My main reaction to that graphical model is that it would be surprising if the intersection point was currently exactly on the cusp in the demand curve, unless there was something keeping it there. To the extent that that model works, I’d expect our current situation to have a shorter vertical bit on the demand curve (there are in fact people going hungry), so that the intersection is somewhere in the slopey bit, at lower price than your first picture. Then UBI could bring us to the second picture, where the price has risen, but food is still more widely available than the status quo. (This is one of the directions I was looking at.)
With competition, it seems to me that retailers currently have margins that competition could eat into, but doesn’t. If one of the factors keeping margins above epsilon is the amount of money people are willing to spend, then an increase in that would presumably also increase margins.
I guess I ruled out the possibility that the status-quo intersection was on the slopey bit because then everyone would be going hungry (from the assumptions that everyone were spending $200/month on food and that everyone shared the same subsistence level). However, I don’t have an argument for why the status quo would be on the cusp rather than below it; I just had a hunch which I should (with hindsight) probably have ignored.
My main reaction to that graphical model is that it would be surprising if the intersection point was currently exactly on the cusp in the demand curve, unless there was something keeping it there. To the extent that that model works, I’d expect our current situation to have a shorter vertical bit on the demand curve (there are in fact people going hungry), so that the intersection is somewhere in the slopey bit, at lower price than your first picture. Then UBI could bring us to the second picture, where the price has risen, but food is still more widely available than the status quo. (This is one of the directions I was looking at.)
With competition, it seems to me that retailers currently have margins that competition could eat into, but doesn’t. If one of the factors keeping margins above epsilon is the amount of money people are willing to spend, then an increase in that would presumably also increase margins.
I guess I ruled out the possibility that the status-quo intersection was on the slopey bit because then everyone would be going hungry (from the assumptions that everyone were spending $200/month on food and that everyone shared the same subsistence level). However, I don’t have an argument for why the status quo would be on the cusp rather than below it; I just had a hunch which I should (with hindsight) probably have ignored.