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Resource Allocation: Why You Can’t ‘Just Ignore the Economists’
“Rather than paying with money, those in search of scarce goods people
will pay with their time and effort.” ~David Hebert

David Hebert
September 27, 2024

Law professor Zephyr Teachout at a Labor Day event in New York City. 2014.
In a recent Atlantic article titled “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore
the Economists,” law professor Zephyr Teachout castigates economists for
their nigh-universal denouncing of Vice President and now presidential
nominee Kamala Harris’s plan to impose nationwide anti-”price-gouging”
laws on groceries.

Teachout’s criticisms of economists and how “regular people seem to
understand a few things that economists don’t” stem from her
misunderstanding what she calls “abnormal” conditions: that is,
“short-term price spikes.”

But the price-gouging, as Teachout and Harris present it, is for items
whose prices have skyrocketed due to inflation. This is hardly a
short-term phenomenon. Teachout’s critiques of economists’ opposition to
price-gouging are thus premised on a basic misreading of the causes of
price increases in recent years.

General Trends vs. Specific Trend
When we refer to prices rising due to inflation, we are speaking of a
general increase in the overall price level. We can measure this with
the consumer price index (CPI). By looking at the Federal Reserve
Economic Data (FRED), we see that consumer prices have risen almost 32
percent since January 2016, with a sharp increase once the COVID
pandemic began.

To get a sense of how the cost of production can rise over time, we can
look at the producer price index (PPI). Again, FRED data are very clear
on this: costs to producers have increased by 41 percent since January
2016. Looking specifically at supermarkets and other grocery stores
reveals the same increase in producer costs. Taken together, these data
paint a completely different picture to that presented by Teachout:
consumer prices have risen slower than producer costs. If anything,
producers are absorbing more of the cost of production than they used to
— not less. This underscores the fallacy of blaming businesses for
“greedflation.”

Other data support this analysis of grocery prices. A Food Industry
Association report shows that grocery stores around the country did
indeed see their profit margins rise in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Labor costs fell as consumers shifted to purchasing groceries online and
opting for pick-up instead of walking around the store themselves. But
the profit margins quickly fell back to their historic averages as the
pandemic abated and, more importantly, as COVID policies constricting
international shipping sunsetted. Profit margins for food and grocery
stores may remain slightly higher than their pre-pandemic levels. But
those were historic lows, not the norm.

If Harris was to ban “price-gouging” on groceries purchased by
consumers, the result would be disastrous. By preventing prices for
groceries sold to consumers from rising in response to inflation, Harris
would encourage shrinkflation — the idea that sellers would rather
reduce the size or quantity of a product while keeping price constant
rather than keep the size or quantity constant and increase price —
which President Joe Biden has denounced. Fortunately for us, even
Democratic lawmakers are calming constituents and telling industry
leaders that Congress would not pass Harris’s proposal.

More Troubling
But back to Teachout’s arguments for anti-price-gouging laws: she claims
that “short-term demand cannot be met by short-term supply.” But an
economist would point out that producers do not need to “spin up” new
factories or increased capacities in the short term. Instead, they need
to respond to price-signals. In such cases, resources bound for other
parts of the country would be redirected to the area where the price is
higher. This is what happened with lumber during Hurricane Katrina and
bottled water during Hurricane Sandy. Trucks carrying these precious
resources were recalled and rerouted to New Orleans and New York City,
respectively. This reduced the supply in the “low-demand” areas of the
country and provided the increased quantity-supplied in the area
experiencing temporarily high demand.

Lest we think that this phenomenon is isolated to natural disasters, we
saw the same happen in Flint, Michigan during its water crisis. Because
the price of bottled water rose, more bottled water was sent there to
people in desperate need of it rather than other locations where it was
less necessary.

It is possible that the idea that “temporarily higher-priced products
will find their way to the people who value them the most” might not, as
Teachout claims, perfectly hold in the real world. Teachout gives the
example of “a working-class cancer patient who desperately needs to buy
the last generator in stock to keep his medications refrigerated might
not be able to outbid a healthy millionaire who just wants to run their
air conditioner” as evidence of this.

However, the relevant insight from economics is not “the glory of
prices.” The right answer is to ask “compared to what?” Let’s take
Teachout’s example of the cancer patient in need of a generator. Like
Teachout, I would rather live in a world where the middle-class cancer
patient gets the generator rather than the millionaire who wants to run
his air conditioning. But what alternatives do we have to free prices?

Suppose that instead of allowing prices to fully rise, we cap the price
increase (as occurs under current price-gouging laws). But when monetary
costs are prevented from rising fully, non-monetary costs will rise to
fill the gap. One such cost is time. In the months following natural
disasters, we typically observe queues outside stores as people
desperately try to access the small amount of goods available at
artificially low prices. We see people flocking to Red Cross donation
trucks, clamoring to get the supplies their families desperately want.
We see people driving around town looking for stores that are open,
making phone calls to other stores in town and the surrounding area
trying to get a hold of someone who has what they want and is willing to
hold it for them until they can get there.

In other words, rather than paying with money for these goods, these
people are paying with their time and effort. Such time and effort are
resources that could have been directed towards rebuilding. After all,
you can’t begin the cleanup and rebuilding effort if you’re standing in
line.

Another way to solve the allocation problem would be to use democracy.
But consider what we would need to do to accomplish this.

First, we would somehow have to rank the alternative uses of the
resources. Should we rebuild the hospital first or the daycare center?
Rebuilding the hospital means that people who are sick or injured can be
taken care of more quickly. But as anyone with children will tell you,
if you want to get something done around the house, the first step is to
find a way to get the kids out of the house. Rebuilding the daycare
center first might provide more parents with more opportunities to get
more facilities rebuilt more quickly.

A second difficulty with a democratic approach to deciding
resource-allocation would be finding a time where everyone could come
together and voice their concerns. Finding such a time is hard enough in
politics. But even if we could find such a time, we would have to assume
they would do so honestly, lest we try to make a democratic decision
with false information. Do we really think that everyone will tell the
truth all the time? And do we really believe that democratic votes will
render the most efficient outcome? And by what criteria would people be
able to know whether the vote has produced the best outcome for everyone?

These are the types of matters with which college freshmen enrolled in
Econ 101 courses are required to grapple. They are also core questions
that Teachout’s analysis does not address.

In the end, this is the fundamental problem with Teachout’s criticism of
economists: her grasp of economics itself just does not hold water. Just
as economists should stay out of court proceedings, so too should
lawyers stay out of making pronouncements about how economies operate.

David Hebert

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