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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.

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Reminds me of this pg classic [1]:

> When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.

> Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.

In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1

You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?

One important example of this is pensions. Some people argue that we should settle for less consumption and economic growth. However, our concept of retirement is predicated on these. If you want to change the workings of the economy, you have to reinvent retirement first, or you'll end up with the elderly starving.

Food's a fun example, because there's currently too much of it. At least in my part of the world, the price of various foods is moderated by the government buying or selling huge stocks of it.

My bigger concern about that is all of the fossil fuels getting wasted doing the haber-process for food nobody's going to use.

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