This is the essence of how markets allocate resources to where they
are needed.
Suppose you’ve got a hurricane on the way. The price of supplies
skyrockets. This tells people, “don’t buy more than you need, do without
things if you can, sell some if you’ve got extra, and if you’ve got any
way of bringing more in from areas where it’s cheap, do it.”
If you enact price controls, all of those signals go away and the
shortage is inevitably made worse.
It still kind of seems like someone is hoarding resources in this
scenario, even tho the price signal says not to…?
The price signal is expected to increase supply of out-of-region goods and sometimes to slightly reduce hoarding. The main hoarders to be convinced by a high price to sell are those who have already far more than they need. If noone has enough to be willing to sell (e.g. a real apocalypse), then hoarding is not reduced.
You have to be good at satire, just like anything else. Pretending to be satirizing something you just unironically believe in doesn't count, but not everyone will get even the best satire and that's part of it.
It's more of a general trend of contrarian nerds going 'This bad thing is good, actually' or 'In defense of bad thing X' and thinking they're extra clever for it. I mean we recently got 'The left-wing case against open borders' or 'A modest defense of missionary' from Quillette for fuck's sake. These types of 'defenses' are getting old.
Regarding this specific post, dude is going 'what if literally every human action under the sun was financially accounted for' and thinking that'd be pretty cool instead of horribly creepy. This obsession with putting numbers on everything even when it doesn't make sense is typical from the rationalist/SSC readership
I think it showcases a certain sneerworthy lack of imagination. If only we could make more accurate price decisions at the margin! If only we could have perfect market information so as to consume as optimal rational agents! And it ignores that, even if all price info is conveniently displayed on your power level scouter, there's still a huge amount of mental energy that would be devoted to making optimal decisions, which, for me at least, would result in a net loss of utilons.
To me, it's another tidy example of how rationalist-consumerist thinking leads to wishing that one weren't human.
It still kind of seems like someone is hoarding resources in this scenario, even tho the price signal says not to…?
The trouble with dystopian satire is that there will always be someone who treats it as an instruction manual.
So are we really sneering at a kid who was inspired by dystopian science fiction into not being wasteful?