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> Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage. Can you explain how I still seem to have enough

by zmmmmm 8y ago

> Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage. Can you explain how I still seem to have enough oxygen to breathe? I get the point, but I don't like the absolutism applied in these kind of arguments. Similarly, I can go to a small country town with a 2 lane highway through it and somehow building that road did not induce congestion despite the fact that the article asserts a 1:1 correlation between congestion and building roads. Obviously these are silly arguments but it still all goes back to the point that we need to figure out how to model these things and each situation should be modeled and engineered on its own merits. Turning the argument into just an alternative form of dogma to what caused the problem originally is actually almost as bad as the original problem.

BurningFrog 8y ago
> Can you explain how I still seem to have enough oxygen to breathe? This is a fundamental question in economics, and the answer is that oxygen is (currently) not a scarce resource. This is not an inherent property of oxygen. In a Mars settlement, oxygen would probably be a costly manufactured good. Economics is sometimes called the "science of scarcity", and the basic economic problem as the gap between limited resources and theoretically limitless wants: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp Resources that are in bigger supply that the demand have nothing for Economists to study. As for roads, I'd note that they're only scarce some times. I wouldn't expect much or any road pricing to apply at nights or weekends even in heavily congested big city commute paths. And as for my "absolutism" and "dogma", I don't know what that specifically refers to. I think I'm just calmly explaining the state of the science in this field. Let me know if I need to clarify anything!

by zmmmmm 8y ago

BurningFrog 8y ago

> Can you explain how I still seem to have enough oxygen to breathe? This is a fundamental question in economics, and the answer is that oxygen is (currently) not a scarce resource. This is not an inherent property of oxygen. In a Mars settlement, oxygen would probably be a costly manufactured good. Economics is sometimes called the "science of scarcity", and the basic economic problem as the gap between limited resources and theoretically limitless wants: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/scarcity.asp Resources that are in bigger supply that the demand have nothing for Economists to study. As for roads, I'd note that they're only scarce some times. I wouldn't expect much or any road pricing to apply at nights or weekends even in heavily congested big city commute paths. And as for my "absolutism" and "dogma", I don't know what that specifically refers to. I think I'm just calmly explaining the state of the science in this field. Let me know if I need to clarify anything!