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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

> "Overpriced"

Legos are priced at what people are willing to pay for them. If they were overpriced they would not sell and there would be no Legos. Maybe you are suggesting that Legos should be cheaper because the material cost do not justify the prices you see, well again, Legos are priced at what they sell at and clearly people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts. It would be a disservice to Lego's investors to price them in accordance with the wishes of people who think everything should be accessible to everyone. For-profit companies should responsibly capture all the value they can.

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All hail the global superintelligence known as Market. From Him all purpose and justification floweth. There need be no other.

No, there are clearly real problems with market based economies and issues of social responsibility. Selling plastic block toys, for which there are cheap enough alternatives, doesn't really seem to fit in this picture though.

Your original comment basically just stated the same tautology four different ways, as if it were the last word on the matter. Besides judging the large-scale results of the system (eg your reference to 'social responsibility'), we're also entitled to judge the small-scale details vis-a-vis our own heuristics, even when they are at odds with a market's state.

I'm not sure I understand what your point is. I explained why Legos are not overpriced, and made some probably unnecessary judgement statements about why people would call it overpriced. I didn't say Legos are not overpriced because they are not overpriced, I said they're not overpriced because their products are selling. Where is the tautology?

Your original comment is basically just different ways of saying that Legos are priced appropriately because Legos are selling, and Legos are selling because they're priced appropriately. While this is the extent of the analysis in terms of simple market mechanics, your main point seems to be to insist that the only way to judge pricing is how the market responds. This is in fact trivially wrong because any market is in fact a sum of individual actors who each form their own judgment.

The net effect of your comment is to further confuse the distinction between what is expedient/existing and what is right, and to discourage people from developing an independent sense of the latter (in the same vein as "might makes right" and "technological determinism").

> "and Legos are selling because they're priced appropriately"

Nope never said that, show me where I said this.

It's a basic tenet of consensual transactions, which you allude to:

> people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts

Also,

> Legos are priced at what they sell at"

If you're taking issue that it's not a direct iron-clad "tautology", then please insert whatever less-stringent term you please that indicates circular reasoning by which a process supposedly justifies itself.

> people have voted with their wallets and have said that Legos are worth greater than the sum of their parts

That's half a quote. The point you misquoted was very specific, regarding Legos being priced higher than their material costs works, because people value Legos for more than the plastic they're made with. That's not a tautology, that's a simple observation. This is without a doubt the worst conversation I've ever had about Legos.

I said "allude to", which still applies to your whole quote.

This "conversation" has been terrible because you've been nitpicking for seemingly its own sake, while completely ignoring any substance of what I've said.

No it doesn't apply, and thus the substance of whatever you've said doesn't appeal to me. It fails a heuristic of mine I'll call "throws out false accusations after misrepresenting what I've said".

If you don't believe that a product's price effects its sales, then you could have simply stated this several comments back, rather than role-playing a computer by placing critical importance on the form of my saying why I assumed you agreed with that widely-held belief. Then we could have actually talked about the actual non-meta issue.

And you invalidated the concept with your witty one-liner. Well done, very thorough criticism of markets.

It's certainly not a criticism of markets per se - it's a criticism of those who think markets are an appropriate replacement for reason.

Well there is a certain logic to markets. If LEGO is overpriced, a competitor should be able to offer a cheaper alternative. So if you claim LEGO is overpriced, you have to explain why no cheaper competitor emerged. Maybe there are reasons (for example patents - but the competitor would not have to be the same kind of thing, just the same category).

I wonder how do you reason without the theory of markets? Serious question!

>Legos are priced at what people are willing to pay for them.

I wont argue with that. But you can raise prices by raising demand for your product. Perhaps by aggressively marketing (and meta-marketing) a movie based on your product...

If this were absolutely, positively, easily provably true...

So what?

So it's possible to cheat. So there's a hidden cost of going to see this movie - it'll make you pay more for lego in the future.

Cheat? Huh? How?

They raise the price. You think it's too high. Don't buy it.

How will it "make" you pay more in the future?

There was a post on reddit a while ago from a former lego employee addressing why they are so expensive. It comes down to the fact that they don't want the bricks to be off by more than half a thousandth of an inch, so every brick can fit with every other brick ever made.

http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/14ccan/lego_super_star...

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