8 ms·

Things I pay a lot for: * Rent (they're all high; and can't afford to buy anywhere near where I work) * Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) * I

Things I pay a lot for: * Rent (they're all high; and can't afford to buy anywhere near where I work) * Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) * Internet (Cable's the only modern-speed option where I currently rent) * Energy / Gas - either utilities or again, the same everywhere I think most everyone else is in the same boat. I can scale down some of these a little bit, but they're all fairly __inelastic__. I can't stop eating. I need all of these for life and work. Want to tame inflation? Tax the hell out of profits above X%!!! Someone's making money on this.

yanderekko 3y ago
A good where consumers have inelastic demand does not mean that individual companies face inelastic demand curves - that's the whole point of competition. ie. It doesn't matter if you're willing to pay a lot to avoid starvation since no individual company is making profits off of having some market power to starve you. The thought that food providers are colluding to raise prices is absurd and should serve as a reductio ad absurdum in these arguments, not a fundamental explanation for "greedflation".
- NLPaep 3y ago
  > The DOJ, explained forbes.com, charged that company “executives worked together to keep prices paid to poultry farmers low while raising costs for consumers at grocery stores and restaurant chains.” https://www.producer.com/opinion/u-s-government-strikes-out-on-food-price-fixing-prosecution/ https://www.producer.com/opinion/u-s-government-strikes-out-...
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    Seems relevant to note that these charges failed..
    - sobkas 3y ago
      > Seems relevant to note that these charges failed.. As USA lives in post law age it only means that relevant corporations carpet bombed regulator with lawyers, paid politicians, lobbyists, job offers for key bureaucrats(after they retire/leave) to make it go away. And to prosecute corporation regulator needs money, money they have is finite so they need to choose their fights. And they need don't know if around the corner some corporation doesn't produce fentanyl out of baby skulls. On top of that fixing plight of chicken producers won't translate into them spending money on lobbyists, hiring retired bureaucrats or financing PACs, everything corporations that gain from it will definitely do.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Food providers don't need to collude when much of the time (enough) they're all the same company.
dmurray 3y ago
> Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) I can't believe this is true. Either you're shopping for food at a subsistence level, in which case you know exactly what you're missing and how much easier it would be if you could afford a bit more, or you indulge yourself a bit and you're wilfully ignoring that you could pay less.
gfdsgfsdgfs 3y ago
You'll get more shortages and higher inflation with your solution.
- pydry 3y ago
  Unless you tax land. Nobody manufactures that for profit but profit handsomely from it they do.
  - gfdsgfsdgfs 3y ago
    Taxing land would increase rent and therefore increase food prices.
    - digitaltrees 3y ago
      Not if you tax low use more heavily than higher density uses and encourage building more housing supply.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Not if you tax low use more heavily than higher density uses and encourage building more housing supply. If you tax land with higher taxes for lower density, then, yes, you’ll radically increase food costs.
        digitaltrees 3y ago
        Why would you want farms in urban settings? We have plenty of farm land as is, in fact if many cities were more densely structured rather than suburban there would be even more farm land.
        JoeJonathan 3y ago
        If only there were some way to distinguish farms from not-farms…
shoubidouwah 3y ago
the rent, as always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent and the companies do not want to compete: most modern large companies only exist as a _vehicle for investment_, and as such compete for shareholders, not consumers. Due to this, short-termism dominates: average CEO stays 4 years at a given company, and performance of the company after they leave is largely uncorrelated with their carreer success, while share prices during tenure actually does. So they'll suck the blood from us, crash everything, and get a raise when politicians ask them very nicely to try and fix it. And while share prices will go down on the S&P, billionaires will gte richer, and hedges will make bank...
- willis936 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with the law of rent, but it does not seem accurate. Right now blue collar workers can't afford to rent within a 60 minute commute to Boston, where they are not paid a wage that justifies that commute. Why would you cook or clean in Boston when you could do it literally anywhere else in MA without the commute? I guess my point is that markets continually prove to not be rational. Maybe a philosopher hundreds of years ago imagined they could be, but that's not how things are shaking out.
  - codeflo 3y ago
    Why do you believe this to be a market failure?
    - barney54 3y ago
      Just for sake of argument, let’s say it is market failure. But what will correct it first, the market or a new law passed by Congress?
      - prepend 3y ago
        Is no one cleaning in Boston? It seems pretty easy to test whether it’s a market failure (ie, there are no cleaners cleaning in Boston). I think if you ask anything vs “new law passed by Congress” I’m going with anything. So at least the invisible hands will eventually solve this problem by raising cleaner pay until someone is willing to commute 60 minutes (note that was my commute in a larger metro area on programmer pay) or cleaners can afford closer.
windex 3y ago
All of them were sorted during WFH. I moved out to remote places and paid far less. I saved quite a bit on all of the above remote other than Internet of course. The economy is setup to extract your money from you once you've earned it.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  > The economy is setup to extract your money... Well, yes. How else can the rich keep getting richer? And the umpteen million individuals assuming "stocks will return 10% over the long term" in their retirement planning actually manage to retire as they planned? And as long as the culture wars can be kept burning fairly hot, the line-ups of new movies and video drama compelling, and the web addictive - the poor working masses won't put up too much of a fuss over all that extraction.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Push it too far and people will just "lie flat", i.e. check out of the economy.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      Some will, others will rightfully turn to crime.
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      That's just another curve for Wall Street to optimize. And in their books, anyone who persists in lying flat is 100% expendable.
bell-cot 3y ago
Notice how many of those things have highly inelastic supply, are monopolies (or close), or have really bloated "value adding" supply chains. NIMBYs and such ensure that more housing can't be built, at scale, in areas with high rents, to have normal supply/demand dynamic. Food is relatively cheap, if you cook for yourself and don't mind a lot of beans, rice, bread-machine bread, peanut butter, etc. If you want heavily processed or prepared food, or restaurant food...that's an order of magnitude more expensive. And many parts of the food industry are far too consolidated to be competitive. Etc. Taxing the hell out of profits sounds great...but in sectors where the real problems are strangulated supply, monopolies, and massive processing in the supply chain - it won't do much good.
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  Prepared food is really unconsolidated like bulk food unless you live in a total roadside mall hellscape. There seems to be agreements on maintaining irrational pricing where there is price differentiation. I.e. you will pay more for cheaper to make vegan food because a vegan can't eat a cheap burger. IMO this is more distributed in nature like landlords sharing a price fixing app.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Disagree. There is a very old rule of thumb in the restaurant biz, that your selling price has to be 4x your actual cost of the food - because of all the labor, kitchen equipment, rent, etc. overhead. I'd bet that similar rules of thumb apply to grocery stores' deli departments, shrink-wrapped sandwiches in vending machines, and pretty much every other sort of non-restaurant prepared food. And, at least in the area I live in, the barriers to entry for the restaurant biz are pretty minimal. Most restaurants are (at most) local micro-chains, and there's a lot of churn as people try to make a restaurant work...and often fail financially. Want to get into the restaurant biz? With a low-6-figure nest egg, and willingness to wait for some local commercial landlord to have a vacant failed little restaurant on his hands, it's "easy". And the real estate supply is pretty elastic - cities and NIMBYs favor the (often quick & easy) construction of more small retail spaces; likewise converting generic vacant retail spaces into more restaurants. Vs. if you want to be residential landlord - I'll guess a 7-figure nest egg to buy existing property (limited supply, and buying some does not increase overall supply). If you want to actually expand supply, by building rental housing at scale...you'd better have an 8-figure nest egg, and experienced legal team, and be willing to spend 8+ years (from "ready to do this" to "collect rent checks") fighting your way through the government red tape, NIMBY-land's standing army, and actual construction. With no guarantees of success.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
In my country, rents are increasing now after the markets have already been flat or down, the startup boom has long fizzled out, and there are layoffs almost every day. It's baffling. Rents were down during the pandemic but they've now rocketed up 50-100% in some areas.
prepend 3y ago
Only food is an area where there’s lots of profit, right? Internet is regulated through phone and cable so profit is hidden into costs and whatnot. Same for energy. Rent is hard to determine profit because of the way expenses can be assigned and so much is private landlord direct to renters.

yanderekko 3y ago

A good where consumers have inelastic demand does not mean that individual companies face inelastic demand curves - that's the whole point of competition. ie. It doesn't matter if you're willing to pay a lot to avoid starvation since no individual company is making profits off of having some market power to starve you. The thought that food providers are colluding to raise prices is absurd and should serve as a reductio ad absurdum in these arguments, not a fundamental explanation for "greedflation".

NLPaep 3y ago
> The DOJ, explained forbes.com, charged that company “executives worked together to keep prices paid to poultry farmers low while raising costs for consumers at grocery stores and restaurant chains.” https://www.producer.com/opinion/u-s-government-strikes-out-on-food-price-fixing-prosecution/ https://www.producer.com/opinion/u-s-government-strikes-out-...
- yanderekko 3y ago
  Seems relevant to note that these charges failed..
  - sobkas 3y ago
    > Seems relevant to note that these charges failed.. As USA lives in post law age it only means that relevant corporations carpet bombed regulator with lawyers, paid politicians, lobbyists, job offers for key bureaucrats(after they retire/leave) to make it go away. And to prosecute corporation regulator needs money, money they have is finite so they need to choose their fights. And they need don't know if around the corner some corporation doesn't produce fentanyl out of baby skulls. On top of that fixing plight of chicken producers won't translate into them spending money on lobbyists, hiring retired bureaucrats or financing PACs, everything corporations that gain from it will definitely do.
brailsafe 3y ago
Food providers don't need to collude when much of the time (enough) they're all the same company.

dmurray 3y ago

> Food (prices are pretty much the same everywhere) I can't believe this is true. Either you're shopping for food at a subsistence level, in which case you know exactly what you're missing and how much easier it would be if you could afford a bit more, or you indulge yourself a bit and you're wilfully ignoring that you could pay less.

gfdsgfsdgfs 3y ago

You'll get more shortages and higher inflation with your solution.

pydry 3y ago
Unless you tax land. Nobody manufactures that for profit but profit handsomely from it they do.
- gfdsgfsdgfs 3y ago
  Taxing land would increase rent and therefore increase food prices.
  - digitaltrees 3y ago
    Not if you tax low use more heavily than higher density uses and encourage building more housing supply.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Not if you tax low use more heavily than higher density uses and encourage building more housing supply. If you tax land with higher taxes for lower density, then, yes, you’ll radically increase food costs.
      - digitaltrees 3y ago
        Why would you want farms in urban settings? We have plenty of farm land as is, in fact if many cities were more densely structured rather than suburban there would be even more farm land.
      - JoeJonathan 3y ago
        If only there were some way to distinguish farms from not-farms…

shoubidouwah 3y ago

the rent, as always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent and the companies do not want to compete: most modern large companies only exist as a _vehicle for investment_, and as such compete for shareholders, not consumers. Due to this, short-termism dominates: average CEO stays 4 years at a given company, and performance of the company after they leave is largely uncorrelated with their carreer success, while share prices during tenure actually does. So they'll suck the blood from us, crash everything, and get a raise when politicians ask them very nicely to try and fix it. And while share prices will go down on the S&P, billionaires will gte richer, and hedges will make bank...

willis936 3y ago
I'm not familiar with the law of rent, but it does not seem accurate. Right now blue collar workers can't afford to rent within a 60 minute commute to Boston, where they are not paid a wage that justifies that commute. Why would you cook or clean in Boston when you could do it literally anywhere else in MA without the commute? I guess my point is that markets continually prove to not be rational. Maybe a philosopher hundreds of years ago imagined they could be, but that's not how things are shaking out.
- codeflo 3y ago
  Why do you believe this to be a market failure?
  - barney54 3y ago
    Just for sake of argument, let’s say it is market failure. But what will correct it first, the market or a new law passed by Congress?
    - prepend 3y ago
      Is no one cleaning in Boston? It seems pretty easy to test whether it’s a market failure (ie, there are no cleaners cleaning in Boston). I think if you ask anything vs “new law passed by Congress” I’m going with anything. So at least the invisible hands will eventually solve this problem by raising cleaner pay until someone is willing to commute 60 minutes (note that was my commute in a larger metro area on programmer pay) or cleaners can afford closer.

windex 3y ago

All of them were sorted during WFH. I moved out to remote places and paid far less. I saved quite a bit on all of the above remote other than Internet of course. The economy is setup to extract your money from you once you've earned it.

bell-cot 3y ago
> The economy is setup to extract your money... Well, yes. How else can the rich keep getting richer? And the umpteen million individuals assuming "stocks will return 10% over the long term" in their retirement planning actually manage to retire as they planned? And as long as the culture wars can be kept burning fairly hot, the line-ups of new movies and video drama compelling, and the web addictive - the poor working masses won't put up too much of a fuss over all that extraction.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Push it too far and people will just "lie flat", i.e. check out of the economy.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Some will, others will rightfully turn to crime.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    That's just another curve for Wall Street to optimize. And in their books, anyone who persists in lying flat is 100% expendable.

bell-cot 3y ago

Notice how many of those things have highly inelastic supply, are monopolies (or close), or have really bloated "value adding" supply chains. NIMBYs and such ensure that more housing can't be built, at scale, in areas with high rents, to have normal supply/demand dynamic. Food is relatively cheap, if you cook for yourself and don't mind a lot of beans, rice, bread-machine bread, peanut butter, etc. If you want heavily processed or prepared food, or restaurant food...that's an order of magnitude more expensive. And many parts of the food industry are far too consolidated to be competitive. Etc. Taxing the hell out of profits sounds great...but in sectors where the real problems are strangulated supply, monopolies, and massive processing in the supply chain - it won't do much good.

fatfingerd 3y ago
Prepared food is really unconsolidated like bulk food unless you live in a total roadside mall hellscape. There seems to be agreements on maintaining irrational pricing where there is price differentiation. I.e. you will pay more for cheaper to make vegan food because a vegan can't eat a cheap burger. IMO this is more distributed in nature like landlords sharing a price fixing app.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Disagree. There is a very old rule of thumb in the restaurant biz, that your selling price has to be 4x your actual cost of the food - because of all the labor, kitchen equipment, rent, etc. overhead. I'd bet that similar rules of thumb apply to grocery stores' deli departments, shrink-wrapped sandwiches in vending machines, and pretty much every other sort of non-restaurant prepared food. And, at least in the area I live in, the barriers to entry for the restaurant biz are pretty minimal. Most restaurants are (at most) local micro-chains, and there's a lot of churn as people try to make a restaurant work...and often fail financially. Want to get into the restaurant biz? With a low-6-figure nest egg, and willingness to wait for some local commercial landlord to have a vacant failed little restaurant on his hands, it's "easy". And the real estate supply is pretty elastic - cities and NIMBYs favor the (often quick & easy) construction of more small retail spaces; likewise converting generic vacant retail spaces into more restaurants. Vs. if you want to be residential landlord - I'll guess a 7-figure nest egg to buy existing property (limited supply, and buying some does not increase overall supply). If you want to actually expand supply, by building rental housing at scale...you'd better have an 8-figure nest egg, and experienced legal team, and be willing to spend 8+ years (from "ready to do this" to "collect rent checks") fighting your way through the government red tape, NIMBY-land's standing army, and actual construction. With no guarantees of success.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

In my country, rents are increasing now after the markets have already been flat or down, the startup boom has long fizzled out, and there are layoffs almost every day. It's baffling. Rents were down during the pandemic but they've now rocketed up 50-100% in some areas.

prepend 3y ago

Only food is an area where there’s lots of profit, right? Internet is regulated through phone and cable so profit is hidden into costs and whatnot. Same for energy. Rent is hard to determine profit because of the way expenses can be assigned and so much is private landlord direct to renters.