Comment by Eisenstein
Comment by Eisenstein 17 hours ago
> No, that's precisely the situation where markets work best: when resources are scarce. A single gallon of water isn't worth much to a data center or a farmer; you can't water a field with just one gallon. But it's potentially worth a lot to someone who's thirsty.
1 gallon might be worth nothing to a datacenter, but the datacenter is built and a company invested in it and it can't go unused. They will pay more to keep that datacenter open than the local who needs it to drink. It doesn't matter how much the local needs or wants the water, if they don't have the money, how are they going to out bid a global corporation?
> You're right, markets are not charities; they're only concerned with efficiency.
Markets aren't concerned with anything, they are a means to an end. And they have appropriate uses and inappropriate uses. Not everything needs to be 'efficient' sometimes things should be 'just' or 'humane' rather than 'efficient'
> Markets are actually great at allocating things like road space. NYC's congestion pricing is doing wonders for the efficiency of their road system right now
That isn't a market, that is a tax.
Look, markets are great, but I don't get this quasi-religious adherence to one mechanism amongst many as the be-all-end-all of solutions. It is good at some things, bad at others. Ayn Rand was just an author.
> Not everything needs to be 'efficient' sometimes things should be 'just' or 'humane' rather than 'efficient'
You ignored the second part of my paragraph. It's far easier to be humane when operating in an efficient system than an inefficient one.
Even a multi-billion dollar datacenter can and will go unused if the price of water to cool it gets high enough. If keeping that datacenter running is somehow so important to larger society that it's actually more efficient to airlift in water from across the country to supply coolant than to shut down the datacenter (extremely doubtful), then that's exactly what should happen, and it's exactly what the market will make happen unless you interfere.
If unstable market prices result in temporary, unacceptably inhumane conditions for other people, then the most efficient solution is certainly going to be to work within the market-based system to help those people (e.g. subsidize the cost of water to residential homes until prices stabilize), not to override the system and prevent that (apparently extremely valuable) datacenter from being constructed in the first place.
> > NYC's congestion pricing
> That isn't a market, that is a tax.
People are freely choosing to exchange their money in return for a service. That's a market. Not a perfectly free market since NYC roads are a local monopoly, but closer to that ideal than the previous system of "free roads".
> Look, markets are great, but I don't get this quasi-religious adherence to one mechanism amongst many as the be-all-end-all of solutions.
Markets are more than just great, they've proven themselves time and time again to be nearly unbeatable in their ability to create wealth and allocate resources efficiently.
Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone. None of us have any hope of beating that with our own naive takes on what "seems best". Anytime we interfere we're making everyone poorer in the service of whatever other goal we're trying to achieve, so we better be darned sure it's worth it.