[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.