I’m thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example.
Yep, I think there’s central examples of theft (breaking into someone’s house and taking cash out of their wallet), less central examples of theft that are still widely agreed upon to be theft (taking someone’s money claiming it’s being safeguarded on a trading exchange when actually some of customer funds pay for a bahamas office.)
And what I’m trying to point at there is that charging higher rates based on income for the same product, even if enforced only by social pressure, falls into that same category.
As long as they’re clearly and honestly labeled I disagree, would expect >=7 out of 10 random Americans would also disagree, and though I think you’ve got the law background and I don’t I would expect a court to disagree. Maybe I’m not modeling exactly how social pressure works here?
Where a genuinely different product is being sold, and the customer can choose which product to buy, I don’t think of that as price discrimination, at least not of the wrongful sort. The first class seat on an airplane is actually bigger and nicer than the economy seat.
I am pretty sure (85%) that airplanes do other price discrimination than just seat size. How early the ticket is being booked, how I’m planning to pay for it, whether I often fly with that airplane. I believe they also do a bit of dynamic pricing based on IP address, which is a sneaky way to guess at how much the customer is willing to pay. It annoys me a bit, but as long as they show the price when I’m buying the ticket and honour that price I wouldn’t call it stealing.
In the context of organizing a community event, I don’t think we need to be as ruthlessly profit maximizing as a stereotypical for-profit corporation, but I also don’t see anything wrong with paying organizers and aiming for some profit to build up the organization. I think that is what good organizers do when the community can support it. I don’t know why you seem to want to treat it as something shameful. When I buy a ticket to an event at Lighthaven, I know very well that a fraction of that is going to pay the half dozen staff of Lightcone, and that is fine. Nobody seems to object to this.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don’t think it’s shameful. I’m pretty cheerful in both gift economies and market economies. I don’t want to accidentally interact with one like it’s the other, so sometimes I ask in various ways what mode we’re all in. I’d feel bad if I took advantage of someone’s gift to make a bunch of money, and I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money, and so I try to be up front about what I’m doing under which hat. Edit: Eh, “I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money” is a generalization, not true in every particular.
(I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket).
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the update.
But if you are right that the $35 per person is not enough to pay for the venue and the equipment and such (I think the musicians might be volunteers?), then I think the organizers messed up and should have marked a higher price as the default price.
My point is that if the musicians and organizers and speakers are all volunteering, there’s at gift being given as well as product being marketed.
I’m not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word “stealing” in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.
I think I want to taboo the phrase “price discrimination”. It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don’t think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I’ll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.
The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices for the same ticket based on when it is purchased seems fine.
There are also often economic reasons to sell things in bulk and charge a lower per-unit price for bulk purchases. That’s all a frequent flier program is, so again, that is probably fine.
I’m honestly not sure what you are referring to by different payment methods.
But I would absolutely call charging different prices of different IP addresses stealing, and I think most people would agree that it is not ethical to do so. And when airlines are caught doing things like that, they sometimes are forced by public pressure to stop. This notion that you don’t charge different people different prices for the same product is central to a fair and honest economy, and I think it is fair and important to call out violations of it as stealing.
Here’s another thing airlines sometimes do: they charge more money for the ticket from city A to city B than for the ticket from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I’m not sure what the airlines think they are doing there, but it’s clearly not a legitimate market transaction, as the second thing is just the first thing plus an extra things. So I have no qualms about buying the A->B->C ticket when I really just want to go from A to B. (For anyone else who wants to exploit this dishonest airline pricing, see skiplagged.com).
I agree that some things function as gifts rather than economic transactions, and some relationships have elements of both. Mixing the two can cause issues which are maybe out of scope for this conversation but are worth flagging as a reason to be hesitant to mix them. And when they are mixed, that seems like a point where it is especially important to explicitly demarcate how much money is market-based and how much is gift-based. But I think even in a gift economy, gifts are expected to be roughly proportional to other gifts, not to the giver’s means. We don’t expect the $500k software engineer to give gifts 10x the size of the $50k teacher.
Yep, I think there’s central examples of theft (breaking into someone’s house and taking cash out of their wallet), less central examples of theft that are still widely agreed upon to be theft (taking someone’s money claiming it’s being safeguarded on a trading exchange when actually some of customer funds pay for a bahamas office.)
As long as they’re clearly and honestly labeled I disagree, would expect >=7 out of 10 random Americans would also disagree, and though I think you’ve got the law background and I don’t I would expect a court to disagree. Maybe I’m not modeling exactly how social pressure works here?
I am pretty sure (85%) that airplanes do other price discrimination than just seat size. How early the ticket is being booked, how I’m planning to pay for it, whether I often fly with that airplane. I believe they also do a bit of dynamic pricing based on IP address, which is a sneaky way to guess at how much the customer is willing to pay. It annoys me a bit, but as long as they show the price when I’m buying the ticket and honour that price I wouldn’t call it stealing.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don’t think it’s shameful. I’m pretty cheerful in both gift economies and market economies. I don’t want to accidentally interact with one like it’s the other, so sometimes I ask in various ways what mode we’re all in. I’d feel bad if I took advantage of someone’s gift to make a bunch of money, and I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money, and so I try to be up front about what I’m doing under which hat. Edit: Eh, “I’d feel annoyed if someone took advantage of my gift to make a bunch of money” is a generalization, not true in every particular.
Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the update.
My point is that if the musicians and organizers and speakers are all volunteering, there’s at gift being given as well as product being marketed.
I’m not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word “stealing” in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.
I think I want to taboo the phrase “price discrimination”. It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don’t think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I’ll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.
The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices for the same ticket based on when it is purchased seems fine.
There are also often economic reasons to sell things in bulk and charge a lower per-unit price for bulk purchases. That’s all a frequent flier program is, so again, that is probably fine.
I’m honestly not sure what you are referring to by different payment methods.
But I would absolutely call charging different prices of different IP addresses stealing, and I think most people would agree that it is not ethical to do so. And when airlines are caught doing things like that, they sometimes are forced by public pressure to stop. This notion that you don’t charge different people different prices for the same product is central to a fair and honest economy, and I think it is fair and important to call out violations of it as stealing.
Here’s another thing airlines sometimes do: they charge more money for the ticket from city A to city B than for the ticket from city A to city C with a layover in city B. I’m not sure what the airlines think they are doing there, but it’s clearly not a legitimate market transaction, as the second thing is just the first thing plus an extra things. So I have no qualms about buying the A->B->C ticket when I really just want to go from A to B. (For anyone else who wants to exploit this dishonest airline pricing, see skiplagged.com).
I agree that some things function as gifts rather than economic transactions, and some relationships have elements of both. Mixing the two can cause issues which are maybe out of scope for this conversation but are worth flagging as a reason to be hesitant to mix them. And when they are mixed, that seems like a point where it is especially important to explicitly demarcate how much money is market-based and how much is gift-based. But I think even in a gift economy, gifts are expected to be roughly proportional to other gifts, not to the giver’s means. We don’t expect the $500k software engineer to give gifts 10x the size of the $50k teacher.