[eru]

Why a raffle and not an auction?

Auctions are the standard way to find a price that balances supply and demand.

(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets. Are you afraid they'll buy booze instead?)

[et-al]

If all one cares about are that only their fellow millionaires get to savor some publicly-owned campsites, then sure that's a great solution.

[eru]

Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.

Giving them a ticket is equivalent to giving them money, but restricting it be spent on park tickets only. Very condescending and paternalistic, isn't it?

Are you afraid they are going to spend their ticket money on booze?

[unionpivo]

Not from USA, but my opinion on raffles vs auctions:

Raffle is not giving them money. Raffle is giving them a chance. No matter how much money you give to poor people, rich people will always be able to afford to outbid them.

So sure, giving money to poor people (or better jet, making sure they get decent pay in the first place) is good idea.

And raffle makes sure, prices stay reasonable so that even poor/middle class people can on occasion enjoy the parks.

You do auctions when you want to maximize profit. You do raffles when you need to rate limit access to a limited resource.

[eru]

If you allow people to resell tickets they won in a raffle, it's no different from an auction.

(And why would you want to keep poor people from re-selling their tickets? Perhaps they need the x dollars that the ticket is more than the they need the ticket?)

[et-al]

Uh, it wouldn't be just poor people. It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

(Though arguably with bots and scrapers, that's maybe what they are now anyway.)

[eru]

Yes, if you don't have an auction, you just get bots and scrapers, and an auction-like secondary market.

> It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

I don't see how that works. We don't see the top 2% win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either.

[lozenge]

There are enough rich people to make the auction price of a ticket at a desirable location $1,000 and we know there is never going to be enough redistribution to prevent that. What you're suggesting would realistically make the activity inaccessible.

[ghaff]

$1,000/night is pretty much in the range of relatively primitive camping on private land in primo locations. I've been shocked at the price tag associated with so-called glamping (which isn't quite like pitching a tent but close enough) in locations I don't even think are that primo. Absolutely an auction for Yosemite slots on a summer weekend would be at least in the high three figures.

[19h]

You're completely out of touch with reality if you think $1000/night for camping is acceptable or normal.

[eru]

It depends on 'primo' the 'primo location' is, I guess.

It is very much on the high end.

[mnky9800n]

This is a very top down thinking approach. Yes we should give poor people money. But actually is that the job of parks? Perhaps parks should try to be as equitable as possible to let whoever wants in entry. Then a raffle not an auction is the best way to do it.

[eru]

If supply exceeds demand, you have to have some form of rationing.

Charging everyone the same fee (set via auction) seems very equitable to me. It's a form of rationing that treats everyone the same.

Raffles are designed to produce inequality. Some get lucky, some don't.

And if you allow people to resell tickets, Raffles essentially turn into an auction anyway. But the profits go as windfall to a lucky few, not to the park.

(Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds of 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s)

[olivermuty]

This argument is nonsensical unless you suggest the tickets should be sellable.

False equivalent argumentation.

Edit: Excellent idea to give poor people money either way though. UBI!

[eru]

Yes, of course, the tickets should re-sellable.

Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds that 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s

[karmakurtisaani]

You face a lot if opposition, but I fully agree with you. This is basic economic thinking.

Somehow people are fine with having healthcare, education, housing, transportation etc. being driven by market forces, but parks not? In my opinion the state should absolutely cash in on the lucrative public parks. Otherwise you will and up with scalpers and other perversions that will take their cut in pricing the true value of this good.

Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

[eru]

Thanks for the support.

> Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

Be careful, that's not the orthodox definition of public goods. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.

You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.

However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.

For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.

An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.

[karmakurtisaani]

Thanks for the correction, I was on a bus writing in a hurry with my phone, so no time for a comprehensive thesis. I agree that making a blanket statement like that misses a lot of important cases, real world has too many complications. The example of vaccines is a good one, as it's beneficial to everyone that everyone else takes them.

[eru]

No worries. Thanks for being so civil!

In principle you could still sell the vaccines and separately give people money for taking them. For cheap, well-established vaccines that would just be more hassle than it's worth.

For eg the first batches of the covid vaccine, it would have made a lot of sense though.

[hnbad]

Or just raise the ceiling income tax rate and introduce a wealth tax so there are fewer ultra-rich people skewing the "market price". You could then use the extra tax income to fund public services like housing, transit, medical care and food so the poor have more freely disposable income.

Wait, I thought we were talking about parks?

[eru]

Income taxes have lots of deadweight effects. Raising them mostly leads to more and more avoidance.

Establish a land value tax, if you want efficient taxation. You can't hide land, and you can't pass such a tax on, either.

[hnbad]

The biggest problem with income tax is that income tax does not distinguish by source of income. There was a proposal in Switzerland to establish a separate capital gains tax with a considerably higher tax rate that targets income from capital (rent, stocks, dividends, etc) though sadly it failed to get enough votes.

The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

[eru]

Most countries already tax capital gains at a different rate than other income. For example here in Singapore we have a maximum marginal income tax of 22% and a capital gains tax of 0%. (Dividends are taxed separately.)

What was special about the Swiss proposal?

> The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

Bezos worked very hard and his company Amazon benefitted many customers, workers and investors. If you have a tax system manages to raise a lot of money to the government with no deadweight losses, then it's an extra bonus if it leaves Bezos to his billions, too. That should encourage other people to emulate him.

Land is still extremely important in the modern economy. You might think eg modern Internet companies don't have much to do with land, but for some reason they still mostly cluster in a few spots around the globe, like Silicon Valley; despite the high rent in those places. They must get some advantage from that land there.

An LVT would allow to drop income taxes and capital taxes to 0%.

[lazyasciiart]

Then you need to give all the poor people enough money to outbid all the rich people - otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction. Sounds a lot more expensive than letting people self select and assigning tickets based on some method other than money.

[eru]

> [...] otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction

I don't see how that works. We don't see only rich people win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either. Nor do they eat all the meat.

[lazyasciiart]

These tickets are orders of magnitude rarer than houses or even concert tickets. There are ~20,000 tickets to the Wave, total, each year - in 2017 alone there were over 1 million tickets to Justin Bieber concerts. There are over 700 billionaires in the US, and over 5 million millionaires. If only one third of millionaires wants to do these hikes, only once ever, and doesn't want to take anyone else, that's the next 100 years of tickets bought up.

[lifeonlars]

Does this apply to all public goods, or are there limits to this principle?

For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

[eru]

It doesn't apply to any public goods. It can't.

Access to national parks isn't a public good.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

How would you even run an auction on a good that's non-excludable? By definition, you can't keep the losers of the auction from using the good.

> For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

Sounds reasonable.

Most municipal utility (at least in the places I lived in) charge for the water they provide. Usually those charges are very reasonable.

It sounds like a lot of hassle to give poor people a weekly water ration in kind. At the very least, you need to involve the water utility in the bureaucracy that administers welfare. Seems like a lot of hassle.

Just giving poor people money that they can use to pay their utility bills seems much simpler in comparison. And that's eg what they do in Germany (the country where I know the most about how government welfare is run).

At most, you sometimes hear people suggest that the poor need some extra money, if eg electricity or water prices are suddenly higher than before. But I haven't really heard anyone seriously suggest giving poor people a water allowance. Is that common where you live?

[lifeonlars]

You're not aware of the existence of water fountains?

[eru]

There's also aircon at government buildings here where I live, that you can visit for free.

However it would still be a bit silly to say that our government is providing free aircon to poor people.

Technically, they do. But it's such a niche case. Just like people don't typically go and fill up jugs at the public water fountains to flush their toilets at home with.

So you are technically correct, but it doesn't matter.

[throw9away6]

If the number of entries is unlimited then it’s essentially an auction anyway

[eru]

Yes, if the number of tickets you can buy for the raffle is unlimited, and the number of winners per day is fixed; then the raffle is just a more complicated, less predictable equivalent of an auction.

[xnorswap]

Auctions are terrible because of the uneven distribution of wealth.

You end up with a situation where the wealthy can do everything and the poor can do nothing.

And then there's the super rich, who could buy out the possibility of anyone else participating, literally turning such places into their private playground for eternity if they so wished.

Like, what price could you price it at where:

1. You could afford to go occassionally

2. Elon Musk couldn't just buy out every single ticket for the next decade to make it their personal playground.

There's simply no feasible solution to that.

Just auctioning everything and letting capitalism take its course just denies a vast segment of society from participating at all for activities where demand outstrips supply.

Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

For things like National Parks or Taylor Swift concerts, price discovery through "supply and demand" does not work because supply can't increase to match supply no matter the price.

[Sankozi]

Not sure how you come up with point 1 when talking about auctions of a very limited resource. Lets focus on the point 2.

You are vastly overestimating buying power of the richest people. Lets assume that some of them are really irrational and want to buy access to the single place by selling whole their wealth.

X entries per day, 365 day in a year, that is 3650*x tickets to buy out to cover 10 years.

Musk wealth: 171 000 000 000

Divided by 3650 = 46 849 315

If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

There is over 60 million people with wealth higher wealth than that. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/203930/global-wealth-dis...).

If park increases number of tickets to 500 daily (~21 per hour) then we are talking about 600 million richest people that can try to outbid Musk on a single ticket.

In reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction. If they had, they would not be that rich. Additionally park could easily increase number of tickets if those are not used.

[HWR_14]

> If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

Wow, and for anyone else for only a million dollars people can buy an entire day in what was once a free federal location!

Meanwhile, let's look at Yellowstone. Over a decade, they will sell about $110MM in passes (just a 10x of what they generated recently.) Let's say at an auction the passes go for an average of 20x that. So for $2.2 billion, someone can buy exclusive access to a 2.2 million acre federal park for a decade.

A 20x multiple is pretty high too.

> reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction.

Musk spent approximately 20% of his wealth on an internet toy.

[eru]

Sure. But he has only five twenty-percents to spend in total.

[eru]

Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving them a park ticket is equivalent to giving them the auction price for the ticket but restricting them to use it on park tickets. Very condescending and paternalistic.

> Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

No? Where did you get that idiosyncratic notion from?

Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Auctions also work well for things that are in fixed demand. Of course, in that case you have suppliers bid, not buyers.

You can also have a two-sided auction where both suppliers and buyers bid.

[xnorswap]

If the goal is for everyone to own a Van Gogh, then yes those auctions have failed.

A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

[vel0city]

> A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

There are many national parks which do not have any limitations, timed entries, or reservations. There are then also many which do have reservations, but reservations can be pretty easily obtained. There are a few which have limited resources available with massive numbers of people wanting to attend which do have these lottery issues.

Most locations run by the NPS allow people to just show up without restrictions. Everyone already does have the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

[eru]

We are only talking about auctions, because the number of people who can visit certain parks is lower than those parks can admit.

No matter how you shuffle, auction or raffle the tickets, that doesn't increase their supply.

So by your metric, all methods fail?

If the market clearing price for tickets would be so high that poor people couldn't afford to win an auction, then in the alternative that they get lucky and win a raffle, their best course of action would be to sell the ticket on the secondary market and enjoying the money.

Unless, of course, you ban poor people from re-selling their tickets. I mean, they most likely would spend it all on booze, wouldn't they? /s

> Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

Give poor people money. They know best what they need.

[unionpivo]

> Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

Yeah wont happen in real world. I wont assume bad faith from you, but generally speaking saying just give them money is a huge copout.

> Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Glad you brought that up.

Van Goh sold his paintings and owners of such paintings then sell them on auctions etc.

There are people in the art world who would argue that such paintings do belong in Museums, so that public can enjoy them. So they band together and collect money so that their local museum can afford to buy such Van Goh painting.

After such painting are displayed in Museum where anyone can view them, for a fixed price, that generally covers the upkeep.

Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

Auctions would defeat the purpose.

[eru]

> Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

And that's why Bill Gates and Elon Musk bid on and win all ebay auctions ever? Whenever a house goes for sale, they snatch it up, too. Don't they? /s

Basically, the same forces that make the paragraph above untrue, would also be at work here.

> Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

If demand is so high, then a poor person who wins a ticket in a raffle is better off selling the ticket in the secondary market (to Bill Gates perhaps) and enjoying the money.

Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

[unionpivo]

> Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

> proceeds for booze, wouldn't they?

Who tf said that. nobody in this said that. you are the only one in this thread insinuating that people who disagree with your (brilliant /s) thoughts are doing so out of ulterior motives.

And sure in perfect world selling your tickets on secondary market would work.

But in our world, some already well of prick, would develop a scrapping bot, using lots of residential ip's (sometimes obtained in questionable ways), to spoil everything for the rest of us.

[eru]

If you auction of the tickets in the first place, you don't have to criminalize the secondary market.

No need for a perfect world.

[actionfromafar]

So in your envisaged ultra-communist society, where wealth has been distributed enough for the (formerly) poor people to bid on a level playing field against the (formerly, relatively speaking) rich people, now what do you do?

[eru]

Where do you get the communism from?

Modest levels of redistribution gets you something like Germany or Scandinavia or the US.

[lukas099]

This would be politically unviable. Just look at responses to your comment.

[eru]

Indeed. Though that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

You know how eg abolishing slavery or letting women vote was once politically unviable.