[whoiscroberts]

No, it’s a roundabout way of saying that when government bureaucrats decide to stop enforcing a law passed by congress, grocery corporations will actively work to grow larger and close stores in Black neighborhoods. Don’t retroactively assign preference to the mother who walks to the grocery store a block away only find it is closed and was forced to take a bus to Walmart, that mother was not exercising a preference. The preference was clear prior to the ceasing of enforcement. The article said the prices were only 1% higher at the local chains, the customer were exercising presence by choosing to pay 1% more…

[haroldp]

> grocery corporations will actively work to grow larger and close stores in Black neighborhoods

If black neighborhoods are underserved, go make a fortune in black neighborhood grocery stores or their suppliers.

[mindslight]

Have you discovered a proof of P == NP, or are you just choosing to assert it to go on a message board commenting spree completely disconnected from the real world?

If markets worked the way you are implying, then the problem would already be solved. In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.

[haroldp]

> In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.

Which is how big stores attract customers with lower prices, provided they already have cars to get to them.

[mindslight]

I was talking about inefficiencies due to "free market" optimization being a mere heuristic that finds local optima rather than global ones. So it can be completely rational for individual customers to be basing their purchasing around such a dynamic, to the point where even adding some energy (eg investment capital) can't get the optimization unstuck, while still having longstanding structural inefficiencies when looking at the larger scale.

[haroldp]

I think that is also what I am talking about.

A big central store is more economically efficient, and as a result the consumer preference, in an economic landscape where Men With Guns have removed every option except diffuse suburban housing, where they already need to have cars to get along.

Some suggest as a fix, getting the gunmen back out to force a more expensive, less efficient system for distributing food. I'm saying, can we strike at the root instead of forever hacking at the branches? Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.

[mindslight]

Except your original volley of comments was channeling the efficient market fallacy, whereby anything that's suboptimal must imply an opportunity for profit. And this comment is still focusing on economic inefficiency coming from external non-economic factors, when my point is that the market itself will sustain such inefficiencies on its own.

> Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.

Keep following this thought experiment. There is plenty of vacant unincorporated land that a group of people could get together and build whatever city they might want. That scale of investment could even get some legal leeway from state government. The type of blank-slate freedom that you're idyllically invoking ("build the cities they actually want") actually exists right now.

The intrinsic problem is still that of social scaling. Cities need people, and those people will inevitably have conflicts (and these conflicts become more intense with residents' capital buy in - cf a building full of owned condominiums versus rented apartments). Cue you've just reinvented laws but are perhaps calling them by another name (eg "policies" "user agreement" etc).

And so sorry, there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here, just a lot of messy tradeoffs. If you think eliminating some type of regulation (eg minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, etc) might change consumer preferences to make neighborhood grocery stores viable again, you can argue for that! But recognize that you're arguing tradeoffs (eg denser buildings now mean more traffic, taller buildings mean the fire department needs higher ladders, existing properties lose access to sunlight, etc) rather than some imaginary null hypothesis of a blank slate where everything will be correct by construction.