Why do we not allow people to sell organs? If it is a medical worry or a problem with people getting ripped off, a national regulatory body (there is already an organization that regulates organ donation), should solve those problems.
People have strong anti-market biases. It has been said that if there was not a market in sandwiches, and one was suggested, people would recoil in horror. “Only the rich will be able to buy sandwiches.” “Sandwiches will be filled with rat poison and feces.” “It’s just wrong! People should feed each other out of kindness, not greed.” Even “Many people only sell sandwiches because they need money. It’s exploitation.”
Taboo tradeoffs. Probably most readers are too young (as am I) to remember when life insurance was considered immoral. How can you put a price on life?
Political incentives. Why should any one voter demand change? Why should any one politician? Or any one judge? Collective action problems are hard.
Probably because the poor would have a lot of trouble getting organ transplants. Under the current system, you’re put on a waiting list until your number is called. If others can bid more money on organs, you’re out of luck. I can’t imagine insurance companies being overly keen on bidding for organs.
I really don’t want to think about issues arising from people selling off their organs to make ends meet (or to settle gambling debts). And let’s not forget human trafficking. Instead of just forcing people into prostitution, you could also harvest their organs.
I think there are several thorny problems and issues of consent that complicate this matter. Losing an organ is permanent.
It is legal to sell kidneys in Iran. As a result, Iran has no waiting lists for kidney transplantation. You can read an interesting study of the situation here. TLDR: it works well, but everything has tradeoffs.
The top-level answer is because people do not own them. As far as I remember, in the US people do NOT have property rights in their organs and tissues (yes, there were court cases).
Digging deeper, allowing people to own their organs and tissues would make life more complicated and expensive for the medical establishment and it doesn’t like that.
The concern is that we don’t want poor people forced to sell parts of themselves to pay off their debts—it’s a bit too Merchant of Venice. (I think it’d still be good policy, because I don’t see how them not having the choice is any better, but that’s the common concern)
In game theory, sometimes “not having a choice” is an advantage.
Imagine that you are a poor person, someone kidnaps your children and asks $100.000 from you.
Scenario A: Okay, this is not realistic. If they know you are poor, you don’t have a chance to give them $100.000. So actually they will not kidnap your children.
Scenario B: You can sell your body parts for $100.000. Any they know it.
The utility that people gain from money is not linear (and the utility that people lose when losing $X worth of organs is really not linear). Making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who has a lot of money, then, causes less of a loss in utility to them than making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who would have to sell his organs to get the money.
It is easier, in general, to extort a poor person for $X than a rich person for the same amount, for hopefully obvious reasons. For instance, the poor person can’t hire a private detective, bribe the police, or use his connections to track down the kidnapper, and the kidnapping is much less likely to make the national news. And it is much less likely that when you kidnap his kids you piss off some very important people.
It is easy for the kidnapper to figure out that someone has organs. It is harder for the kidnapper to figure out that they have $100000 in a bank account (unless they are rich enough to fall into category 2) or that they can feasibly mortgage their house within a short time.
The market price for organs is not that high compared to how much the person would lose in utility from losing the organs. So a more plausible scenario is that the kidnapper asks for $10000, which is the sale price of the organs, but the person with the organs loses the utility that he would lose from losing $1000000 in cash. If the kidnapper instead extorted someone who had money, they would not lose as much utility.
There exists a mild market in organs. I can donate a kidney in exchange for a loved one getting a kidney. I also can donate my body to science, in exchange the institution—at least in Germany—pays for some kind of burial.
Immediate edit: Actually, since there exists a black market in organs we could make some estimates about prices and conditions on a legalised market in organs.
I suggest that allowing people to sell something where the market price of the item is much less than the price that most people would name if they were asked how much they would accept to sell it but were not in immediate need of money, is generally a bad idea.
This includes organs, prostitution, and signing away your house for a glass of water if you’re dying of thirst in the desert and someone offers to give you water in exchange for your house.
I am confused about your suggestion. If the “market price” is much less than the price that most people would name, where does the market price come from?
Also, forbidding “signing away your house for a glass of water if you’re dying of thirst in the desert” leads to you dying of thirst in the desert. That doesn’t look like a desirable outcome.
If the “market price” is much less than the price that most people would name, where does the market price come from?
I didn’t say the price that most people would name, I said the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money. The market price can certainly be different from that.
Also, forbidding “signing away your house for a glass of water if you’re dying of thirst in the desert” leads to you dying of thirst in the desert. That doesn’t look like a desirable outcome.
It only leads to you dying of thirst in the desert if the existence of this prohibition doesn’t change the behavior of the seller. As long as the legal maximum price is high enough that the seller can make a profit, the seller will change his behavior and sell the water for that price instead.
I said the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money.
So, let’s consider janitorial work. The market price (of an hour of labor) is considerably lower than ” the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money”, isn’t it?
Why do we care about price perceptions by people who are not in immediate need of money, anyway?
It only leads to you dying of thirst in the desert if the existence of this prohibition doesn’t change the behavior of the seller.
You are making no sense. The existence of this prohibition DOES change the behavior of the seller—he no longer spends his time standing in the middle of the desert with a glass of water.
Consider a realistic example. Some states have anti-gouging laws which basically prohibit raising the prices in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. Let’s say I run a lumberyard and state A (without anti-gouging laws) just had a hurricane. I would rent a box truck, stuff it full of lumber and plywood, and drive it over to state A to sell the contents for double the usual price. But if state B (with anti-gouging laws) just had a hurricane, I would sit in my yard and do nothing—why would I? Net effect: residents of state A can start fixing up their houses much faster.
The existence of this prohibition DOES change the behavior of the seller—he no longer spends his time standing in the middle of the desert with a glass of water.
There are several ways in which the behavior of the seller changes. Some may benefit the buyer (as in your anti-gouging example) but some may not (such as if the guy with the glass of water would have had one anyway). Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the benefit you describe happens only at the market price; it may be that people in the area are willing to pay 50 times the normal price for lumber, but 20 times is sufficient to incentivize you to truck in a load of lumber.
I think this discussion would be both more pleasant and more productive (at least for people who are not you) with a higher engagement-to-sneering ratio.
That’s not sneering, that’s shortcutting. If you wish, I’ll unroll.
One of the primary functions of the markets is price discovery. It is really important for the economy that the markets discover prices which then form the basis for future resource allocation.
The classic conceit of the central planner is that he doesn’t need to learn the market prices—he knows better and can allocate resources without all these unfair, chaotic, and messy markets.
In this subthread Jiro feels he doesn’t need market prices—he thinks it would be better if he set fixed prices (or floors or ceilings) based on his perceptions of fairness (see organs) or on what he thinks will be sufficient incentives (see lumber). That looks to me to much like the central planner conceit.
The problem, of course, is that central planning has been shown, empirically, to work badly in real life. The issue then becomes why does Jiro think that his scheme will do much better. Thus the question: why does Jiro thinks central planning has failed and why does he believe that his price manipulation will avoid that fate?
Let me, correspondingly, unpack the motivation behind my comment a little.
There is a continuum running all the way from “completely free unregulated markets” to “totalitarian central state determines what will be made and what it will cost”. It looks to me as if Jiro was proposing some regulation and you responded by saying that totalitarian central planning has a bad track record. That doesn’t seem altogether reasonable.
Further, when you say “central planning failed” you’re working with a rather small sample and one with a bunch of confounding factors. Consider the USSR, for example. It had central planning, its people were rather poor, and in the end it collapsed. But, also: those people were always much poorer per capita than, say, those of the USA or Western Europe; the USSR spent decades locked in economic and (indirect) military conflict with a much better-resourced opponent; it had not only central planning but outright totalitarianism with some rather crazed leaders. Maybe the primary reason why the USSR wasn’t a roaring economic success was that central planning is inferior to free markets, but I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that claim with a lot of confidence.
and you responded by saying that totalitarian central planning has a bad track record
No, I did not—the word “totalitarian” is a gratuitous addition by you.
I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that claim with a lot of confidence.
Oh, but I do think we have more than enough evidence (have you looked at China, for example?). I don’t think that claiming “we don’t know yet” is a reasonable position—this question has been settled.
the word “totalitarian” is a gratuitous addition by you.
It doesn’t seem that way to me. What has failed is a bunch of totalitarian communist countries with central planning. How do you know it is better to characterize that situation as “central planning has failed” than as “totalitarian central planning has failed”?
this question has been settled.
Point me to an explanation of how it has been settled and how rival explanations for the observations have been dealt with?
I think this discussion would be both more pleasant and more productive (at least for people who are not you) with a higher engagement-to-sneering ratio.
I am not particularly interested in engagement with the equivalent of flat-earth theories. At least not until I see some empirical evidence in their favour.
Something widely debated in the economics literature over 70 years is the equivalent of a flat-earth theory? OK, then.
(I do wonder whether we’re at cross purposes somehow, though—whether one of us has misunderstood what specific claim(s) the other is making. My reply to economy elsewhere in this thread may clarify.)
The first one is theoretical. The advantages and disadvantages of central planning have been argued about in the literature for many decades. That was driven mainly by two factors: ideology and the paucity of empirical data.
XX century was, generally speaking, the time of human hubris in the social sphere. Reason and skill would rearrange the society and create a perfect one, not this messy outgrowth of chaotic history and suspect human motivations. The left, in particular, ran with this idea very far, paving its way with corpses for much of the way. Central planning is a necessary component of this grand plan to arrange the society properly and as such it was massively promoted by the left, with some success.
On the other hand, in early XX century central planning was mostly untested, and by the middle of the century there wasn’t much data (and that was skewed by ideology) plus there were exciting developments in the area of linear programming and so there was hope that maths would provide that perfect solution to the allocation problem. In the 50s and the 60s that wasn’t an outrageous claim—maybe yes, maybe no, let’s see how it works out.
But nowadays the bastions of the left have collapsed and we DO know how it works out. The debate is basically over and central planning has lost quite thoroughly. I doubt there’s anyone other than committed marxists who still sing its praises.
The other line of argument, the one I actually had in mind, is purely empirical and does not rely on the opinions of economists.
We had a bunch of countries attempt central planning. It turned out to work really badly. We had another bunch of countries go with the markets. They turned out to work really well. There are no cases of central planning being noticeably successful. There are many cases of market-driven economies being noticeably successful. At the moment all the rich and free countries have market economies. Countries which stick with central planning are countries like Cuba and North Korea.
How much empirical evidence do you need? Please update already.
As I have already said (more than once, I think) in this discussion: I already agree that the available evidence and theoretical analysis give good reason to think that markets beat large-scale central planning. And if Jiro had been proposing large-scale central planning, my only problem with your response would have been its needlessly contemptuous tone.
What s/he was actually proposing was interference with prices in a small number of rather unusual cases, the goal not being to maximize overall economic growth but to prevent what (I take it, with confidence but not certainty) s/he sees as exploitation.
For “Sigh. Why do you think central planning failed” to be an appropriate response to that, it is (it seems to me) not sufficient that the evidence, on the whole, points to markets doing better than large-scale central planning. What would make it an appropriate response? Perhaps if the communist countries had failed so spectacularly, and so obviously because of their different approach to price-setting and resource allocation, that any fool could see at a glance that any interference with the price-setting of the free market is bound to lead to disaster.
It doesn’t appear to me that the state of the evidence is anywhere near to that.
How much empirical evidence do you need?
To agree that it looks like markets are better than large-scale central planning? I have enough, thanks. To say that it’s a completely settled question empirically, and that the difference is so big that anyone suggesting a departure from perfectly free markets should be dismissed with a sigh? A lot more.
How large is our sample here? The number of countries that had centrally-planned economies is fairly large but they’re far from independent (i.e., in many cases their outcomes were closely intertwined on account of common relationships with the USA and USSR). Perhaps something like the equivalent of n=10 independent experiments? (This feels like it’s distinctly on the generous side.) They were mostly pretty poor to begin with, the US and its economic allies were trying pretty hard to make them fail, and their governments were messed up in ways largely unrelated to centralized economic planning. Plenty of economies do really badly without central planning, even without the world’s richest countries actively trying to harm them. So, I dunno, in the total absence of harmful effects from central planning I’d give any given one of those (fictitious) 10 independent communist countries a 3⁄4 chance of doing badly economically, which means Pr(all do badly) comes out at about 1⁄18. So (given the laughably handwavy assumptions of this paragraph) this is the equivalent of a scientific experiment that falls just a little bit short of significance at the 5% level.
Maybe I should say a thing or two about empirical evidence versus theoretical arguments, because for sure there are good theoretical arguments for free markets. The trouble with these is that the lovely theorems the economists prove tend to say things along these lines: “Subject to such-and-such simplifying assumptions, every Pareto-optimal outcome can be had by making cash transfers and then letting a free market operate” and the transfers required to get the right Pareto-optimal outcome (note: there may be lots of Pareto-optimal outcomes and some may be terrible by any reasonable criteria) may be politically infeasible. They might amount to large-scale expropriation, for instance.
If you’re hoping that the market will produce anything like a utility-maximizing outcome without large-scale interference (e.g., massive expropriatory wealth transfers), then the obstacle is that the market can’t see utility except via the proxy of willingness to pay. And maximizing total utility-as-measured-by-willingness-to-pay is very much like maximizing total utility weighted by wealth (if marginal utility of money is inversely proportional to current wealth, which seems like a reasonable approximation, then the market is indifferent to a change that gives me 1 unit of utility at the cost of 1 unit of utility for each of 10 people with 1⁄10 my wealth). I don’t know about you, but I don’t find “max utility weighted by wealth” a very satisfactory figure of merit for optimization.
And, lo, empirically it does look rather as if markets look after the interests of the rich better than those of the poor (though of course this is hard to be sure about since other more reasonable effects can look similar). Does this mean that central planning is better? Heck no. Does it suggest that there might be a case for government intervention, perhaps including some diddling with prices in unusual cases, in order to come closer to maximizing total utility or (unweighted) average utility or something else we prefer to wealth-weighted utility, even at the cost of some reduction in total wealth? To me, yes.
That doesn’t mean Jiro’s suggestion is a good one. Maybe it’s a terrible one. But considerations like the above are why I don’t find “central planning failed and Economics 101 says free markets are optimal, duh” a satisfactory response.
I already agree that the available evidence and theoretical analysis give good reason to think that markets beat large-scale central planning.
That certainly wasn’t evident from this comment of yours.
If you’re hoping that the market will produce anything like a utility-maximizing outcome
The critical issue is the time horizon. In the short term the utility-maximizing move is to divide all the wealth equally. In the long term I would argue that we have evidence showing that markets do maximize utility, compared to the available alternatives.
Does it suggest that there might be a case for government intervention, perhaps including some diddling with prices in unusual cases, in order to come closer to maximizing total utility
First, governments just love diddling with prices. Google up why sugar is so expensive in the US. Or what happens to you if you produce raisins 8-/
Second, I am deeply suspicious of the claim that diddling with the prices is done in order to maximize total utility (of some sort). Based on historical experience, I expect that diddling with the prices aims to transfer wealth from some less politically powerful group to some more politically powerful group. Crony capitalism is a very popular thing nowadays.
That doesn’t mean Jiro’s suggestion is a good one.
Jiro is basically taking the paternalistic stance: “these people don’t know what’s good for them and I’m not going to allow them to do what I don’t like”. That’s not a economic argument, it’s a moral one and picking appropriate moral criteria you can justify any economic practice whatsoever (recall Proudhon’s “Property is theft”, for example).
That certainly wasn’t evident from this comment of yours.
How fortunate, then, that I made other comments as well.
governments just love diddling with prices
I know. And they do diddle with prices. And so all the empirical evidence we have that free markets work well is really evidence that free markets with a whole lot of assorted government intervention work well.
I am deeply suspicious of the claim that diddling with the prices is done in order to maximize total utility
I wasn’t claiming (or at least wasn’t intending to claim) that it generally is. Only that it could be. An argument of the form “we could improve what markets do by doing X” is not invalidated by the fact that governments often do X for bad reasons.
picking appropriate moral criteria you can justify any economic practice whatsoever
No doubt. But if we’re going to argue about what should be done, that’s inevitably partly an argument about values. We can pretend it isn’t, e.g. by settling on some not-explicitly-value-laden thing to maximize—say, total wealth after 100 years—but that really just amounts to choosing values that only care about total wealth after 100 years.
~50 years, from the publishing of Mises’ Socialism until...whenever people just gave up in 70s....
Yes, flat earth comparison too strong. Many brilliant economists of the 20th century made great strides in economics working on this question. And frankly is much easier to prove earth round than markets > central planning.
See page 7 two paragraphs above part IV. Note that opportunities to improve market does not suggest any amount of central planning in any way desirable. Has been academic consensus since 70s that markets > central planning. And consensus also is that when market doesn’t work well, figure out ways to make it work well. Central planning not good alternative.
It doesn’t look to me as if this addresses the question I thought Lumifer and I were arguing about, though: namely, whether we know that the collapse of the communist economies of the USSR and its satellites shows that central planning is a bad idea. (See notes 3 and 4 below.)
Maskin’s lecture says that theoretical economic analysis has led economists to believe that in an idealized situation (in particular, with no monopoly/monopsony power and no externalities) free markets are in some sense optimal. OK, fine (but see note 2 below), but that’s a quite separate question from what conclusions we can draw from the alleged fact that “central planning failed” (see note 1 below).
… I find that there are a bunch of other largely separate things I need to say.
Note 1: For all I know, there may indeed be overwhelming evidence that the late-20th-century failures of communist states were largely the result of economic catastrophe caused solely by central planning. But Maskin’s lecture doesn’t appear to contain or point at anything resembling such evidence.
Note 2: I would be more completely convinced by a consensus of academic economists if there were more sign of mechanisms by which academic economists’ opinions could be strongly constrained by reality. I don’t doubt the correctness of the mathematical manipulations, but how applicable those are to actual economies is another matter. (I take it we can agree that it’s possible for consensus within an academic field to be quite disconnected from reality; consider e.g. the theology of any religion you don’t follow. I think economics is better off than theology in this respect, but it seems to fall some way short of, say, chemistry.) Having said which, I am in fact perfectly happy to accept the economists’ consensus that markets generally do a much better job of price-setting than central planning, and at no point in this discussion have I said (or intended to imply) otherwise.
Note 3: It’s possible that I have misunderstood Lumifer’s comment “Sigh. Why do you think central planning failed?”—which I take to mean something like “Gee, Jiro, you’re being stupid. It’s common knowledge that the communist USSR and its satellites collapsed because their economies were wrecked by central planning, and if you understood that you’d see that what you’re proposing would be disastrous for the same reasons”.
Note 4: So far as I can see, what Jiro was suggesting really isn’t very much like the “central planning” of (e.g.) the USSR. S/he proposed interference with prices only in cases where sellers are desperate (having in mind goods that people normally wouldn’t sell unless desperate) which may or may not be a good idea but has basically nothing to do with the question of markets versus central planning (versus anything else) for “normal” price-setting.
Maybe the primary reason why the USSR wasn’t a roaring economic success was that central planning is inferior to free markets, but I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that claim with a lot of confidence.
So intended to address question of central planning --> bad economy? rather than bad economy --> central planning bad? Maskin’s lecture speaks to that point. But unimportant.
Maskin, like most economists, confuses efficiency with efficacy. I cited him just to indicate that academic economists are very confident that markets > central planning. (Hurwicz shared Nobel with Maskin in 2007.)
Academic economists’ preference for markets more to do with observation than math. Adam Smith didn’t know what linear programming is. Wasn’t until the advent of mathematical tools that central planning could even be conceived of as feasible. The spread of markets is associated with rising prosperity, peacefulness, and civilized behavior. Economists had been observing and theorizing about this fact long before they had the math they do today. Qualitative reasoning combined with observation are basis for most of support for markets, not formalized quantitative models.
Lumifer’s approach not my own, but Jiro’s suggestion to interfere with prices based on their own judgment violates long and uncontroversial position in economics: Thou Shalt Not Substitute Thine Own Judgment For Market Prices. Violating that rule writ large is not a bad summary of central planning. Lumifer’s reaction understandable, albeit perhaps not commendable.
Why markets work and central planning doesn’t is very complicated, difficult subject; in some ways economists’ understanding of this question is quite primitive. Work on this subject myself (right now in fact; this is pleasant distraction). Am working on sequence of articles that, among other things, should indicate why economists have this consensus in favor of markets.
The specific question on which I was disagreeing with Lumifer was: does the late-20th-century failure of communist countries make it obvious that unfettered free markets are always best and that no interference with pricing can be justified? I say it doesn’t seem to.
academic economists are very confident that markets > central planning
Sure. I’m pretty confident of that too. But I don’t think that has much to do with the disagreements between Lumifer, Jiro, and me in this thread.
more to do with observation than math
I took a look at, e.g., Hurwicz (1960) as cited by Maskin: math, theory, math. I’m sure it’s true that the mathematics is motivated by observation—but observation that serves as motivation, rather than as the actual content of the scholarly articles, doesn’t get peer-reviewed :-).
Thou Shalt Not Substitute Thine Own Judgment For Market Prices
Understood. But, in fact, it’s pretty common for governments to mess with market prices via (e.g.) taxation, minimum wages, rent restrictions, etc., and to mess with other aspects of markets via (e.g.) regulation on what’s allowed to be bought and sold at all—and the thing we have empirical evidence for the effectiveness of is markets with all this interference, not the idealized perfectly free markets preferred by academic economists. (Or am I confused about this?) In any case, “the dose makes the poison” and the fact that some variety of interference produces bad results when engaged in on a huge scale doesn’t tell us much about what it does when applied on a small scale in unusual circumstances.
in some ways economists’ understanding of this question is quite primitive
Which is absolutely fair enough—but seems to me to indicate that Lumifer’s dismissiveness is, well, let’s say “perhaps not commendable”.
(PS. Notice you omit many words. Looking at other comments seem not always do so. Related somehow to something I’ve said, e.g. not worth taking trouble to write sentences when addressing foolish person? Sorry if so.)
See slight edits to beginning of previous comment.
Notice you omit many words.
Am lazy, arbitrary choice. Helps to knock out this stuff quickly (fairly typical conversation with the intelligent-but-uninitiated).
Can attribute growing prosperity, stronger economy to markets despite interference rather than markets and interference on the whole because have some theoretical understanding of how growth works. Smith’s Wealth of Nations, founding text of economics, is book all about why some nations rich and other nations poor. Like how physicists could know what was their theories working and what was due to friction and air resistance long before possibility of designed controlled settings to prove beyond any doubt.
Agreed, Jiro is making this error. They postulates a situation where people pay (they say “willing to pay,” but clearly is not talking about consumer surplus) 50, but 20 is enough. What Jiro and readers should wonder is why people are paying so much more than necessary to get what they want, and how Jiro knows this but the people in the actual situation do not.
Not exactly. The assertion is that you dont have to go all the way to equilibrium to capture most of the benefit while preventing most of the repugnant results of equilibrium.
Did not interpret it as such, but perhaps because offered interpretation makes little sense.
Market approaches equilibrium by progressively adding marginal suppliers (whether suppliers really enter in sequential fashion irrelevant; is point about opportunity cost). Marginal suppliers are suppliers least interested in providing service; means they have better alternatives. Basically, for a given price, who more likely to sell organ? Person with better opportunities or person with worse opportunities? Plainly latter. So logically, latter will be “snapped up” by buyers before former (where “before” means relative to equilibrium; is again not temporal point).
Therefore can not move at all toward equilibrium to capture most of benefit without also allowing most of repugnance. Most of producer surplus located where most of repugnance is. To get benefit without repugnance, would need price floor, i.e. would need to prevent movement to equilibrium. Goal would be to select portion of sellers closest to equilibrium point, not farthest from it.
. The market price (of an hour of labor) is considerably lower than ” the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money”, isn’t it?
“In immediate need of money” and “in need of money in their life, eventually and predictably”, aren’t the same thing. If you offered most people $200 for an hour of janitorial labor, they would take your offer. Assuming that the market price is close to minimum wage, that’s a factor of 28. If you offered most people 28 times the market price for their organ, or 28 times the market price for prostituting themselves, they would not take it unless they were starving at the moment.
If you offered most people 28 times the market price for their organ
Citation needed. There’s going to be a problem with that, since there are no market prices for organs at the moment.
Actually, there are some exceptions. Women, for example, can effectively sell their eggs. And it seems there is a market where sellers don’t look to be “starving at the moment”.
28 times the market price for prostituting themselves
Citation still needed. The high-end prostitute prices are sky-high, say $5,000 / session. Times 28 is $140,000 -- what were you saying about most people?
I’m in favor of legal prostitution and am not denying your claim generally, but the idea most people (or frankly any more than let’s say doubleish the current real world rate of people) being willing to prostitute themselves for six figures does not agree with my intuition at all.
Do you have a source in mind or do we just have different intuitions?
Oh I did, the figures for any social circle in which I am has a rate of 0%
.
Do you have a source in mind
Look e.g. at the numbers for the so-called sugar daddies/sugar babies sites. (here or here, etc.)
I may be misinterpreting, but wouldn’t that fall within the “current real world rate” of prostitution I mentioned?
But I guess as to the question asked, of a data source for the prostitution rate change at six figure rates, that might be a hard (albeit perhaps quite fun for researchers) study to run, so I’ll just take that add a no.
Again, total tangent. I agree with your base claim.
Women, for example, can effectively sell their eggs. And it seems there is a market where sellers don’t look to be “starving at the moment”.
If this is true, then what I said would not apply to the selling of eggs.
The high-end prostitute prices are sky-high, say $5,000 / session.
I agree that those particular prostitutes would meet the requirement—they make so much money that most people would be willing to prostitute themselves for some multiple of that amount which is not too high (compared to similar multiples for janitors). So I won’t have a problem with letting them operate.
But that would not extend to prostitutes in general. (I might decide that most prostitution is bad but allow it for practical reasons, but that’s different.)
Citation still needed
This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.
This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.
You are making naked assertions and I’m asking for data, evidence that supports your claims.
If you offered most people 28 times the market price for their organ, or 28 times the market price for prostituting themselves, they would not take it unless they were starving at the moment.
I think that assertion has a significant chance of being false.
Most arguments are meant to convince bystanders. I don’t believe that bystanders will think that assertion has a significant chance of being false. If you disagree, then fine; we have different opinions on organ selling based on irreconcilable differences in opinion about how human beings behave.
most people would be willing to prostitute themselves for some multiple of [$5000 … ] So I won’t have a problem with letting them operate. But that would not extend to prostitutes in general.
You know, I’m not one to throw the word “privilege” around, but I’ll make an exception here. This is a profoundly privileged perspective. You’re taking the stigma attached to prostitution and using that to decree, without personal experience or any hard data that you’ve deigned to produce, that it couldn’t possibly be a rational decision for anyone at any reasonable price.
These people aren’t stupid. A few of them might be desperate—though fewer, I imagine, than you’re giving them credit for—but I’d expect that to give them a keen appreciation of their options. Are you really prepared to say that they don’t know their own needs?
(By the way, I lived near the Nevada state line when I was in high school, and locker-room word of mouth at the time placed an hour at one of the so-called “bunny ranches” across the border at about $200. Accounting for inflation, let’s call it $300 now. 28 times that is $8400 -- enough to tempt me as I am, and definitely enough that it would tempt me if I wasn’t already working a high-paying job. No starvation needed.)
You’re taking the stigma attached to prostitution and using that to decree, without personal experience or any hard data that you’ve deigned to produce, that it couldn’t possibly be a rational decision for anyone at any reasonable price.
If by “stigmatize selling X” you mean “refusing to sell X except for a price that is very high compared to what it gets on the market”, then of course—you’re just restating what I’m saying.
If you mean something else, please clarify.
it couldn’t possibly be a rational decision for anyone at any reasonable price
I already agreed that there are high priced prostitutes who are making rational decisions, although I would not apply this to typical prostitutes.
locker-room word of mouth at the time placed an hour at one of the so-called “bunny ranches” across the border at about $200.
1) Do the prostitutes actually get $200 take home pay, not just $200 receipts (some of which has to go to overhead and paying the pimp)?
2) The question about most people is really about most people somewhat like them. In particular, is your gender the same as the prostitutes’?
3) Even if the answers to the first two questions don’t make it moot, are you a typical person in this regard?
If by “stigmatize selling X” you mean “refusing to sell X except for a price that is very high compared to what it gets on the market”, then of course [...] If you mean something else, please clarify.
I said “social stigma”, and I meant “social stigma”: the attitudes that make other people think less of you, on average, for taking X as a job than Y. My presumption is that that you’re basing your extremely low estimate of the job’s attractiveness on that stigma (there’s really nothing else to explain orders-of-magnitude levels of aversion); I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). These are the same factors that make unskilled labor in a steel mill command more money than unskilled labor in data entry, and sex isn’t magic.
(Bans can distort markets in unpredictable ways, but that’s why I used Nevada as an example.)
But that wasn’t even the important part of my post. The important part is that they are not you, neither in personality nor circumstances, and even if you believe that most people would find their career choice very aversive, it’s presumptuous in the extreme to declare it illegitimate (for example by assuming it must be the product of coercion) on that basis. And on that note...
are you a typical person in this regard?
...this is almost exactly the wrong question to be asking. Comparative advantage is a thing! If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms. There is absolutely no reason that a given job has to be attractive to a “typical” person. Mine isn’t.
I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing)
If people are unwilling to sell X except for much more than the price other people people are willing to pay, then the market does indeed take that into account—it takes it into account by causing there not to be a market, except for the desperate.
That’s the whole point of my criterion.
If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms.
The question is not whether it is good for one person to be a prostitute, the question is whether it is good in general. If there are a lot of people like you, most prostitutes will be people with comparative advantage. If there are few people like you, most prostitutes will be the desperate, even though some will indeed be people like you. So it doesn’t just matter whether you exist at all, it also matters if you are typical.
This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.
You really think it’s appropriate to object to somebody calling out your unsupported claims as unsupported when they are
A) obviously disagreeing with you, to the point where there’s absolutely no need to explicitly state it, and
B) providing evidence in support of their own claims, with both reasonable arguments and supporting links? In that case, what would it take to convince you?
(Emphasis mine) Should I take it that this is then something you can’t actually be convinced of by anything short of incontrovertible proof to the contrary?
Most arguments are meant to convince bystanders. I don’t believe that bystanders will think that assertion has a significant chance of being false
Data set of one, but I find Lumifer’s arguments far more convincing than yours. This is largely based on the fact that they are actually backed up by something more than the assumption that everybody begins with your personal model of how people make decisions.
If we grant for the sake of argument that these are the facts, it’s still not clear to me that banning the sale is a good thing.
Suppose we have three people, Alice (who lives a comfortable upper-middle class life), Bob (currently starving), and Carol (rich and in need of a kidney). Alice doesn’t particularly care about money, but if there is a lack of kidneys she is willing to give one to feel that she is doing good in the world. Bob cares very much about money—if he can’t sell the kidney he will starve to death.
In this hypothetical there are enough donors to fill demand even with a $0 price ceiling, so Carol doesn’t care either way. But by banning the sale, the benefit of the transaction now goes to Alice (who gets some extra warm fuzzies) rather than Bob, even though Bob is in much more dire need.
As long as the legal maximum price is high enough that the seller can make a profit, the seller will change his behavior and sell the water for that price instead.
“Make a profit” is not the limiting factor. “Make enough of a profit to make it worth scouring the desert for thirsty people” is. If I’ll get $3 for a glass of tap water, I’ll sell it to someone who knocks on my door. If I’ll get $100,000 for it, I’m going to rent a chopper and fly around the Sahara.
Too many analogies, what specific harms do you think would result from people being able to sell their organs and some regulated price? If there is informed consent, then the monetary benefit should exceed the health cost.
I think that if the regulated price was either a ceiling that is low enough, or a floor which is high enough (or both, as in the case for wages), then harms would not result at all. A law which said “all organ selling must be either a free donation, or accompanied by a payment of at least $2 million” would probably be okay.
But that is a very noncentral description of organ selling. The majority of advocates of organ selling don’t want such limits on it.
Actually, there are two ways to limit it. If the price is very low, such as $0, desperation would not affect people’s willingness to sell their organs because the price is so low that it can’t relieve desperation. If the price is very high, desperation is not making people sell the organs for a lowballed price. It’s prices in the middle that are the problem.
(We also do this with normal labor. You can give away your labor for $0, and you can work for an amount that is at least the minimum wage, but nothing inbetween.)
(We also do this with normal labor. You can give away your labor for $0, and you can work for an amount that is at least the minimum wage, but nothing inbetween.)
It feels like you are playing the “Gotcha!” game with the goal of winning rather than communicating your objection to organ selling. I can’t see why else you would argue that organ donation is regulated sale with a price $0.
In that case I am not likely to respond further. It seems obvious to me what the benefits are of a high price with thorough testing, informed consent and exclusion criteria : it would solve the organ shortage and allow for faster advances in research. As to what the harms are I am still unclear.
It’s not a gotcha. I’m not just saying “well, technically, $0 is a number, so that fits what you literally said”. Limiting the price to $0 really is regulation of the price; setting the price to $0 is meant to alleviate some of the problems that could result from allowing a higher price, because it changes the incentives.
What do you think would happen if we duplicated the minimum wage structure in this arena? ‘You can give away your kidney, or sell it for at least X dollars’ where x is some amount deemed to reduce exploitation of the desperate? I like this idea.
Why do we not allow people to sell organs? If it is a medical worry or a problem with people getting ripped off, a national regulatory body (there is already an organization that regulates organ donation), should solve those problems.
People have strong anti-market biases. It has been said that if there was not a market in sandwiches, and one was suggested, people would recoil in horror. “Only the rich will be able to buy sandwiches.” “Sandwiches will be filled with rat poison and feces.” “It’s just wrong! People should feed each other out of kindness, not greed.” Even “Many people only sell sandwiches because they need money. It’s exploitation.”
Taboo tradeoffs. Probably most readers are too young (as am I) to remember when life insurance was considered immoral. How can you put a price on life?
Political incentives. Why should any one voter demand change? Why should any one politician? Or any one judge? Collective action problems are hard.
The concern is exploitation of poor people. (And no, I agree that that reasoning doesn’t make much sense).
Probably because the poor would have a lot of trouble getting organ transplants. Under the current system, you’re put on a waiting list until your number is called. If others can bid more money on organs, you’re out of luck. I can’t imagine insurance companies being overly keen on bidding for organs.
I really don’t want to think about issues arising from people selling off their organs to make ends meet (or to settle gambling debts). And let’s not forget human trafficking. Instead of just forcing people into prostitution, you could also harvest their organs.
I think there are several thorny problems and issues of consent that complicate this matter. Losing an organ is permanent.
It is legal to sell kidneys in Iran. As a result, Iran has no waiting lists for kidney transplantation. You can read an interesting study of the situation here. TLDR: it works well, but everything has tradeoffs.
The top-level answer is because people do not own them. As far as I remember, in the US people do NOT have property rights in their organs and tissues (yes, there were court cases).
Digging deeper, allowing people to own their organs and tissues would make life more complicated and expensive for the medical establishment and it doesn’t like that.
That makes a lot of sense. The healthcare industry would be down several thousand dollars per kidney transplant if people sold instead of donating.
The ownership thing, ugh, why do we allow people to donate then.
This reminds me of prostitution—it’s legal to give away something that it’s illegal to sell.
The concern is that we don’t want poor people forced to sell parts of themselves to pay off their debts—it’s a bit too Merchant of Venice. (I think it’d still be good policy, because I don’t see how them not having the choice is any better, but that’s the common concern)
In game theory, sometimes “not having a choice” is an advantage.
Imagine that you are a poor person, someone kidnaps your children and asks $100.000 from you.
Scenario A: Okay, this is not realistic. If they know you are poor, you don’t have a chance to give them $100.000. So actually they will not kidnap your children.
Scenario B: You can sell your body parts for $100.000. Any they know it.
That’s a fully general argument against having any capabilities.
No, it’s not, for several reasons:
The utility that people gain from money is not linear (and the utility that people lose when losing $X worth of organs is really not linear). Making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who has a lot of money, then, causes less of a loss in utility to them than making it possible to extort $100000 from someone who would have to sell his organs to get the money.
It is easier, in general, to extort a poor person for $X than a rich person for the same amount, for hopefully obvious reasons. For instance, the poor person can’t hire a private detective, bribe the police, or use his connections to track down the kidnapper, and the kidnapping is much less likely to make the national news. And it is much less likely that when you kidnap his kids you piss off some very important people.
It is easy for the kidnapper to figure out that someone has organs. It is harder for the kidnapper to figure out that they have $100000 in a bank account (unless they are rich enough to fall into category 2) or that they can feasibly mortgage their house within a short time.
The market price for organs is not that high compared to how much the person would lose in utility from losing the organs. So a more plausible scenario is that the kidnapper asks for $10000, which is the sale price of the organs, but the person with the organs loses the utility that he would lose from losing $1000000 in cash. If the kidnapper instead extorted someone who had money, they would not lose as much utility.
“The Bangladesh poor selling organs to pay debts” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24128096
Yeah, that. There’s no way of getting money that’s so ugly that some poor, desperate person somewhere won’t try.
There exists a mild market in organs. I can donate a kidney in exchange for a loved one getting a kidney. I also can donate my body to science, in exchange the institution—at least in Germany—pays for some kind of burial.
Immediate edit: Actually, since there exists a black market in organs we could make some estimates about prices and conditions on a legalised market in organs.
I suggest that allowing people to sell something where the market price of the item is much less than the price that most people would name if they were asked how much they would accept to sell it but were not in immediate need of money, is generally a bad idea.
This includes organs, prostitution, and signing away your house for a glass of water if you’re dying of thirst in the desert and someone offers to give you water in exchange for your house.
I am confused about your suggestion. If the “market price” is much less than the price that most people would name, where does the market price come from?
Also, forbidding “signing away your house for a glass of water if you’re dying of thirst in the desert” leads to you dying of thirst in the desert. That doesn’t look like a desirable outcome.
I didn’t say the price that most people would name, I said the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money. The market price can certainly be different from that.
It only leads to you dying of thirst in the desert if the existence of this prohibition doesn’t change the behavior of the seller. As long as the legal maximum price is high enough that the seller can make a profit, the seller will change his behavior and sell the water for that price instead.
So, let’s consider janitorial work. The market price (of an hour of labor) is considerably lower than ” the price that most people would name if they weren’t in immediate need of money”, isn’t it?
Why do we care about price perceptions by people who are not in immediate need of money, anyway?
You are making no sense. The existence of this prohibition DOES change the behavior of the seller—he no longer spends his time standing in the middle of the desert with a glass of water.
Consider a realistic example. Some states have anti-gouging laws which basically prohibit raising the prices in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. Let’s say I run a lumberyard and state A (without anti-gouging laws) just had a hurricane. I would rent a box truck, stuff it full of lumber and plywood, and drive it over to state A to sell the contents for double the usual price. But if state B (with anti-gouging laws) just had a hurricane, I would sit in my yard and do nothing—why would I? Net effect: residents of state A can start fixing up their houses much faster.
There are several ways in which the behavior of the seller changes. Some may benefit the buyer (as in your anti-gouging example) but some may not (such as if the guy with the glass of water would have had one anyway). Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the benefit you describe happens only at the market price; it may be that people in the area are willing to pay 50 times the normal price for lumber, but 20 times is sufficient to incentivize you to truck in a load of lumber.
Sigh. Why do you think central planning failed?
I think this discussion would be both more pleasant and more productive (at least for people who are not you) with a higher engagement-to-sneering ratio.
That’s not sneering, that’s shortcutting. If you wish, I’ll unroll.
One of the primary functions of the markets is price discovery. It is really important for the economy that the markets discover prices which then form the basis for future resource allocation.
The classic conceit of the central planner is that he doesn’t need to learn the market prices—he knows better and can allocate resources without all these unfair, chaotic, and messy markets.
In this subthread Jiro feels he doesn’t need market prices—he thinks it would be better if he set fixed prices (or floors or ceilings) based on his perceptions of fairness (see organs) or on what he thinks will be sufficient incentives (see lumber). That looks to me to much like the central planner conceit.
The problem, of course, is that central planning has been shown, empirically, to work badly in real life. The issue then becomes why does Jiro think that his scheme will do much better. Thus the question: why does Jiro thinks central planning has failed and why does he believe that his price manipulation will avoid that fate?
Let me, correspondingly, unpack the motivation behind my comment a little.
There is a continuum running all the way from “completely free unregulated markets” to “totalitarian central state determines what will be made and what it will cost”. It looks to me as if Jiro was proposing some regulation and you responded by saying that totalitarian central planning has a bad track record. That doesn’t seem altogether reasonable.
Further, when you say “central planning failed” you’re working with a rather small sample and one with a bunch of confounding factors. Consider the USSR, for example. It had central planning, its people were rather poor, and in the end it collapsed. But, also: those people were always much poorer per capita than, say, those of the USA or Western Europe; the USSR spent decades locked in economic and (indirect) military conflict with a much better-resourced opponent; it had not only central planning but outright totalitarianism with some rather crazed leaders. Maybe the primary reason why the USSR wasn’t a roaring economic success was that central planning is inferior to free markets, but I don’t think we have enough evidence to make that claim with a lot of confidence.
To be precise, he was proposing price fixing.
No, I did not—the word “totalitarian” is a gratuitous addition by you.
Oh, but I do think we have more than enough evidence (have you looked at China, for example?). I don’t think that claiming “we don’t know yet” is a reasonable position—this question has been settled.
It doesn’t seem that way to me. What has failed is a bunch of totalitarian communist countries with central planning. How do you know it is better to characterize that situation as “central planning has failed” than as “totalitarian central planning has failed”?
Point me to an explanation of how it has been settled and how rival explanations for the observations have been dealt with?
This question has only been widely debated in the economics literature for the last, what, 70 years?
I think this discussion would be both more pleasant and more productive (at least for people who are not you) with a higher engagement-to-sneering ratio.
I am not particularly interested in engagement with the equivalent of flat-earth theories. At least not until I see some empirical evidence in their favour.
Something widely debated in the economics literature over 70 years is the equivalent of a flat-earth theory? OK, then.
(I do wonder whether we’re at cross purposes somehow, though—whether one of us has misunderstood what specific claim(s) the other is making. My reply to economy elsewhere in this thread may clarify.)
There are two lines of argument here.
The first one is theoretical. The advantages and disadvantages of central planning have been argued about in the literature for many decades. That was driven mainly by two factors: ideology and the paucity of empirical data.
XX century was, generally speaking, the time of human hubris in the social sphere. Reason and skill would rearrange the society and create a perfect one, not this messy outgrowth of chaotic history and suspect human motivations. The left, in particular, ran with this idea very far, paving its way with corpses for much of the way. Central planning is a necessary component of this grand plan to arrange the society properly and as such it was massively promoted by the left, with some success.
On the other hand, in early XX century central planning was mostly untested, and by the middle of the century there wasn’t much data (and that was skewed by ideology) plus there were exciting developments in the area of linear programming and so there was hope that maths would provide that perfect solution to the allocation problem. In the 50s and the 60s that wasn’t an outrageous claim—maybe yes, maybe no, let’s see how it works out.
But nowadays the bastions of the left have collapsed and we DO know how it works out. The debate is basically over and central planning has lost quite thoroughly. I doubt there’s anyone other than committed marxists who still sing its praises.
The other line of argument, the one I actually had in mind, is purely empirical and does not rely on the opinions of economists.
We had a bunch of countries attempt central planning. It turned out to work really badly. We had another bunch of countries go with the markets. They turned out to work really well. There are no cases of central planning being noticeably successful. There are many cases of market-driven economies being noticeably successful. At the moment all the rich and free countries have market economies. Countries which stick with central planning are countries like Cuba and North Korea.
How much empirical evidence do you need? Please update already.
Update how, exactly?
As I have already said (more than once, I think) in this discussion: I already agree that the available evidence and theoretical analysis give good reason to think that markets beat large-scale central planning. And if Jiro had been proposing large-scale central planning, my only problem with your response would have been its needlessly contemptuous tone.
What s/he was actually proposing was interference with prices in a small number of rather unusual cases, the goal not being to maximize overall economic growth but to prevent what (I take it, with confidence but not certainty) s/he sees as exploitation.
For “Sigh. Why do you think central planning failed” to be an appropriate response to that, it is (it seems to me) not sufficient that the evidence, on the whole, points to markets doing better than large-scale central planning. What would make it an appropriate response? Perhaps if the communist countries had failed so spectacularly, and so obviously because of their different approach to price-setting and resource allocation, that any fool could see at a glance that any interference with the price-setting of the free market is bound to lead to disaster.
It doesn’t appear to me that the state of the evidence is anywhere near to that.
To agree that it looks like markets are better than large-scale central planning? I have enough, thanks. To say that it’s a completely settled question empirically, and that the difference is so big that anyone suggesting a departure from perfectly free markets should be dismissed with a sigh? A lot more.
How large is our sample here? The number of countries that had centrally-planned economies is fairly large but they’re far from independent (i.e., in many cases their outcomes were closely intertwined on account of common relationships with the USA and USSR). Perhaps something like the equivalent of n=10 independent experiments? (This feels like it’s distinctly on the generous side.) They were mostly pretty poor to begin with, the US and its economic allies were trying pretty hard to make them fail, and their governments were messed up in ways largely unrelated to centralized economic planning. Plenty of economies do really badly without central planning, even without the world’s richest countries actively trying to harm them. So, I dunno, in the total absence of harmful effects from central planning I’d give any given one of those (fictitious) 10 independent communist countries a 3⁄4 chance of doing badly economically, which means Pr(all do badly) comes out at about 1⁄18. So (given the laughably handwavy assumptions of this paragraph) this is the equivalent of a scientific experiment that falls just a little bit short of significance at the 5% level.
Maybe I should say a thing or two about empirical evidence versus theoretical arguments, because for sure there are good theoretical arguments for free markets. The trouble with these is that the lovely theorems the economists prove tend to say things along these lines: “Subject to such-and-such simplifying assumptions, every Pareto-optimal outcome can be had by making cash transfers and then letting a free market operate” and the transfers required to get the right Pareto-optimal outcome (note: there may be lots of Pareto-optimal outcomes and some may be terrible by any reasonable criteria) may be politically infeasible. They might amount to large-scale expropriation, for instance.
If you’re hoping that the market will produce anything like a utility-maximizing outcome without large-scale interference (e.g., massive expropriatory wealth transfers), then the obstacle is that the market can’t see utility except via the proxy of willingness to pay. And maximizing total utility-as-measured-by-willingness-to-pay is very much like maximizing total utility weighted by wealth (if marginal utility of money is inversely proportional to current wealth, which seems like a reasonable approximation, then the market is indifferent to a change that gives me 1 unit of utility at the cost of 1 unit of utility for each of 10 people with 1⁄10 my wealth). I don’t know about you, but I don’t find “max utility weighted by wealth” a very satisfactory figure of merit for optimization.
And, lo, empirically it does look rather as if markets look after the interests of the rich better than those of the poor (though of course this is hard to be sure about since other more reasonable effects can look similar). Does this mean that central planning is better? Heck no. Does it suggest that there might be a case for government intervention, perhaps including some diddling with prices in unusual cases, in order to come closer to maximizing total utility or (unweighted) average utility or something else we prefer to wealth-weighted utility, even at the cost of some reduction in total wealth? To me, yes.
That doesn’t mean Jiro’s suggestion is a good one. Maybe it’s a terrible one. But considerations like the above are why I don’t find “central planning failed and Economics 101 says free markets are optimal, duh” a satisfactory response.
That certainly wasn’t evident from this comment of yours.
The critical issue is the time horizon. In the short term the utility-maximizing move is to divide all the wealth equally. In the long term I would argue that we have evidence showing that markets do maximize utility, compared to the available alternatives.
First, governments just love diddling with prices. Google up why sugar is so expensive in the US. Or what happens to you if you produce raisins 8-/
Second, I am deeply suspicious of the claim that diddling with the prices is done in order to maximize total utility (of some sort). Based on historical experience, I expect that diddling with the prices aims to transfer wealth from some less politically powerful group to some more politically powerful group. Crony capitalism is a very popular thing nowadays.
Jiro is basically taking the paternalistic stance: “these people don’t know what’s good for them and I’m not going to allow them to do what I don’t like”. That’s not a economic argument, it’s a moral one and picking appropriate moral criteria you can justify any economic practice whatsoever (recall Proudhon’s “Property is theft”, for example).
How fortunate, then, that I made other comments as well.
I know. And they do diddle with prices. And so all the empirical evidence we have that free markets work well is really evidence that free markets with a whole lot of assorted government intervention work well.
I wasn’t claiming (or at least wasn’t intending to claim) that it generally is. Only that it could be. An argument of the form “we could improve what markets do by doing X” is not invalidated by the fact that governments often do X for bad reasons.
No doubt. But if we’re going to argue about what should be done, that’s inevitably partly an argument about values. We can pretend it isn’t, e.g. by settling on some not-explicitly-value-laden thing to maximize—say, total wealth after 100 years—but that really just amounts to choosing values that only care about total wealth after 100 years.
~50 years, from the publishing of Mises’ Socialism until...whenever people just gave up in 70s....
Yes, flat earth comparison too strong. Many brilliant economists of the 20th century made great strides in economics working on this question. And frankly is much easier to prove earth round than markets > central planning.
See page 7 two paragraphs above part IV. Note that opportunities to improve market does not suggest any amount of central planning in any way desirable. Has been academic consensus since 70s that markets > central planning. And consensus also is that when market doesn’t work well, figure out ways to make it work well. Central planning not good alternative.
Thanks!
It doesn’t look to me as if this addresses the question I thought Lumifer and I were arguing about, though: namely, whether we know that the collapse of the communist economies of the USSR and its satellites shows that central planning is a bad idea. (See notes 3 and 4 below.)
Maskin’s lecture says that theoretical economic analysis has led economists to believe that in an idealized situation (in particular, with no monopoly/monopsony power and no externalities) free markets are in some sense optimal. OK, fine (but see note 2 below), but that’s a quite separate question from what conclusions we can draw from the alleged fact that “central planning failed” (see note 1 below).
… I find that there are a bunch of other largely separate things I need to say.
Note 1: For all I know, there may indeed be overwhelming evidence that the late-20th-century failures of communist states were largely the result of economic catastrophe caused solely by central planning. But Maskin’s lecture doesn’t appear to contain or point at anything resembling such evidence.
Note 2: I would be more completely convinced by a consensus of academic economists if there were more sign of mechanisms by which academic economists’ opinions could be strongly constrained by reality. I don’t doubt the correctness of the mathematical manipulations, but how applicable those are to actual economies is another matter. (I take it we can agree that it’s possible for consensus within an academic field to be quite disconnected from reality; consider e.g. the theology of any religion you don’t follow. I think economics is better off than theology in this respect, but it seems to fall some way short of, say, chemistry.) Having said which, I am in fact perfectly happy to accept the economists’ consensus that markets generally do a much better job of price-setting than central planning, and at no point in this discussion have I said (or intended to imply) otherwise.
Note 3: It’s possible that I have misunderstood Lumifer’s comment “Sigh. Why do you think central planning failed?”—which I take to mean something like “Gee, Jiro, you’re being stupid. It’s common knowledge that the communist USSR and its satellites collapsed because their economies were wrecked by central planning, and if you understood that you’d see that what you’re proposing would be disastrous for the same reasons”.
Note 4: So far as I can see, what Jiro was suggesting really isn’t very much like the “central planning” of (e.g.) the USSR. S/he proposed interference with prices only in cases where sellers are desperate (having in mind goods that people normally wouldn’t sell unless desperate) which may or may not be a good idea but has basically nothing to do with the question of markets versus central planning (versus anything else) for “normal” price-setting.
Specifically, what Lumifer quoted end of:
So intended to address question of central planning --> bad economy? rather than bad economy --> central planning bad? Maskin’s lecture speaks to that point. But unimportant.
Maskin, like most economists, confuses efficiency with efficacy. I cited him just to indicate that academic economists are very confident that markets > central planning. (Hurwicz shared Nobel with Maskin in 2007.)
Academic economists’ preference for markets more to do with observation than math. Adam Smith didn’t know what linear programming is. Wasn’t until the advent of mathematical tools that central planning could even be conceived of as feasible. The spread of markets is associated with rising prosperity, peacefulness, and civilized behavior. Economists had been observing and theorizing about this fact long before they had the math they do today. Qualitative reasoning combined with observation are basis for most of support for markets, not formalized quantitative models.
Lumifer’s approach not my own, but Jiro’s suggestion to interfere with prices based on their own judgment violates long and uncontroversial position in economics: Thou Shalt Not Substitute Thine Own Judgment For Market Prices. Violating that rule writ large is not a bad summary of central planning. Lumifer’s reaction understandable, albeit perhaps not commendable.
Why markets work and central planning doesn’t is very complicated, difficult subject; in some ways economists’ understanding of this question is quite primitive. Work on this subject myself (right now in fact; this is pleasant distraction). Am working on sequence of articles that, among other things, should indicate why economists have this consensus in favor of markets.
The specific question on which I was disagreeing with Lumifer was: does the late-20th-century failure of communist countries make it obvious that unfettered free markets are always best and that no interference with pricing can be justified? I say it doesn’t seem to.
Sure. I’m pretty confident of that too. But I don’t think that has much to do with the disagreements between Lumifer, Jiro, and me in this thread.
I took a look at, e.g., Hurwicz (1960) as cited by Maskin: math, theory, math. I’m sure it’s true that the mathematics is motivated by observation—but observation that serves as motivation, rather than as the actual content of the scholarly articles, doesn’t get peer-reviewed :-).
Understood. But, in fact, it’s pretty common for governments to mess with market prices via (e.g.) taxation, minimum wages, rent restrictions, etc., and to mess with other aspects of markets via (e.g.) regulation on what’s allowed to be bought and sold at all—and the thing we have empirical evidence for the effectiveness of is markets with all this interference, not the idealized perfectly free markets preferred by academic economists. (Or am I confused about this?) In any case, “the dose makes the poison” and the fact that some variety of interference produces bad results when engaged in on a huge scale doesn’t tell us much about what it does when applied on a small scale in unusual circumstances.
Which is absolutely fair enough—but seems to me to indicate that Lumifer’s dismissiveness is, well, let’s say “perhaps not commendable”.
(PS. Notice you omit many words. Looking at other comments seem not always do so. Related somehow to something I’ve said, e.g. not worth taking trouble to write sentences when addressing foolish person? Sorry if so.)
See slight edits to beginning of previous comment.
Am lazy, arbitrary choice. Helps to knock out this stuff quickly (fairly typical conversation with the intelligent-but-uninitiated).
Can attribute growing prosperity, stronger economy to markets despite interference rather than markets and interference on the whole because have some theoretical understanding of how growth works. Smith’s Wealth of Nations, founding text of economics, is book all about why some nations rich and other nations poor. Like how physicists could know what was their theories working and what was due to friction and air resistance long before possibility of designed controlled settings to prove beyond any doubt.
Agreed, Jiro is making this error. They postulates a situation where people pay (they say “willing to pay,” but clearly is not talking about consumer surplus) 50, but 20 is enough. What Jiro and readers should wonder is why people are paying so much more than necessary to get what they want, and how Jiro knows this but the people in the actual situation do not.
Not exactly. The assertion is that you dont have to go all the way to equilibrium to capture most of the benefit while preventing most of the repugnant results of equilibrium.
Did not interpret it as such, but perhaps because offered interpretation makes little sense.
Market approaches equilibrium by progressively adding marginal suppliers (whether suppliers really enter in sequential fashion irrelevant; is point about opportunity cost). Marginal suppliers are suppliers least interested in providing service; means they have better alternatives. Basically, for a given price, who more likely to sell organ? Person with better opportunities or person with worse opportunities? Plainly latter. So logically, latter will be “snapped up” by buyers before former (where “before” means relative to equilibrium; is again not temporal point).
Therefore can not move at all toward equilibrium to capture most of benefit without also allowing most of repugnance. Most of producer surplus located where most of repugnance is. To get benefit without repugnance, would need price floor, i.e. would need to prevent movement to equilibrium. Goal would be to select portion of sellers closest to equilibrium point, not farthest from it.
“In immediate need of money” and “in need of money in their life, eventually and predictably”, aren’t the same thing. If you offered most people $200 for an hour of janitorial labor, they would take your offer. Assuming that the market price is close to minimum wage, that’s a factor of 28. If you offered most people 28 times the market price for their organ, or 28 times the market price for prostituting themselves, they would not take it unless they were starving at the moment.
Citation needed. There’s going to be a problem with that, since there are no market prices for organs at the moment.
Actually, there are some exceptions. Women, for example, can effectively sell their eggs. And it seems there is a market where sellers don’t look to be “starving at the moment”.
Citation still needed. The high-end prostitute prices are sky-high, say $5,000 / session. Times 28 is $140,000 -- what were you saying about most people?
I’m in favor of legal prostitution and am not denying your claim generally, but the idea most people (or frankly any more than let’s say doubleish the current real world rate of people) being willing to prostitute themselves for six figures does not agree with my intuition at all.
Do you have a source in mind or do we just have different intuitions?
Look beyond your own social circle.
Look e.g. at the numbers for the so-called sugar daddies/sugar babies sites. (here or here, etc.)
Oh I did, the figures for any social circle in which I am has a rate of 0% .
I may be misinterpreting, but wouldn’t that fall within the “current real world rate” of prostitution I mentioned?
But I guess as to the question asked, of a data source for the prostitution rate change at six figure rates, that might be a hard (albeit perhaps quite fun for researchers) study to run, so I’ll just take that add a no.
Again, total tangent. I agree with your base claim.
If this is true, then what I said would not apply to the selling of eggs.
I agree that those particular prostitutes would meet the requirement—they make so much money that most people would be willing to prostitute themselves for some multiple of that amount which is not too high (compared to similar multiples for janitors). So I won’t have a problem with letting them operate.
But that would not extend to prostitutes in general. (I might decide that most prostitution is bad but allow it for practical reasons, but that’s different.)
This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.
You are making naked assertions and I’m asking for data, evidence that supports your claims.
It is only appropriate to ask for data for an assertion if you think the assertion has a significant chance of being false.
Sure. Your assertion was:
I think that assertion has a significant chance of being false.
Most arguments are meant to convince bystanders. I don’t believe that bystanders will think that assertion has a significant chance of being false. If you disagree, then fine; we have different opinions on organ selling based on irreconcilable differences in opinion about how human beings behave.
You know, I’m not one to throw the word “privilege” around, but I’ll make an exception here. This is a profoundly privileged perspective. You’re taking the stigma attached to prostitution and using that to decree, without personal experience or any hard data that you’ve deigned to produce, that it couldn’t possibly be a rational decision for anyone at any reasonable price.
These people aren’t stupid. A few of them might be desperate—though fewer, I imagine, than you’re giving them credit for—but I’d expect that to give them a keen appreciation of their options. Are you really prepared to say that they don’t know their own needs?
(By the way, I lived near the Nevada state line when I was in high school, and locker-room word of mouth at the time placed an hour at one of the so-called “bunny ranches” across the border at about $200. Accounting for inflation, let’s call it $300 now. 28 times that is $8400 -- enough to tempt me as I am, and definitely enough that it would tempt me if I wasn’t already working a high-paying job. No starvation needed.)
In addition: sugar babies/daddies are very popular, looks like.
If by “stigmatize selling X” you mean “refusing to sell X except for a price that is very high compared to what it gets on the market”, then of course—you’re just restating what I’m saying.
If you mean something else, please clarify.
I already agreed that there are high priced prostitutes who are making rational decisions, although I would not apply this to typical prostitutes.
1) Do the prostitutes actually get $200 take home pay, not just $200 receipts (some of which has to go to overhead and paying the pimp)?
2) The question about most people is really about most people somewhat like them. In particular, is your gender the same as the prostitutes’?
3) Even if the answers to the first two questions don’t make it moot, are you a typical person in this regard?
I said “social stigma”, and I meant “social stigma”: the attitudes that make other people think less of you, on average, for taking X as a job than Y. My presumption is that that you’re basing your extremely low estimate of the job’s attractiveness on that stigma (there’s really nothing else to explain orders-of-magnitude levels of aversion); I, on the other hand, would expect it to have been priced into the market already, along with a number of other externalities like health and legal risk, and that the people considering the job are competent to evaluate it (which is really just another way of saying the same thing). These are the same factors that make unskilled labor in a steel mill command more money than unskilled labor in data entry, and sex isn’t magic.
(Bans can distort markets in unpredictable ways, but that’s why I used Nevada as an example.)
But that wasn’t even the important part of my post. The important part is that they are not you, neither in personality nor circumstances, and even if you believe that most people would find their career choice very aversive, it’s presumptuous in the extreme to declare it illegitimate (for example by assuming it must be the product of coercion) on that basis. And on that note...
...this is almost exactly the wrong question to be asking. Comparative advantage is a thing! If one person is willing and able to produce more value for money in a given role than another, that means nothing more or less than that they’re better suited to that role, at least in economic terms. There is absolutely no reason that a given job has to be attractive to a “typical” person. Mine isn’t.
If people are unwilling to sell X except for much more than the price other people people are willing to pay, then the market does indeed take that into account—it takes it into account by causing there not to be a market, except for the desperate.
That’s the whole point of my criterion.
The question is not whether it is good for one person to be a prostitute, the question is whether it is good in general. If there are a lot of people like you, most prostitutes will be people with comparative advantage. If there are few people like you, most prostitutes will be the desperate, even though some will indeed be people like you. So it doesn’t just matter whether you exist at all, it also matters if you are typical.
You really think it’s appropriate to object to somebody calling out your unsupported claims as unsupported when they are A) obviously disagreeing with you, to the point where there’s absolutely no need to explicitly state it, and B) providing evidence in support of their own claims, with both reasonable arguments and supporting links? In that case, what would it take to convince you?
(Emphasis mine) Should I take it that this is then something you can’t actually be convinced of by anything short of incontrovertible proof to the contrary?
Data set of one, but I find Lumifer’s arguments far more convincing than yours. This is largely based on the fact that they are actually backed up by something more than the assumption that everybody begins with your personal model of how people make decisions.
A disagreement about priors is not nontrivially “can’t be convinced by anything short of incontrovertible proof”.
If we grant for the sake of argument that these are the facts, it’s still not clear to me that banning the sale is a good thing.
Suppose we have three people, Alice (who lives a comfortable upper-middle class life), Bob (currently starving), and Carol (rich and in need of a kidney). Alice doesn’t particularly care about money, but if there is a lack of kidneys she is willing to give one to feel that she is doing good in the world. Bob cares very much about money—if he can’t sell the kidney he will starve to death.
In this hypothetical there are enough donors to fill demand even with a $0 price ceiling, so Carol doesn’t care either way. But by banning the sale, the benefit of the transaction now goes to Alice (who gets some extra warm fuzzies) rather than Bob, even though Bob is in much more dire need.
“Make a profit” is not the limiting factor. “Make enough of a profit to make it worth scouring the desert for thirsty people” is. If I’ll get $3 for a glass of tap water, I’ll sell it to someone who knocks on my door. If I’ll get $100,000 for it, I’m going to rent a chopper and fly around the Sahara.
I stand corrected, but that doesn’t really change what I’m trying to say.
Too many analogies, what specific harms do you think would result from people being able to sell their organs and some regulated price? If there is informed consent, then the monetary benefit should exceed the health cost.
I think that if the regulated price was either a ceiling that is low enough, or a floor which is high enough (or both, as in the case for wages), then harms would not result at all. A law which said “all organ selling must be either a free donation, or accompanied by a payment of at least $2 million” would probably be okay.
But that is a very noncentral description of organ selling. The majority of advocates of organ selling don’t want such limits on it.
Either regulate the price of organs, or not allow people who are desperate (could be defined by income or wealth) to sell their organs.
We already do that. We regulate the price at $0.
Actually, there are two ways to limit it. If the price is very low, such as $0, desperation would not affect people’s willingness to sell their organs because the price is so low that it can’t relieve desperation. If the price is very high, desperation is not making people sell the organs for a lowballed price. It’s prices in the middle that are the problem.
(We also do this with normal labor. You can give away your labor for $0, and you can work for an amount that is at least the minimum wage, but nothing inbetween.)
Ahem.
The minimum wage only affects a particular subset of labor relations.
It feels like you are playing the “Gotcha!” game with the goal of winning rather than communicating your objection to organ selling. I can’t see why else you would argue that organ donation is regulated sale with a price $0.
In that case I am not likely to respond further. It seems obvious to me what the benefits are of a high price with thorough testing, informed consent and exclusion criteria : it would solve the organ shortage and allow for faster advances in research. As to what the harms are I am still unclear.
It’s not a gotcha. I’m not just saying “well, technically, $0 is a number, so that fits what you literally said”. Limiting the price to $0 really is regulation of the price; setting the price to $0 is meant to alleviate some of the problems that could result from allowing a higher price, because it changes the incentives.
What do you think would happen if we duplicated the minimum wage structure in this arena? ‘You can give away your kidney, or sell it for at least X dollars’ where x is some amount deemed to reduce exploitation of the desperate? I like this idea.
Edit: saw comment below.
For the same reason tribes living near the edge of starvation have especially strong cannibalism taboos.