs to be compared with someone else who's only willing to pay some fraction of $X; the value they provided to society, that they're willing to give in exchange for the ticket, is less.

Again, obviously the abstraction is imperfect, but that's the ultimate justification for capitalism.

[skybrian]

You can pretty it up with economic reasoning but that's still an essentially panglossian view of the world - a naive belief that fortunate people probably deserve their good fortune and unfortunate people probably did something wrong.

[ikeboy]

I had like three disclaimers in that comment.

But if you're going to criticize capitalism, maybe you could offer an alternative that does better?

[skybrian]

I'm not criticizing capitalism. There are a lot of good things you can say about capitalism. It results in some efficient organizations being created, a lot of useful work getting done, and everyone having incentives to increase productivity and reduce waste. It produces a lot of wealth. I don't think we would do better without markets.

Like evolution, capitalism exists so we need to describe it and understand it. It's definitely a force to be reckoned with.

It's not a system for approximating justice. It doesn't result in people getting what they deserve, even approximately.

The problem isn't only the cheating but also the randomness, which basically gives outsized rewards for being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Anyone watching the tech industry knows this.

If the people who end up with the money choose to spend it to pursue justice, sometimes the world becomes a better place. But nothing in economic theory guarantees it will happen. It's up to people to do it.

[braythwayt]

As you say yourself:

  > which may not be fair

That's my sole point. Capitalism is not fair, and really, it is not a "benefit," it just is what it is. Some benefit from it, some do not, and whether there is a "greater good" or whether that even matters is a matter of personal choice.

[bobbyi_settv]

> All you are changing is which people get the tickets.

I don't think this is true. Without scalpers, a sold-out concert ends up with basically every seat filled. Since services like StubHub have gotten big, it is now more common for there to be many empty seats because those were snatched up by scalpers and never got bought.

The scalpers are often acting rationally here by holding out for high prices until the end instead of dumping their tickets because they make more overall that way even if some inventory goes unsold.

[ikeboy]

I don't think this undermines my point about value of tickets. If the total spent on some group of tickets goes up, then the buyers valued those tickets more than otherwise; it's thus better for them to have those tickets than the previous group.

[braythwayt]

This is your point, but not everyone agrees with your point. Which doesn't really mean that you're wrong, just that we have entered an area of subjectivity.

What you suggest is certainly one way to measure "better" objectively, but that doesn't magically make it the best way.

On a large scale, you can see this in the field of health care. Some people argue as you do, and this leads to a fully free market for medicine. And the principle is that the most good will be done, because the people who value their health the most will pay the most for their services.

But whether we agree or disagree with the principle, surely we must acknowledge that there are entire countries full of people who have a different belief about the greatest good with respect to health care: In Ontario, for example, it is usually illegal for a doctor to charge more than a set amount for a certain type of procedure, and thus the people able to pay more are prevented by law from doing so.

That doesn't make Ontario, Canada "right" and Ontario, California "wrong," but clearly the idea that "it is better if the people willing to pay the most get the most" is not a universally held belief.

[ikeboy]

>In Ontario, for example, it is usually illegal for a doctor to charge more than a set amount for a certain type of procedure, and thus the people able to pay more are prevented by law from doing so.

There are several different possible justifications for such a law:

1. We think the amount people can pay for some services should be capped, someone willing to pay more doesn't mean they value it more 2. We think that people are uninformed about the prices of services, and/or are extorted by time pressure, and/or the medical profession is extracting rents

If it's 2, then they can still agree that people should be able to pay what they want to, but there's an informational asymmetry because you don't have time to shop around when there's an emergency, or there's a monopoly that needs price controls to break, etc. None of those invalidate my point.

Does any of Ontario's rules apply to discretionary medical services?

Do you have any other example that applies without falling into one of the categories above?

[braythwayt]

Ontario has a third justification:

As a society, we value the idea of everyone having access to health care, and if we make medicine a free market, the only people who get it will be those willing to pay the most.

Thus, we specifically reject the argument that providing health care to fewer people who pay more results in a greater benefit.

The reasons for our belief vary from completely subjective moral arguments to arguments that society overall benefits from having a healthy citizenry, just as society overall benefits from having a healthy infrastructure.

I don’t need to debate the specific reasons with you, I’m just pointing out that it is neither #1 nor #2. We certainly think there are people willing to pay more, and that those willing to pay more are correctly valuing it form themselves. We don’t believe that those unwilling to pay more don’t understand the value of medicine.

In the end, not everyone agrees with your perspective on value. Many do. I understand there’s this gigantic country south of us who believe medicine should be a free market, and that many of its citizens think its health care system is providing better value than ours.

But I insist that your views, while valid from your perspective, do not represent a universal truth.

[ikeboy]

>As a society, we value the idea of everyone having access to health care, and if we make medicine a free market, the only people who get it will be those willing to pay the most.

Um what? If you artificially reduce the price, you reduce the supply, and thus decrease the number of people who get it.

My model of free market here is not supposed to affect the total supply, just the limited supply is divided based on money. If price controls increase supply, then there was a market failure of some sort, which probably counts under reason 2.