When the shortage is the strategy | Hacker News Reader

When the shortage is the strategy

nooneshappy.com

60 pointsspeckx57 comments

> constrain supply, raise prices far beyond what the constraint justifies, and then refuse to lower them

In a healthy competitive market, this doesn't work. In a Ronald Reagan / Robert Bork / Consumer Welfare Standard market, where the idea that antitrust policy should promote competition is scoffed at and all M&A is allowed so long as a business can scribble with crayons on butcher paper a tall tale about how their merger will totally reduce prices (pinky promise!), an unhealthy low-competition market is the intentional and inevitable result.

There is no such thing as a "healthy competitive market". That is a totem, or a fantasy. As is exemplified in the article itself, the reasonable behavior of commercial corporations is to make the market non-competitive and 'unhealthy', whatever the starting situation is.

But it goes deeper than this of course: A commodity-exchange-based economy only forms in 'unhealthy' situations, where people are dominated by powerful minorities which can control most property and input flows - lands, workshops, raw materials etc. Before that happens, economies are communal.

The most bothering aspect is that governments always hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability: "well you can't accuse us of not possessing a crystal ball to predict the future", except governments don't need crystal balls depicting the future.

Image companies A & B wish to merge for example, and claim lowered future consumer prices as a result of the merger. A government can shape this as a bet: proportional to your excess-price-over-prediction is positive, a government can institute a misprediction tax proportional to such excess. This places the prediction effort correctly with the companies instead of the government (if you believe governments were intrinsically better at predicting than companies, you'd be a communist).

Yes! Absolutely! If merging business were confident in their price reduction tall tales they would be willing to bet on them. Unfortunately, both the corporations who abuse the policy and the politicians who put it in place understand perfectly well what they are doing. Structuring the deal in a manner that would avoid corruption would defeat the purpose of doing corruption.

Re: crystal ball, a biography of Louis Brandeis would suffice. It turns out we had this exact same problem with the Robber Barons. The arguments were the same, the talking points were the same (they didn't even update the story about Standard Oil lol), time is a flat circle when it comes to American antitrust. In any case, the Robber Barons were defeated in the early 20th century and Reagan was just bringing back the policy that served them well using the excuses that served them well. He was not inventing something brave and new that might reasonably have been expected to behave differently. Reagan and Bork knew exactly what they were doing.

> credit card debt hit an all-time high last year ($1.28 trillion, Q4 2025)

Let me inflation adjust that for you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpo. Even better, as a percentage of disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpt

> real hourly wages, only 3%

Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpE. Doesn't look so dire to me?

Whenever I see someone quoting economic statistics I look them up on FRED and zoom out a little. Usually I close the article at that point. The "Ongoing collusion" table in this article is interesting, though. Capitalism breaks down without competition.

When prices rise and wages don't keep pace, individual solvency forces substitution of inferior goods. CPI's methodology then updates the basket to reflect the forced substitution and pretend it was voluntary. You think you are looking at rising real wages, but due to the basket methodology you are actually looking at the individual solvency constraint in a mirror. The economy could reduce people to eating bug burgers in homeless encampments and that line would still go up through the entire process.

Repeat the exercise using a real deflator and the results are different. Ideally, this would mean constructing a basket of things you (or the people in question) want to buy. In practice, nobody has time for that so people just use an asset with a reputation for holding value (gold) or a proxy for their most important aspiration (housing). These both have problems, but the problems are not nearly as bad as the circular logic in the CPI.

Agree that measuring inflation is complex and expensive. It also glosses over devices getting new features and networks improving latency and bandwidth.

Unfortunately alternative measures are worse. Gold increased in price 37% in the last year. What does that tell me about the price of groceries? Housing prices depend on government committees approving what can be built where. We have no idea what a free market would produce.

No, CPI does not gloss over improvements in quality. CPI gets diligent hedonic adjustments. Good news is always welcome, it seems. By contrast, BLS usually doesn't even try to track enshittification. This compounds, and that's another reason why CPI is a poor measure. Not to mention the recent statistical fuckery with trimmed means or the less recent fuckery around excluding energy costs during bouts of energy inflation. How much proof do you need that CPI is a political quantity not a measure of the economy?

Hypothetical YIMBY parallel universes have no place in an inflation discussion. If NIMBYs inflated the price of houses and you want a house, it's inflation that is relevant to you, end of story. As for the volatility of gold, yeah, that disqualifies gold from being a good measure on short timescales. Fortunately, we have a good short-timescale inflation measure: CPI. But gold compounds correctly whereas CPI does not. In the short run, volatility is everything, in the long run, compounding is everything. Don't use gold to figure out how much inflation happened last year and don't use CPI to figure out how much inflation happened last decade.

Reminder: I presented gold and housing as dirty hacks. The correct methodology is to construct a basket of things you care about and track them. If the dirty hacks have dirty hack problems, well, such is the nature of dirty hacks.

Then what number would you use instead? A "correct methodology" that's not done is useless.

Complaining about CPI to defend using nominal values poorly is not improving the article's analysis.

Housing and gold, to be used when the timescale is more than a few years. CPI is fine if the timescale is under a few years, because that is not enough time for its sins to compound.

You posted an incorrect interpretation of the FRED real wages line. All I owe the discussion is an explanation of why I believe your interpretation was incorrect. Which I gave. The fact that I went above and beyond to provide and defend both a theoretical alternative and practical alternatives is a nice extra. Your complaints that the practical alternatives aren't simultaneously perfect and easy is praise by faint damnation. Perfect and easy aren't the ways of this world. No, they only have to be better than CPI on long timescales to be good alternatives -- but the CPI methodology places that bar very low and both gold and housing clear it easily.

My analysis was "Doesn't look so dire to me?" and I don't think the point you raised leads to a different conclusion.

I can tell you know the topic well, but we're at the same place CPI criticism always come back to: "It's flawed, but the alternatives are worse, don't exist, or in some way not practical."

Exactly the opposite: CPI is worse than the alternatives at long timescales, despite their flaws.

I know you really really want to make this about the flaws in the alternatives, but I have spent many sentences dealing with the flaws in those in good faith while you have yet to reciprocate at all with any in defense of CPI, either in comparative or absolute terms. Because you know that's a losing game. CPI is cooked, the FRED real wages graph is cooked, your conclusion from it is cooked, and you know it's cooked.

You seem stuck on the idea that real wages have declined within the last 10 years. Is this vibes or real data? Because nit picking data to justify vibes and dropping the thought there is dumb.

Gold is a market where price moves for reasons unrelated to price level. It was stagnant for decades because rich country consumers value it less and now it's on a run as the US weaponizes the monetary system. It's just not useful to represent inflation over the last 10 years.

Housing is even worse. Unlike dollars and gold, every house is unique and in a different location. It's one of the least useful parts of CPI for the same reason it's a worse deflator on it's own.

I use CPI because it's useful, it exists, and it has less problems than the alternatives on a 10 year chart. We're not comparing to a basket of hand sewn shoes and a horse from the 1820s.

You still haven't engaged with a single one of my CPI critiques. 100% offense, 0% defense, you are not operating in good faith. If you can't defend CPI, maybe you should stop making grand proclamations based on it.

If you don't like the data I used offer data that's more informative. You've failed to do that.

Denying reality by nit picking the best data available is not useful.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Also breaks down when few individuals command tremendous power. Tax policy has been //fantastic// for the very wealthy.

I don't think commonly used inflation is helpful for many people, instead asset price inflation is more interesting and reflects people's feeling more accurate.

If you use asset price inflation, in the last 2 decades, most people's real income consistently dropped.

I think we 80% agree: people should use a measure of inflation that includes more asset inflation than CPI. The American Dream was not to Owner's Imputed Rent a house. However, there's a balance to be struck with reasonable expectations, and "I want to own an increasing fraction of the world economy" isn't a reasonable expectation for everyone to have, but that's what jumping to a wholesale asset inflation measure would get you. The way I pick a midpoint is by fixing the asset: one lump of gold, or one house, are reasonable to use as reference points. But not "one billionth of the revenue from the search monopoly" or "one billionth of all newly mined gold" because those things might be expected to grow without robbing me of anything I care about.

> Let me inflation adjust that for you

Oh, perfect! So what about solving every problem by going $40 more trillion in debt, to reach $80 T in debt?

That way everything will be good inflation adjusted?

I am in favor of apples-to-apples comparisons and viewing data points in context. Now sure how that has to with fiscal deficits.

This is the wrong way to look at it.

In a K-shaped economy a business will not succeed by making quality goods at reasonable prices. Who are the customers for that? The middle class no longer exists.

Every successful business will do one of two things. Some will make ludicrous luxury goods at preposterous prices for customers that are not price conscious. Others will make mass produced garbage at insanely low margins in vast quantities.

The shortage is only the strategy in the sense that a large part of luxury goods is status. If you have a luxury product, you have to make it into a status symbol to get sales. Limited availability increases desirability. If something is too popular, wealthy people don’t want it anymore at any price.

The only solution is to end wealth inequality and restore the middle class. Tax the rich.

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-american-middle-clas...

This isn't going to get solved at the consumer level. Yes, one perhaps can & should attempt to vote w/ one's wallet, but the real fix is anti-trust law enforcement. TFA knows this,

> Every pattern above can be explained without conspiracy.

(… and in a section titled "Ongoing collusion", too!) but conspiracy also explains some of it: the egg price increases were industry collusion[1]; Americans lost something like $3B to $6B in egg prices due to it. The DOJ permitted them to settle for what effectively amounts to "don't do that again".

Did I try avoiding eggs while they were $6/dz? Absolutely, but meanwhile Tyson ate one of our local meat suppliers, and those prices immediately went up 50%.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_Clearinghouse#Price_fixing

I feel like I am living in a different universe to the author. My beef still costs around $5/lb, my milk is still roughly $3/gal, similar on a lot of staples I buy regularly. My shirts cost about $5 for a t-shirt, and my jeans cost $20 or so. I spend 80% at Costco and 20% at King Soopers (Kroger).

Ancedota I know, but the author is writing like Big Business has 100% coverage of the whole market.

The article contains 31 references. Of course, no report on the _general_ market trends are going to cover every anecdote in the US. It could be that the staples you mentioned aren't affected to the same degree. How about your non-staples? How about cars? Houses? Vacation expenses?

In fact, your comment could be read as the exception that proves the rule: you haven't been affected by rising costs because you stick to staples and avoid "frivolous" purchases (that is, you live frugally, as suggested by the article).

Most of the references are not to actual price data, eg CPI basket of goods, so here is the actual link.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Energy stands out as actually being noteworthy, but is not discussed in the article compared to food, consumer goods. It is pretty inelastic for most people, especially gas/diesel.

Cattle herds are at historic lows to the point that meat packers have closed a handful of facilities, laid off thousands, and still have excess capacity. Your beef prices are either not accurate or not representative of the macro.

Is America Falling Out of Love With Beef? Surging prices are finally hurting demand for the country’s favorite meat - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-08-21/after-... | https://archive.today/2K1Rh - August 21st, 2026

Skyrocketing Beef Prices Finally Have Americans Reaching Their Spending Limit - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-16/skyrocket... | https://archive.today/9AYzx - August 16th, 2026

Tyson to Close More Beef Plants as Cattle Shortage Drags On - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/tyson-to-... | https://archive.today/KYI6P - August 13th, 2026

Define "beef"? My beef is $20/lb for flank!

https://www.macrotrends.net/4487/us-steak-prices

Sincere question: where are you buying beef for $5/lb? I shop at Costco and ground beef is close to $10/lb

I think the only beef you can find for $5/lb is the ground beef that comes pre-weighed in sealed tubes -not at the meat counter.

I'm in the midwest, and 1lb 73/27 ground beef rolls are $6.44. Even 80/20 rolls don't drop below $7 unless on sale.

If I want to get $5/lb ground beef, I have to stick to 73/27 rolls, and they have to be 5lb or larger.

I have started seeing beef/pork mixes for $4/lb, but alas, those are not to my taste.

Americans buy beef in a roll? I had to look this up.

In oz I have only seen this kind of packaging for pet food or lunch meat (colloquially 80/20 in this case would probably refer to the meat to sawdust ratio).

Otherwise prices in Australia are similar but for beef mince from the supermarket meat counter.

The pre-packaged rolls/tubes are the cheap option -most but not all supermarkets have them. All supermarkets have a meat counter with fresh meats. Obviously the fresh meats are more expensive and of course aged meats are way more expensive.

all 88/12 ground. Choice sirloin is $8/lb. Boneless chicken breast is $2.5/lb.

Beef on craiglist (1/4, 1/2 or whole) is averaging $6-12/lb for mostly grass fed beef raised <50 miles from me.

When the general pop talks about beef prices they’re not referring to premium beef (organic, grass fed) they are talking about 80/20 at working class retailers.

This is an interesting example of a pangram false negative. It's very obvious from the jump that substantial AI assistance was used, but feeding some samples in I got a 100% human rating. I wonder if it's a case of adversarial prompting?

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”

"NoOneIsHappy.com" appears to be some sort of low-effort demoralization psyop or something. Who'd have guessed with a name like that?

These blog posts appear to be well-researched and well-cited.

I assume it’s a reference to “everything is amazing and no one is happy.”

Instead of ad hominem, why not read the article and refute? The sources are included.

> Corporate profits drove more than a third of inflation from the start of the pandemic

This seems like it’s getting causation backwards. Shortages directly result in corporate profits somewhere, because there are companies that can raise prices. Most recently, in the oil industry, and in memory chips, and so on. Also, housing.

If there’s enough competing supply then they can’t raise prices. If there isn’t, they can and usually will.

Strategy often means anticipating shortages and having something to sell when they happen, but not overdoing it. It might be temporary but it can take years to resolve.

Deciding not to build new factories in anticipation of a memory shortage is a strategy. Often it’s justified by saying the shortage won’t last.

The people saying that the AI bubble will collapse are justifying a wait-and-see strategy that makes it worse.

> If there’s enough competing supply then they can’t raise prices. If there isn’t, they can and usually will.

Right, key word there is "competing". Large firms collude via all sorts of means to avoid competing. Many such cases

The US is cooked. China is the new economic and industrial super power. The US "free market" is actively blocking all the future tech that the US can't compete with, first cars, latest is robotic parts. The rich are just soaking the rest of us for everything they can get before they GTFO.

> The US is cooked. China is the new economic and industrial super power.

The US economy has outperformed every economy on earth for the last fifteen years.

China is at a permanent disadvantage because the United States and Russia are the largest producers of petroleum and natural gas on earth.

Anyone who thinks China is going to be passing the US anytime soon is uninformed.

> The US economy has outperformed every economy on earth for the last fifteen years

In nominal dollars, not production/output

Russia is hanging on by a thread, China is 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity. The US coasts on dollar and US treasuries demand until it doesn't. The only thing the US builds anymore is grifts.

Russia:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/russia-will-sacri...

https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/20/russia-runs-out-of-petro...

China:

The Next China Shock Is Here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393566 - August 2026

> The biggest economic story in the world right now is China’s growing dominance across advanced manufacturing sector after advanced manufacturing sector — from electric vehicles to batteries to solar panels to software like A.I. and open models, where they’ve become a world leader. What is happening here is very different than what we call the first China Shock, when China became a big exporter of things that were not that important to advanced economies — things that mattered maybe for particular communities, for many jobs, but weren’t the frontier of economic growth. But now it’s different. China is very much at the frontier, and they’re dominating it, and that is going to transform geopolitics. It is going to transform the politics, many say of European countries, where China is pushing them out of manufacturing that has been the absolute cornerstone of their economies. So I think understanding this second shock is about as essential to understanding economics and geopolitics in the coming era as literally anything is.

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/21/europe-china-shock-manufact...

> U.S. tariffs have done little to slow China's export machine. Exports hit a record $3.8 trillion last year and are up 14% through July this year, even as shipments to the U.S. plunged.

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

> In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288393 (citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45496507 (citations)

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... (August 2024)

> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023).

> These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.

China Hunts for Scientific Talent. The U.S. Is Making It Easier. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/business/china-scientific... | https://archive.today/vaapU - August 17th, 2026

> The US economy has outperformed every economy on earth for the last fifteen years.

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

"How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." -- Hemingway

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379851 (citations)

Additional citation:

China's New Five-Year Plan Preps the Nation for Peak Oil - https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Chinas-New-Five-Year-P... - August 21st, 2026

China is also cooked.

Everywhere is cooked, but some places are less cooked than others. See how China reacted to the oil shortage: they just cut their oil imports and carried on. Arguably, China prevented a total meltdown in oil-dependent countries (USA).

The USA is a net exporter of oil.

And go where?

Elison has his own island - wont take much to subdue the rest of it. Thiel's setting up in Argentina. A US in revolt is a markedly worse place for them than places already set up for repression.

So what if none of that happens? Say 10yrs from now it's basically the same as now, would you change your opinion?

TLDR: the article describes stagflation in a novel way.

Yes, it’s happening, just as it did in the seventies. Invest appropriately.

We do not have high unemployment (yet?). And the economy is growing, just slowly.

Isn't that due to gig work (effectively -EV for a huge chunk of people) and other math shenanigans?

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