3 ms·
It is a market failure if people want to sell editing and people want to buy editing and no transactions take place. If no one wants to buy editing, no sales o
by patio11 14y ago
It is a market failure if people want to sell editing and people want to buy editing and no transactions take place. If no one wants to buy editing, no sales of editing is a market success. For example, it informs people wondering if they should learn editing or nursing that nursing is the socially and personally optimal choice. One could argue gl that government subsidies for editing misinform participants about what society wants and, simultaneously, redirect societal resources from things people want to things they do not want, like editing.
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoGood point. It's not a market failure, it's a market idiocy. People don't want to buy editing or journalism, they just want regular newspapers and well-edited books to somehow appear for them without having to pay anyone.
- xiaoma 14y agoActually, market failure is when the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto optimal. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where a market participant may be made better-off without making someone else worse-off. This is entirely possible in situations when nobody wants to buy X and nobody is buying X. One common example is when there are externalities involved -- e.g. companies using highly polluting processes that are bourne by not just the customers but also uninvolved 3rd parties. Another common example is due to informational gaps -- imagine a benign physician selling polio vaccinations to a less educated populace that doesn't want them. No one wants to buy, but no sales of vaccinations is very far from Pareto optimal. It is well recognized that non-competitive markets and principal–agent problems can also lead to market failure and there is probably a case to be made that the supply side of high-end journalism suffers from both.