Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

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Auctions are terrible because of the uneven distribution of wealth.

You end up with a situation where the wealthy can do everything and the poor can do nothing.

And then there's the super rich, who could buy out the possibility of anyone else participating, literally turning such places into their private playground for eternity if they so wished.

Like, what price could you price it at where:

1. You could afford to go occassionally

2. Elon Musk couldn't just buy out every single ticket for the next decade to make it their personal playground.

There's simply no feasible solution to that.

Just auctioning everything and letting capitalism take its course just denies a vast segment of society from participating at all for activities where demand outstrips supply.

Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

For things like National Parks or Taylor Swift concerts, price discovery through "supply and demand" does not work because supply can't increase to match supply no matter the price.

Not sure how you come up with point 1 when talking about auctions of a very limited resource. Lets focus on the point 2.

You are vastly overestimating buying power of the richest people. Lets assume that some of them are really irrational and want to buy access to the single place by selling whole their wealth.

X entries per day, 365 day in a year, that is 3650*x tickets to buy out to cover 10 years.

Musk wealth: 171 000 000 000

Divided by 3650 = 46 849 315

If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

There is over 60 million people with wealth higher wealth than that. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/203930/global-wealth-dis...).

If park increases number of tickets to 500 daily (~21 per hour) then we are talking about 600 million richest people that can try to outbid Musk on a single ticket.

In reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction. If they had, they would not be that rich. Additionally park could easily increase number of tickets if those are not used.

> If we sell only 50 tickets daily it is less than million of $ that Musk have available for each ticket.

Wow, and for anyone else for only a million dollars people can buy an entire day in what was once a free federal location!

Meanwhile, let's look at Yellowstone. Over a decade, they will sell about $110MM in passes (just a 10x of what they generated recently.) Let's say at an auction the passes go for an average of 20x that. So for $2.2 billion, someone can buy exclusive access to a 2.2 million acre federal park for a decade.

A 20x multiple is pretty high too.

> reality people like Musk probably would never spend even 1/100 of their wealth for any single attraction.

Musk spent approximately 20% of his wealth on an internet toy.

Sure. But he has only five twenty-percents to spend in total.

Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving them a park ticket is equivalent to giving them the auction price for the ticket but restricting them to use it on park tickets. Very condescending and paternalistic.

> Supply & Demand only works if supply can be increased, so that as prices rise there's incentive for greater supply.

No? Where did you get that idiosyncratic notion from?

Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Auctions also work well for things that are in fixed demand. Of course, in that case you have suppliers bid, not buyers.

You can also have a two-sided auction where both suppliers and buyers bid.

> Give poor people money, if you want to help them.

Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

Yeah wont happen in real world. I wont assume bad faith from you, but generally speaking saying just give them money is a huge copout.

> Auctions work just fine for eg van Gogh paintings, and they have been in decidedly fixed supply since 1890.

Glad you brought that up.

Van Goh sold his paintings and owners of such paintings then sell them on auctions etc.

There are people in the art world who would argue that such paintings do belong in Museums, so that public can enjoy them. So they band together and collect money so that their local museum can afford to buy such Van Goh painting.

After such painting are displayed in Museum where anyone can view them, for a fixed price, that generally covers the upkeep.

Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

Auctions would defeat the purpose.

> Giving poor people money will not help the situation. How much money do you need to give to a family, that would want to have a picnic over the weekend, so that Bill Gates and Elon Musk and others, could not outbid them.

And that's why Bill Gates and Elon Musk bid on and win all ebay auctions ever? Whenever a house goes for sale, they snatch it up, too. Don't they? /s

Basically, the same forces that make the paragraph above untrue, would also be at work here.

> Which is the same situation as here. there is a public park (that is by definition there to be used by the public), that sells tickets, that should cover the upkeep. But since the demand is too high, it sometimes need to raffle them.

If demand is so high, then a poor person who wins a ticket in a raffle is better off selling the ticket in the secondary market (to Bill Gates perhaps) and enjoying the money.

Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

> Naturally, you can forbid poor people from reselling their ticket to prevent that. We all know they would only use the proceeds for booze, wouldn't they? /s

> proceeds for booze, wouldn't they?

Who tf said that. nobody in this said that. you are the only one in this thread insinuating that people who disagree with your (brilliant /s) thoughts are doing so out of ulterior motives.

And sure in perfect world selling your tickets on secondary market would work.

But in our world, some already well of prick, would develop a scrapping bot, using lots of residential ip's (sometimes obtained in questionable ways), to spoil everything for the rest of us.

If you auction of the tickets in the first place, you don't have to criminalize the secondary market.

No need for a perfect world.

> If you auction of the tickets in the first place, you don't have to criminalize the secondary market.

it's the world where people with money get all of the advantages, and people with less get leftovers.

I will agree, that in many cases this is close to reality we live in currently (for instance holiday destinations, private resorts, etc.). But that doesn't mean people can't fight it and occasionally win. And I would think it would be important for public parks (and other institutions) to do so.

Otherwise what is the point of public institutions. Just privatize everything.

So in your envisaged ultra-communist society, where wealth has been distributed enough for the (formerly) poor people to bid on a level playing field against the (formerly, relatively speaking) rich people, now what do you do?

Where do you get the communism from?

Modest levels of redistribution gets you something like Germany or Scandinavia or the US.

If the goal is for everyone to own a Van Gogh, then yes those auctions have failed.

A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

> A goal of national parks should be that everyone has the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

There are many national parks which do not have any limitations, timed entries, or reservations. There are then also many which do have reservations, but reservations can be pretty easily obtained. There are a few which have limited resources available with massive numbers of people wanting to attend which do have these lottery issues.

Most locations run by the NPS allow people to just show up without restrictions. Everyone already does have the opportunity to visit at least one over their lifetimes.

We are only talking about auctions, because the number of people who can visit certain parks is lower than those parks can admit.

No matter how you shuffle, auction or raffle the tickets, that doesn't increase their supply.

So by your metric, all methods fail?

If the market clearing price for tickets would be so high that poor people couldn't afford to win an auction, then in the alternative that they get lucky and win a raffle, their best course of action would be to sell the ticket on the secondary market and enjoying the money.

Unless, of course, you ban poor people from re-selling their tickets. I mean, they most likely would spend it all on booze, wouldn't they? /s

> Or we're left with needing charity to step in and buy tickets on behalf of the needy.

Give poor people money. They know best what they need.

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