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Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them and disease transmission/severity increases.

gruez 7y ago
behold, the supply and demand curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand Yes, increasing price makes it so less people can afford it, but it also makes more supply available so more people can buy it. What use is cheap masks when only a small portion of the population can actually get their hands on it because of shortages?
- AlexandrB 7y ago
  What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will buy them because of the cost? Now apply the same market logic to a future vaccine and you'll have a situation where herd immunity will never be achieved because it won't be profitable to achieve it. Edit: It's even worse than the above though. Those that won't buy expensive masks/vaccines are also likely to be those most exposed/vulnerable to the disease in the first place. Then, when they're on death's door they will need much more expensive emergency care at the nearest hospital. Letting the market make these kinds of decisions is how the US achieves such dismal health outcomes despite spending a fortune on healthcare.
  - gruez 7y ago
    > What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will buy them because of the cost? What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will have them because of their scarcity? In the short term, the amount of masks are the same. Pricing them higher doesn't magically cause masks to evaporate, and vendors aren't going to hoard masks when they can fetch a high price on the market. In the long term (when production ramps up in response to the increased price) the production of masks will increase, allowing more people in aggregate to have masks, even if it means that some portion of the population will be priced out. The alternative is that the supply of masks stay the same in the short term and long term, and the masks is randomly distributed (at best) or held in the hands of a small number of hoarders.
    - AlexandrB 7y ago
      > The alternative is that the supply of masks stay the same in the short term and long term, and the masks is randomly distributed (at best) or held in the hands of a small number of hoarders. This is an utterly false dichotomy and a big reasons why government exists and is actually useful. Governments can do things (and compel others to do things) that don't fall in the optimal spot on the supply/demand curve. If supply is limited masks should not be "randomly" distributed, but distributing based on who can afford them is probably not any better than random in an epidemiological sense. Should the first people to get vaccinated be billionaires or health-care workers?
      - gruez 7y ago
        >If supply is limited masks should not be "randomly" distributed, but distributing based on who can afford them is probably not any better than random in an epidemiological sense. This appears to be a shifting of the goal posts. Your original comment remarked about how "Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them", however now you seem to advocate for central allocation of medical resources. If the government is in charge of allocating resources, prices would be a moot point.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Yes, many people will buy more than they need. But without a forced price ceiling, fewer people will buy even more of them in order to profiteer off an emergency. The former is suboptimal, but still better than the latter.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Do conditions of perfect competition obtain in this market? Is there perfect information for all market participants? Are all offerings in the market perfectly fungible? Are entry to and exit from the market frictionless? Are all other conditions held equal? If these are not true, then your model of supply and demand is uncoupled from reality and will give wrong results. Supply and demand ais an elementary model to explore the basic principles of price theory. It is a starting point, not the last word. Listening to people talk about it like an iron law of nature is like doing a high school math problem about how fast a car can get from A to B and thinking you've got the hang of autonomous vehicles.
  - generalpass 7y ago
    > Do conditions of perfect competition obtain in this market? Is there perfect information for all market participants? Are all offerings in the market perfectly fungible? Are entry to and exit from the market frictionless? Are all other conditions held equal? If these are not true, then your model of supply and demand is uncoupled from reality and will give wrong results. This is a red herring on the strawman's shoulder. Good. Grief. I really think you would be much enlightened to listen to Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics audio book. It's really long, but covers this sort of thing just oh so well. It will help you to answer questions like: how come people in the Soviet Union were starving to death while crops rotted in the field? Among many others...
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      The questions I raised above are the theoretical conditions under which laws of supply and demand operate perfectly. Thomas Sowell is a political economist who explains economics anecdotally and in rather rudimentary fashion. I am talking about the rigorous microeconomic theory which involves using calculus is required to actually pass an economics course or analyze a commodity market. If you are not familiar with concepts like elasticity, substitution, or the difference between consumer and producer surplus then I suggest you look deeper into microeconomics.
      - generalpass 7y ago
- apta 7y ago
  This is why people are against blind capitalism. Not everything is supposed to be unconditionally placed in the supply and demand curve. Price gouging is immoral, especially when people's lives are at stake.
  - dTal 7y ago
    What do you propose to replace it? The simple fact is that at this moment in time there aren't enough masks. How would you allocate them, and how would you persuade the guy with a box of masks in his basement (he bought them months ago) to let them go for cheap now?
    - apta 7y ago
      You have a regulatory authority step in, and allocate the masks to people who need them (e.g. healthcare workers). Sales from individuals are banned, and said authority can buy them back from people who own them. Just like how the government buys back land or property if there is important construction that is to be built over it, a similar procedure can take place here.

gruez 7y ago

behold, the supply and demand curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand Yes, increasing price makes it so less people can afford it, but it also makes more supply available so more people can buy it. What use is cheap masks when only a small portion of the population can actually get their hands on it because of shortages?

AlexandrB 7y ago
What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will buy them because of the cost? Now apply the same market logic to a future vaccine and you'll have a situation where herd immunity will never be achieved because it won't be profitable to achieve it. Edit: It's even worse than the above though. Those that won't buy expensive masks/vaccines are also likely to be those most exposed/vulnerable to the disease in the first place. Then, when they're on death's door they will need much more expensive emergency care at the nearest hospital. Letting the market make these kinds of decisions is how the US achieves such dismal health outcomes despite spending a fortune on healthcare.
- gruez 7y ago
  > What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will buy them because of the cost? What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will have them because of their scarcity? In the short term, the amount of masks are the same. Pricing them higher doesn't magically cause masks to evaporate, and vendors aren't going to hoard masks when they can fetch a high price on the market. In the long term (when production ramps up in response to the increased price) the production of masks will increase, allowing more people in aggregate to have masks, even if it means that some portion of the population will be priced out. The alternative is that the supply of masks stay the same in the short term and long term, and the masks is randomly distributed (at best) or held in the hands of a small number of hoarders.
  - AlexandrB 7y ago
    > The alternative is that the supply of masks stay the same in the short term and long term, and the masks is randomly distributed (at best) or held in the hands of a small number of hoarders. This is an utterly false dichotomy and a big reasons why government exists and is actually useful. Governments can do things (and compel others to do things) that don't fall in the optimal spot on the supply/demand curve. If supply is limited masks should not be "randomly" distributed, but distributing based on who can afford them is probably not any better than random in an epidemiological sense. Should the first people to get vaccinated be billionaires or health-care workers?
    - gruez 7y ago
      >If supply is limited masks should not be "randomly" distributed, but distributing based on who can afford them is probably not any better than random in an epidemiological sense. This appears to be a shifting of the goal posts. Your original comment remarked about how "Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them", however now you seem to advocate for central allocation of medical resources. If the government is in charge of allocating resources, prices would be a moot point.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yes, many people will buy more than they need. But without a forced price ceiling, fewer people will buy even more of them in order to profiteer off an emergency. The former is suboptimal, but still better than the latter.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Do conditions of perfect competition obtain in this market? Is there perfect information for all market participants? Are all offerings in the market perfectly fungible? Are entry to and exit from the market frictionless? Are all other conditions held equal? If these are not true, then your model of supply and demand is uncoupled from reality and will give wrong results. Supply and demand ais an elementary model to explore the basic principles of price theory. It is a starting point, not the last word. Listening to people talk about it like an iron law of nature is like doing a high school math problem about how fast a car can get from A to B and thinking you've got the hang of autonomous vehicles.
- generalpass 7y ago
  > Do conditions of perfect competition obtain in this market? Is there perfect information for all market participants? Are all offerings in the market perfectly fungible? Are entry to and exit from the market frictionless? Are all other conditions held equal? If these are not true, then your model of supply and demand is uncoupled from reality and will give wrong results. This is a red herring on the strawman's shoulder. Good. Grief. I really think you would be much enlightened to listen to Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics audio book. It's really long, but covers this sort of thing just oh so well. It will help you to answer questions like: how come people in the Soviet Union were starving to death while crops rotted in the field? Among many others...
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    The questions I raised above are the theoretical conditions under which laws of supply and demand operate perfectly. Thomas Sowell is a political economist who explains economics anecdotally and in rather rudimentary fashion. I am talking about the rigorous microeconomic theory which involves using calculus is required to actually pass an economics course or analyze a commodity market. If you are not familiar with concepts like elasticity, substitution, or the difference between consumer and producer surplus then I suggest you look deeper into microeconomics.
    - generalpass 7y ago
apta 7y ago
This is why people are against blind capitalism. Not everything is supposed to be unconditionally placed in the supply and demand curve. Price gouging is immoral, especially when people's lives are at stake.
- dTal 7y ago
  What do you propose to replace it? The simple fact is that at this moment in time there aren't enough masks. How would you allocate them, and how would you persuade the guy with a box of masks in his basement (he bought them months ago) to let them go for cheap now?
  - apta 7y ago
    You have a regulatory authority step in, and allocate the masks to people who need them (e.g. healthcare workers). Sales from individuals are banned, and said authority can buy them back from people who own them. Just like how the government buys back land or property if there is important construction that is to be built over it, a similar procedure can take place here.