I think I’ve got substantial disagreement, but I want to agree that in general I think a ‘pay your share’ ticket is a good default. My one line advice on ticket pricing is something like “first add up the costs of venue, food, equipment, etc, second divide that by the number of people you expect to attend, third add 10% for your planning fallacy, and that’s your one ticket price.” If I get more lines of advice I add more of course.
I empathize a lot with wanting to be able to just pay ones fair portion of something. There also are some real horror stories of groups trying to pry more money loose from their memberships.
Still, substantial disagreements below:
This is the point I was trying to make when I said that not having a price marked as paying ones own way came off as a bit stealy—one possible reading of that is that the organizers think the software engineer should pay more than their fraction of the event, and if that reading is correct, it is an attempt at stealing from the software engineer and should absolutely not happen in a community of honest people.
(emphasis mine.)
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla’s house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like “you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert” and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that’s not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That’s still true even through at least ‘normal’[1] amounts of price discrimination. Dean could offer front row seats for a higher price than the nosebleed section, that seems fine. He could explicitly use student status, asking for student ID or a .edu email, and in a high-trust environment it seems mostly fine to just use the honour system. Seems reasonable.
That’s still true even if community membership was contingent on paying, which it’s not. Off the top of my head, Toastmasters and Rotary Club both have mandatory membership dues to be at a local chapter, every Friday Night Magic I’ve been to had an entrance fee of some kind, and the first choir that came to my mind has membership dues. (They even explicitly do variable options: ctrl+f for “Member duesare a core part of BCE’s budget”.)
I believe it is not an attempt at stealing anything and it is not dishonest to do price discrimination where you say upfront what the price points are and let people decide whether to pay or not.
It can also come off as a bit stealy—like the organizers think they are entitled to more money from the highly paid software engineers than is their fair share.
Speaking as one of the organizers who sometimes runs stuff without a clear pay-your-way price point (though the breakeven price point with a bit of margin is my default these days), I don’t think I’m entitled to this in the current model, and if you want the market economy answer I think the arrow flips around. Like, I don’t get paid out of hypothetical profits for East Coast Rationalist Megameetup or Boston Solstice.[2] In the market economy version of ECRM, I’d add my expected time investment as a cost, and also I’d add more margin because I’d want to make a profit.
Take airplane seats as an example; it seems like a category error of some kind to say ‘United Airlines thinks they’re entitled to more money from the highly paid professionals than is their fair share.’ United Airlines wants as much of my money as they can get me to pay, I want them to fly me around for as little as I can pay. In a market economy they figure out how much they want to offer tickets at, I decide whether to buy from them or Delta or whether I want to call them up and try to negotiate with their representative or whether I want to stay home. They’re probably not going to sell me a ticket for less than the opportunity cost of selling my seat to someone else. They very likely aren’t going to sell me a ticket for less than the marginal cost of my weight[3] but from a market economy perspective, the fair price isn’t the marginal cost of all the passenger’s collective seats, it’s the price point where supply and demand curves cross.
There do exist rationalist (or at least adjacent) events that get run like this, paying organizers and/or staff for their time and charging enough that there’s a decent return on investment. I want to be careful about using non-public information here, so I’ll stop for the moment at just saying they exist, they’re great, and also they’re a minority.
I mildly think the $35 ticket for California Bay Solstice is not actually a market price. I don’t have any inside information on the budget for Berkeley Solstice, but I could ask and I’d be pretty surprised (p(5%)) if everyone paying $35 means that the musicians and organizers all get paid market rate for their time, or pays for the afterparty food and venue and ops time. I hear they sold out last year; in a market, if you sell out all copies, the obvious thing is to keep raising prices until that stops happening.
In the past, the net profit got paid forward to the next year. It did rest on my accounts for the year and I didn’t account for interest earned; I would have if I thought it’d be more money than the cost of my time take to track the interest.
Though they might if they have some clever reason, like they think it’ll make me a more loyal customer and that’s worth it? But afaik the actual marginal cost of an extra ~200lbs of flesh blood and luggage is way cheaper than any airline ticket I’ll ever buy.
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla’s house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like “you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert” and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that’s not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of things that don’t look too much like that in the specifics. We have words for whole categories of crime that we will colloquially call stealing, because they prompt the exact same moral revulsion for the same kinds of reasons, even though the specifics are rather different. I’m thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example. 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.
With price discrimination, I think you are equating some rather different things under that label. 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. And when I was a software engineer I continued to fly economy and personal item only, and while the airlines may have tried to entice me with the luxuries of a more expensive ticket, they never once suggested that I ought to pay them more because I was making more. So I don’t see anything wrong there.
Another situation where I see a similar wrong occurring is haggling. The whole point of a haggling economy is to try to exploit people who have more money just because they have more money, by charging them more for the same product. That, to my mind, is theft too, and I would not participate in a space where it was practiced.
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.
I don’t have any particular inside knowledge of the finances of bay area solstice either. (I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket). 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.
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.
I think I’ve got substantial disagreement, but I want to agree that in general I think a ‘pay your share’ ticket is a good default. My one line advice on ticket pricing is something like “first add up the costs of venue, food, equipment, etc, second divide that by the number of people you expect to attend, third add 10% for your planning fallacy, and that’s your one ticket price.” If I get more lines of advice I add more of course.
I empathize a lot with wanting to be able to just pay ones fair portion of something. There also are some real horror stories of groups trying to pry more money loose from their memberships.
Still, substantial disagreements below:
(emphasis mine.)
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla’s house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like “you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert” and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that’s not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That’s still true even through at least ‘normal’[1] amounts of price discrimination. Dean could offer front row seats for a higher price than the nosebleed section, that seems fine. He could explicitly use student status, asking for student ID or a .edu email, and in a high-trust environment it seems mostly fine to just use the honour system. Seems reasonable.
That’s still true even if community membership was contingent on paying, which it’s not. Off the top of my head, Toastmasters and Rotary Club both have mandatory membership dues to be at a local chapter, every Friday Night Magic I’ve been to had an entrance fee of some kind, and the first choir that came to my mind has membership dues. (They even explicitly do variable options: ctrl+f for “Member dues are a core part of BCE’s budget”.)
I believe it is not an attempt at stealing anything and it is not dishonest to do price discrimination where you say upfront what the price points are and let people decide whether to pay or not.
Speaking as one of the organizers who sometimes runs stuff without a clear pay-your-way price point (though the breakeven price point with a bit of margin is my default these days), I don’t think I’m entitled to this in the current model, and if you want the market economy answer I think the arrow flips around. Like, I don’t get paid out of hypothetical profits for East Coast Rationalist Megameetup or Boston Solstice.[2] In the market economy version of ECRM, I’d add my expected time investment as a cost, and also I’d add more margin because I’d want to make a profit.
Take airplane seats as an example; it seems like a category error of some kind to say ‘United Airlines thinks they’re entitled to more money from the highly paid professionals than is their fair share.’ United Airlines wants as much of my money as they can get me to pay, I want them to fly me around for as little as I can pay. In a market economy they figure out how much they want to offer tickets at, I decide whether to buy from them or Delta or whether I want to call them up and try to negotiate with their representative or whether I want to stay home. They’re probably not going to sell me a ticket for less than the opportunity cost of selling my seat to someone else. They very likely aren’t going to sell me a ticket for less than the marginal cost of my weight[3] but from a market economy perspective, the fair price isn’t the marginal cost of all the passenger’s collective seats, it’s the price point where supply and demand curves cross.
There do exist rationalist (or at least adjacent) events that get run like this, paying organizers and/or staff for their time and charging enough that there’s a decent return on investment. I want to be careful about using non-public information here, so I’ll stop for the moment at just saying they exist, they’re great, and also they’re a minority.
I mildly think the $35 ticket for California Bay Solstice is not actually a market price. I don’t have any inside information on the budget for Berkeley Solstice, but I could ask and I’d be pretty surprised (p(5%)) if everyone paying $35 means that the musicians and organizers all get paid market rate for their time, or pays for the afterparty food and venue and ops time. I hear they sold out last year; in a market, if you sell out all copies, the obvious thing is to keep raising prices until that stops happening.
“Normal” is not well defined here and I don’t expect I could give a good principled definition without working on it for a while.
In the past, the net profit got paid forward to the next year. It did rest on my accounts for the year and I didn’t account for interest earned; I would have if I thought it’d be more money than the cost of my time take to track the interest.
Though they might if they have some clever reason, like they think it’ll make me a more loyal customer and that’s worth it? But afaik the actual marginal cost of an extra ~200lbs of flesh blood and luggage is way cheaper than any airline ticket I’ll ever buy.
That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of things that don’t look too much like that in the specifics. We have words for whole categories of crime that we will colloquially call stealing, because they prompt the exact same moral revulsion for the same kinds of reasons, even though the specifics are rather different. I’m thinking of things like fraud, extortion, blackmail, and embezzlement. None of us would hesitate to call was SBF did stealing, for example. 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.
With price discrimination, I think you are equating some rather different things under that label. 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. And when I was a software engineer I continued to fly economy and personal item only, and while the airlines may have tried to entice me with the luxuries of a more expensive ticket, they never once suggested that I ought to pay them more because I was making more. So I don’t see anything wrong there.
Another situation where I see a similar wrong occurring is haggling. The whole point of a haggling economy is to try to exploit people who have more money just because they have more money, by charging them more for the same product. That, to my mind, is theft too, and I would not participate in a space where it was practiced.
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.
I don’t have any particular inside knowledge of the finances of bay area solstice either. (I do know that the after party is not included, that is a separate ticket). 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.
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.