24 thoughts on “Economic Lesson V: Scarcity

  1. This is far too heavy on rhetoric and too light on substance. You’re just making a bunch of assertions about how wrong and stupid and dishonest other people are. I’m not saying you’re wrong about that, but you do actually have to do the work to make that case. You need concrete examples of people making claims that assume away scarcity or the importance of incentives.Report

    1. Concur, this needs a Part 2 with more meat.

      Talk about how people lie about scarcity, or how governments and businesses manipulate scarcity (and then lie about it).Report

    2. The extra work wouldn’t just give the article more substance, it would give it more meaning. As it stands now, the non-economist reading it would wonder why he should care about some random people denying an economic concept.

      Bonus points: once you’ve explained the denial of scarcity with regard to, say, Medicare and the minimum wage, the likely response would be if there is scarcity, that’s all the more reason for equity with the goods we have. Answering that might go beyond the goal of the piece, but it’d be good at least to expect that argument.Report

      1. An additional form of scarcity that would need to be touched on would be the whole “positional goods” thing.

        There are goods that can only, and I mean *ONLY*, exist because someone else does not have them.Report

  2. Also Marx wasn’t an economic illiterate, most of his work was just done before the marginal Revolution. It’s like calling Newton ignorant about physics. Yes, his theories are wrong, but it is anachronistic because we only know they’re wrong in virtue of later developments in the fieldReport

      1. For those unfamiliar with the phrase (as I was twenty minutes ago), this is a reference to comments in an AEA address by Paul Samuelson:

        https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/robert-paul-wolff-on-paul-samuelson-on-karl-marx-thursday-whiskey-tango-foxtrot-bang-query-bang-query-weblogging.html

        Richard Wolff, who is quoted at the beginning, is a Marxist. It should be noted that Samuelson himself was fairly left-wing by economist standards, and while highly respected for his technical contributions, was notorious for predicting that the USSR would soon catch up to the US economically, and for pushing back his prediction of the year this would happen in each new edition of his textbook. So it’s not like he had a vendetta against Marx or anything.Report

    1. This is correct; Marx and the early marginalists were contemporaries, so it’s entirely understandable that he didn’t have a good understanding of marginalism.

      However, I think the comparison to Newton is a bit off, since Newton was essentially correct for most practical purposes, and our modern understanding of physics builds upon his work. Marx, by comparison was simply wrong, and his work was essentially a dead end. And while he had no way of knowing better, modern Marxists have no such excuse.Report

      1. However, I think the comparison to Newton is a bit off, since Newton was essentially correct for most practical purposes, and our modern understanding of physics builds upon his work. Marx, by comparison was simply wrong, and his work was essentially a dead end. And while he had no way of knowing better, modern Marxists have no such excuse.

        Fair point.Report

    2. And yet people still listen to Marx. And he was illiterate. Valuing a produced good by only the labor that went into it is dumb.Report

  3. Anybody that declares “this is human nature” and the Rules Which Define the World is far more likely to be fooling themselves then anyone else. Saying people are tribal isn’t saying much. How individual or communal are people? That’s question whose answer would include lengthy discussion of places like China, India, Japan etc. American western individualism is not actually the definition all human nature.Report

  4. Anyone who thinks Paul Ryan was serious about anything other than self-promotion and magic asterisks has a LOT of work to show.Report

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