[Amadou]

Cultures would reject them until a famine struck. Then the ruler would eat them out of necessity.

It is incredibly rare for the "rulers" to have their personal food supply impacted by a famine.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for (I'm vastly over-simplifying) research that indicates only dictatorships have famines because the rulers are insulated from the effects and so have little motivation to fix the systemic problems that cause famines. The "let them eat cake" syndrome (although that quote itself is historically misleading).

The premise is that in a democracy the rulers still eat well, but there are other mechanisms for them to share in the suffering of famine so it never gets to that point.

http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/sen.htm

[mercurial]

> Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science for (I'm vastly over-simplifying) research that indicates only dictatorships have famines because the rulers are insulated from the effects and so have little motivation to fix the systemic problems that cause famines. The "let them eat cake" syndrome (although that quote itself is historically misleading).

Should we deduce that, by electing wealthy people, we ensure that they have no incentive to fix the systemic problems which cause a cycle of economic crises?

[MrZongle2]

I'd say Washington DC is proof of that.

[asgard1024]

Actually, it may be true for other areas as well, I thought about this few days ago in the context of free market and choice.

Maybe free market is harmful for society in the sense that market segmentation creates a choice between high and low quality based on price, and this choice doesn't force people who can afford the more expensive solution to make a fix for everybody.

There is lot of anecdotal evidence about this. For example, there was article about school system in Finland, which is pretty much egalitarian. Still, the quality is great as a side effect probably because if someone improves the system, they improve it for everybody.

Similar things could be said about healthcare system. In fact, probably every successful government-run system is based on belief of participants that it should be egalitarian (and yes, they do exist).

We have negative examples of this as well. Most consumer product have awfully low quality, lower than what we could actually manufacture. The standard response to this is "you have a choice" and indeed, the knowledgeable people can buy quality for much higher price. But in doing so, they won't improve quality for those clueless, leaving them to buy lemons.

Interestingly, even the knowledgeable group is then affected. They have to pay higher price, because they get less market power, because they chose not to extend this power by leaving others to bad choice.

[joshuahedlund]

There are choices between high and low quality based on price, but you're ignoring the effect of changes over time. As Hayek and others have explained, typically something new and experimental will only be available to the rich because it will initially be expensively produced in low quantities, but as it catches on innovation brings the price down to the masses. There are dozens of "low-quality" goods (relative to today's "high-quality" versions) enjoyed by the poor today that would have been considered "high-quality" relative to the versions of those same products enjoyed only by the rich a few decades ago (ex. cell phones, refrigerators, etc). Although these trends may be more easily seen in products than in services/public goods like education.

[asgard1024]

That misses the point. Of course a refrigerator from today has more functionality built to it than refrigerator from 50 years ago. Of course we can build it much cheaper. The question, do we want to?

There is also Akerlof, who also won the "Nobel Prize". When people cannot recognize quality, they cannot buy it. Sure, every fool can compare "features". So when the producer is faced with a choice, build it 10% cheaper for half the quality, what do you think he is going to do? Most people won't know until it breaks.

It's also win for the producer. He can make two lines - one "consumer" line with half the quality, and the other "professional" line with the right quality, but two times as expensive. That's how modern market segmentation works.

[stcredzero]

> Similar things could be said about healthcare system. In fact, probably every successful government-run system is based on belief of participants that it should be egalitarian (and yes, they do exist).

Markets are not a god, an oracle, or a panacea. Markets don't work quite like they should in healthcare.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/why-markets-cant...

Use the right tool for the job. Egalitarian systems work great in some contexts (lifeboat) and not so well in others. (The New England town commons.)

[dTal]

"Historically misleading" as in "never happened" - Rousseau seems to have either invented or adapted the anecdote for his autobiography, which attributed it only to "a great princess":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake