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On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset.
medicine, guaranteed demand with no other options makes for interesting prices.
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On August 25 2014 18:50 Skilledblob wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. medicine
Medicine is specifically what I was referring to so maybe you'd like to explain.
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there is no willingness to pay X price involved in medicine. If your choice is to die or pay for completely overpriced medicine then most people will always pay. and this is abused by companies.
it's the same thing with water.your choice is between having no water in your home or paying your water supplier what ever price he makes
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On August 25 2014 19:01 Skilledblob wrote:
there is no willingness to pay X price involved in medicine. If your choice is to die or pay for completely overpriced medicine then most people will always pay. and this is abused by companies.
it's the same thing with water.your choice is between having no water in your home or paying your water supplier what ever price he makes
You're just redefining words to make a point. Willingness and ability to pay for a good is the definition of demand in economics. "Someone who is dying is not willing to pay a high price for medicine" sounds a lot less reasonable when you just say it directly instead of implicitly abusing semantics. If I claimed that people weren't willing to buy cigarettes - my argument being that they don't "actually want it" (whatever that means), they are simply part of a legal addiction scheme - you'd point out the same thing to me. They have the means and the will to buy - and they buy.
Pharma prices are driven by the demand structure I was talking about. Where the demand comes from doesn't matter from an economic point of view. Maybe some guy really likes the taste of ibuprofen. Maybe some guy needs some specific patented drug not to die. Whatever. Money doesn't care about the motivations behind the demand. An industry as an entity is not equipped to care about such motivations either. Financial analysis doesn't require anything other than results.
There are still X people willing to pay Y for your product and C people willing to pay D and F willing to pay G and so on. Medicine is maybe the best model of this behavior (with electronics being a close second). The same exact product created in the same exact facility can cost 20x as much in the US as e.g. Ecuador. Is it because packing up medicine in a shipping container and paying to have it boated down the Pacific ocean makes it cheaper to produce? That's obviously a nonsensical proposition. The reason is that the number of people willing to pay X is so much more than the number of people willing to pay 20 * X that there is more money to be made in selling it for X. This can be attributed to all kinds of factors including differences in standard of living or differences in culture. Hardly any industry except maybe electronics has such a chasm between the price of the same good in different markets.
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life rescuing medicine might be cheaper in other countries by our standards but it is still barely affordable in the other country
Given these options to procure medi-
cines at reduced prices, finance and dis-
tribution remain as impediments to treat-
ment access. The impossibility of poor
countries paying for antiretroviral treat-
ment themselves cannot be overempha-
sized; countries such as Ghana, Nige-
ria, and Tanzania have annual national
health budgets of $8 or less per capita.
41
In contrast, estimates endorsed by 140
faculty members of Harvard University
for a treatment plan of diagnosis, care,
and antiretroviral drugs are about $1200
per patient-year (including infrastruc-
ture development and training would
cost somewhat more).
source: http://iipi.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Antiretroviral_Article.pdf
so as you can see with this example for HIV medicine, yes the medicine is cheaper but still nowhere near affordable for most patients, while my guess is that the work that goes into producing these pills is nowhere near as expensive. I dont care abut arguing with americans about the myth of market self regulation because that's a lost cause but for me the fact remains that life saving medicine will always be completely overpriced no matter what country you look at. The medicine wont be prohibitavely expensive, but it will be so expensive that without indebting themselves the average person wont be able to pay for it. I mean look at the US often enough you hear about cancer patients llosing everything because they can barely afford the treatment.
companies dont do this out of malice, they do this because they have to maximize profit margins for their shareholders which in my opinion should not happen for medicine.
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On August 25 2014 20:08 Skilledblob wrote:life rescuing medicine might be cheaper in other countries by our standards but it is still barely affordable in the other country source: http://iipi.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Antiretroviral_Article.pdfso as you can see with this example for HIV medicine, yes the medicine is cheaper but still nowhere near affordable for most patients, while my guess is that the work that goes into producing these pills is nowhere near as expensive. I dont care abut arguing with americans about the myth of market self regulation because that's a lost cause but for me the fact remains that life saving medicine will always be completely overpriced no matter what country you look at. The medicine wont be prohibitavely expensive, but it will be so expensive that without indebting themselves the average person wont be able to pay for it. I mean look at the US often enough you hear about cancer patients llosing everything because they can barely afford the treatment. companies dont do this out of malice, they do this because they have to maximize profit margins for their shareholders which in my opinion should not happen for medicine.
Did you read any of my posts or do you just see vague red blotches when some topics are brought up? Where did I ever talk about self-regulation or regulation of any kind? What the fuck conversation is this?
I appear to have wasted a lot of words so I might as well waste some more. Here is, in hindsight, what just occurred.
* Discussion ensues about Thing and goes off in a wrong direction *
Me: Here's how Thing works.
You: I find Thing to be morally reprehensible in this instance... therefore your post is wrong.
Me: I don't understand how my post is wrong, maybe you could explain.
You: It turns out that bad stuff happens all the time with Thing!
Me: Okay, but where in my explanation of how Thing works were there mistakes?
You: I don't argue with [insert favourite political group], but the fact is that Thing is just bad!
And just for the record, I'm one of those people whose life was severely impacted by someone getting cancer and having to deal with crooked insurance fuckshits and bankruptcy and hospital managers who couldn't give a shit about a human life unless you crossed their palm with green.
So maybe you could show some empathy and read the fucking words I'm writing.
/edit what is with these stupid emotes?
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Your post is wrong in that the demand isn't direct. I don't choose what drug i want and i don't pay for the drug. My insurance does, and my insurance would pay 1/10th or 10x as much, if that's what the drug's cost was. They would relay that cost back to me by higher insurance cost, but i can't say i don't want an insurance and just not pay. That's how it works here and i know its a bit different in america, so that's why it's pointless arguing with americans about it.
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One specific regarding medicine is a derogation on patents: countries have the right to produce patented drugs without licence for their population if the prices asked are deemed too expensive in the local context. That means there is a ceiling price, that is perhaps lower than what the end customer is willing to pay (may be willing to swear his income on a few generations for his life), at which the market might be destroyed.
Aim has to be the lowest between what the state will allow and what the customer will accept to pay.
(equivalent in eve would be if all BPOs/materials were available for sale in npc stores)
Another specific is the impact such cases might have on the image of the drug company. In EVE the reddit flames are a motivation in itself, but genocide accusations on pharma companies are not welcome.
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On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset.
so let me try this again. The argument that I bolded is false, as I tried to show in my last post. It doesnt have anything to do with my political views. You are right that the basic idea of trade is that your trade partner pays as much for the product as he is willing to pay but what I am getting at is that there is no customer will involved when paying for potentially life saving medicine. Which in turn means that companies are able to use this to push prices above and beyond what any sane customer would normally be willing to pay, so they circumvent the normal supply and demand structure. And this in my eyes changes it from trade to extortion.
it's the same as holding a gun to someone head and telling him "buy my dirty socks for 500$ and you live"
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I thought this was EVE thread 
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No this is the Dota/defmatrix throws random walls of text at people who really don't give a shit thread.
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Sweet. Won't help you become better at dota though! 
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playing dota on that thing would be like driving a Lamborghini on a go-cart course.
yeah it can go 350 miles an hour but your only allowed to go 20.
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On August 26 2014 01:47 PassiveAce wrote:
playing dota on that thing would be like driving a Lamborghini on a go-cart course.
yeah it can go 350 miles an hour but your only allowed to go 20.
I heard the fps is getting lower and lower with each patch.
Compulsory eve contribution, I am 2 months old and still enjoying being a noob. I have 20m in the bank and 50m+ assets. 
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United States43210 Posts
On August 25 2014 18:57 DefMatrixUltra wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 18:50 Skilledblob wrote:On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. medicine Medicine is specifically what I was referring to so maybe you'd like to explain.
You're applying other unstated rules in your system though. Your argument is that if I am dying and am willing to pay all I have and more for the medicine then it is possible to charge me that. However it is also possible for me to go to your house and stab you. Or to be more realistic, to group together collectively and legally rob you through our representatives in the legislative.
Saying "if someone will do it then it is fair, at least for them" doesn't just work one way.
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+ Show Spoiler [Stuff no one cares about] +On August 25 2014 20:45 Warri wrote:
Your post is wrong in that the demand isn't direct. What does it matter? Everything ends up working the same as if it were direct. Imagine you were an accountant tabulating the sum of all these transactions. All you would ever see is the parties involved (buyer and seller) and the amount of money they agreed upon. Since the transaction is complete, it's implicit that the buyer was willing to pay for it. That is what demand is. I don't choose when my windows get broken or when my car needs to be repaired either, but that doesn't stop me from generating demand for those products in the right situation. Also, do you think insurance doesn't have an effect on pharma prices in the US? On August 25 2014 23:24 Skilledblob wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. so let me try this again. The argument that I bolded is false, as I tried to show in my last post. It doesnt have anything to do with my political views. You are right that the basic idea of trade is that your trade partner pays as much for the product as he is willing to pay but what I am getting at is that there is no customer will involved when paying for potentially life saving medicine. Which in turn means that companies are able to use this to push prices above and beyond what any sane customer would normally be willing to pay, so they circumvent the normal supply and demand structure. And this in my eyes changes it from trade to extortion. it's the same as holding a gun to someone head and telling him "buy my dirty socks for 500$ and you live" Yeah let's try this again. I don't fundamentally disagree with the concepts you are putting forward. However, you're literally just redefining what the words mean without saying it directly. That is called a semantic argument. It is not a real argument. Your position is not based on following logical steps to a conclusion. It is based on staring really closely at one word that I'm using and saying "I know what you mean by using that word, but I'm going to take some other improbable meaning of that word and demonstrate how your logic becomes wrong when I essentially replace it with a new word." There's no back and forth to be had in such a discussion. It's the kind of trap shitty political discussions etc. fall into on TL. "Someone who is dying won't pay for medicine to save their life." Agree or disagree? Look how I took the mystery word out and now there's no argument. That's an indication that this is a semantic argument. Your example of holding a gun to someone's head to sell them a product is good. If you were an accountant looking over the transaction history, you wouldn't know the motivations of people, you would only see that the transaction between seller and buyer was completed. The fact that the demand for the product was generated by some external factor doesn't matter. If a hurricane destroys all of an item in the world except one, that last one might become extremely valuable because of its rarity. Does that mean the demand didn't really change because some external force was involved? You could maybe somehow argue that, but if we all ended up agreeing with the argument, it would mean that the word "demand" was now completely useless. If you somehow convince me to take your side on this argument, we will have agreed on a concept of demand that is less useful than it is now. That is the end-result of a semantic argument - it is basically word assassination. Holding a gun to someone's head to buy your overpriced socks is only different in degree from selling cigarettes. If you asked the gunpoint customer if they needed those socks, they would tell you that they really really need those socks. A cigarette buyer would give you the same kind of answer, though they would describe differing degrees of need. Even so, we still can define a demand curve for cigarettes because the concept was created to be useful in that way. If you and I somehow agree that this concept of demand is flawed because we stared at some particular word really hard, we are just diminishing the utility of the word while accomplishing nothing else. It's not just gunpoint socks and cigarettes that this applies to. When someone's car breaks down, demand is generated for car service. People don't "want" (by our weaselly redefinition of the word) to pay for car service, but it's a better alternative to them than not paying for it - so they pay for it. Same with any kind of repair or continuous service industry. We wouldn't be coming to some kind of intellectual resolution of a problem, we'd just be diminishing the usefulness of a term.
On August 26 2014 03:26 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 18:57 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 18:50 Skilledblob wrote:On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. medicine Medicine is specifically what I was referring to so maybe you'd like to explain. You're applying other unstated rules in your system though. Your argument is that if I am dying and am willing to pay all I have and more for the medicine then it is possible to charge me that. However it is also possible for me to go to your house and stab you. Or to be more realistic, to group together collectively and legally rob you through our representatives in the legislative. Saying "if someone will do it then it is fair, at least for them" doesn't just work one way.
I never even broached fairness or morality or whatever. I was trying to explain the concept of demand in economics.
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United States43210 Posts
On August 26 2014 03:49 DefMatrixUltra wrote:+ Show Spoiler [Stuff no one cares about] +On August 25 2014 20:45 Warri wrote:
Your post is wrong in that the demand isn't direct. What does it matter? Everything ends up working the same as if it were direct. Imagine you were an accountant tabulating the sum of all these transactions. All you would ever see is the parties involved (buyer and seller) and the amount of money they agreed upon. Since the transaction is complete, it's implicit that the buyer was willing to pay for it. That is what demand is. I don't choose when my windows get broken or when my car needs to be repaired either, but that doesn't stop me from generating demand for those products in the right situation. Also, do you think insurance doesn't have an effect on pharma prices in the US? On August 25 2014 23:24 Skilledblob wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. so let me try this again. The argument that I bolded is false, as I tried to show in my last post. It doesnt have anything to do with my political views. You are right that the basic idea of trade is that your trade partner pays as much for the product as he is willing to pay but what I am getting at is that there is no customer will involved when paying for potentially life saving medicine. Which in turn means that companies are able to use this to push prices above and beyond what any sane customer would normally be willing to pay, so they circumvent the normal supply and demand structure. And this in my eyes changes it from trade to extortion. it's the same as holding a gun to someone head and telling him "buy my dirty socks for 500$ and you live" Yeah let's try this again. I don't fundamentally disagree with the concepts you are putting forward. However, you're literally just redefining what the words mean without saying it directly. That is called a semantic argument. It is not a real argument. Your position is not based on following logical steps to a conclusion. It is based on staring really closely at one word that I'm using and saying "I know what you mean by using that word, but I'm going to take some other improbable meaning of that word and demonstrate how your logic becomes wrong when I essentially replace it with a new word." There's no back and forth to be had in such a discussion. It's the kind of trap shitty political discussions etc. fall into on TL. "Someone who is dying won't pay for medicine to save their life." Agree or disagree? Look how I took the mystery word out and now there's no argument. That's an indication that this is a semantic argument. Your example of holding a gun to someone's head to sell them a product is good. If you were an accountant looking over the transaction history, you wouldn't know the motivations of people, you would only see that the transaction between seller and buyer was completed. The fact that the demand for the product was generated by some external factor doesn't matter. If a hurricane destroys all of an item in the world except one, that last one might become extremely valuable because of its rarity. Does that mean the demand didn't really change because some external force was involved? You could maybe somehow argue that, but if we all ended up agreeing with the argument, it would mean that the word "demand" was now completely useless. If you somehow convince me to take your side on this argument, we will have agreed on a concept of demand that is less useful than it is now. That is the end-result of a semantic argument - it is basically word assassination. Holding a gun to someone's head to buy your overpriced socks is only different in degree from selling cigarettes. If you asked the gunpoint customer if they needed those socks, they would tell you that they really really need those socks. A cigarette buyer would give you the same kind of answer, though they would describe differing degrees of need. Even so, we still can define a demand curve for cigarettes because the concept was created to be useful in that way. If you and I somehow agree that this concept of demand is flawed because we stared at some particular word really hard, we are just diminishing the utility of the word while accomplishing nothing else. It's not just gunpoint socks and cigarettes that this applies to. When someone's car breaks down, demand is generated for car service. People don't "want" (by our weaselly redefinition of the word) to pay for car service, but it's a better alternative to them than not paying for it - so they pay for it. Same with any kind of repair or continuous service industry. We wouldn't be coming to some kind of intellectual resolution of a problem, we'd just be diminishing the usefulness of a term. Show nested quote +On August 26 2014 03:26 KwarK wrote:On August 25 2014 18:57 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 18:50 Skilledblob wrote:On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. medicine Medicine is specifically what I was referring to so maybe you'd like to explain. You're applying other unstated rules in your system though. Your argument is that if I am dying and am willing to pay all I have and more for the medicine then it is possible to charge me that. However it is also possible for me to go to your house and stab you. Or to be more realistic, to group together collectively and legally rob you through our representatives in the legislative. Saying "if someone will do it then it is fair, at least for them" doesn't just work one way. I never even broached fairness or morality or whatever. I was trying to explain the concept of demand in economics.
The rules of economics do not exist in a vacuum. You have to enter being stabbed into an economic cost benefit analysis. The idea of a free market that exists independently of society is an artificial distinction.
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The price of an item in economics reflects a profit maximizing equilibrium when all other factors are accounted for.
Medicine in general, but in the US in particular is a field where all concepts of free economic exchange fails. Hospitals have geographic monopolies in most parts of the country and the demand curved they are faced with is as close to the theoretical static demand as anything in the real world. They can charge anything they like for their services, and often do.
This statement is only true in some kind of perfect auction vacuum (I don't know how else to describe it, as it doesn't exist):
The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
Edit:
If you ignore the political slant, this is actually a pretty good article on how the market for medicine (healthcare) has been consolidating for the past 10 years or so and the results. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2014/features/after_obamacare048357.php?page=all
Edit2:
I think the fundamental understanding difference is here:
The fact that the demand for the product was generated by some external factor doesn't matter.
It absolutely matters. A market price can only be set in a market that both parties (buyer and seller) willingly engage in. Otherwise it's something that is not trade.
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On August 26 2014 03:49 DefMatrixUltra wrote:+ Show Spoiler [Stuff no one cares about] +On August 25 2014 20:45 Warri wrote:
Your post is wrong in that the demand isn't direct. What does it matter? Everything ends up working the same as if it were direct. Imagine you were an accountant tabulating the sum of all these transactions. All you would ever see is the parties involved (buyer and seller) and the amount of money they agreed upon. Since the transaction is complete, it's implicit that the buyer was willing to pay for it. That is what demand is. I don't choose when my windows get broken or when my car needs to be repaired either, but that doesn't stop me from generating demand for those products in the right situation. Also, do you think insurance doesn't have an effect on pharma prices in the US? On August 25 2014 23:24 Skilledblob wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. so let me try this again. The argument that I bolded is false, as I tried to show in my last post. It doesnt have anything to do with my political views. You are right that the basic idea of trade is that your trade partner pays as much for the product as he is willing to pay but what I am getting at is that there is no customer will involved when paying for potentially life saving medicine. Which in turn means that companies are able to use this to push prices above and beyond what any sane customer would normally be willing to pay, so they circumvent the normal supply and demand structure. And this in my eyes changes it from trade to extortion. it's the same as holding a gun to someone head and telling him "buy my dirty socks for 500$ and you live" Yeah let's try this again. I don't fundamentally disagree with the concepts you are putting forward. However, you're literally just redefining what the words mean without saying it directly. That is called a semantic argument. It is not a real argument. Your position is not based on following logical steps to a conclusion. It is based on staring really closely at one word that I'm using and saying "I know what you mean by using that word, but I'm going to take some other improbable meaning of that word and demonstrate how your logic becomes wrong when I essentially replace it with a new word." There's no back and forth to be had in such a discussion. It's the kind of trap shitty political discussions etc. fall into on TL. "Someone who is dying won't pay for medicine to save their life." Agree or disagree? Look how I took the mystery word out and now there's no argument. That's an indication that this is a semantic argument. Your example of holding a gun to someone's head to sell them a product is good. If you were an accountant looking over the transaction history, you wouldn't know the motivations of people, you would only see that the transaction between seller and buyer was completed. The fact that the demand for the product was generated by some external factor doesn't matter. If a hurricane destroys all of an item in the world except one, that last one might become extremely valuable because of its rarity. Does that mean the demand didn't really change because some external force was involved? You could maybe somehow argue that, but if we all ended up agreeing with the argument, it would mean that the word "demand" was now completely useless. If you somehow convince me to take your side on this argument, we will have agreed on a concept of demand that is less useful than it is now. That is the end-result of a semantic argument - it is basically word assassination. Holding a gun to someone's head to buy your overpriced socks is only different in degree from selling cigarettes. If you asked the gunpoint customer if they needed those socks, they would tell you that they really really need those socks. A cigarette buyer would give you the same kind of answer, though they would describe differing degrees of need. Even so, we still can define a demand curve for cigarettes because the concept was created to be useful in that way. If you and I somehow agree that this concept of demand is flawed because we stared at some particular word really hard, we are just diminishing the utility of the word while accomplishing nothing else. It's not just gunpoint socks and cigarettes that this applies to. When someone's car breaks down, demand is generated for car service. People don't "want" (by our weaselly redefinition of the word) to pay for car service, but it's a better alternative to them than not paying for it - so they pay for it. Same with any kind of repair or continuous service industry. We wouldn't be coming to some kind of intellectual resolution of a problem, we'd just be diminishing the usefulness of a term. Show nested quote +On August 26 2014 03:26 KwarK wrote:On August 25 2014 18:57 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 18:50 Skilledblob wrote:On August 25 2014 17:48 DefMatrixUltra wrote:On August 25 2014 17:02 Jaaaaasper wrote:
Honestly its more like developing new medicines is absurdly expensive and probably costs more than they can afford from standard profit margins to develop. So now they only have a few markets where they can still mark up prices at all, so those regions get turbo fucker so that they can keep their profits and develop new medicine. Yeah I bet there's all these complicated altruistic motivations at work. /s The price of an item is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. When you take that rule and apply it to a large system, you get the demand structure on which every market is based. X people are willing to pay Y for your product. C people are willing to pay D for your product. Is X * Y bigger or C * D bigger? There isn't a single large market that doesn't conform to this. There is no altruism or malice or any other kind of individualistic motivation. It's a machine optimized to run efficiently under a certain ruleset. medicine Medicine is specifically what I was referring to so maybe you'd like to explain. You're applying other unstated rules in your system though. Your argument is that if I am dying and am willing to pay all I have and more for the medicine then it is possible to charge me that. However it is also possible for me to go to your house and stab you. Or to be more realistic, to group together collectively and legally rob you through our representatives in the legislative. Saying "if someone will do it then it is fair, at least for them" doesn't just work one way. I never even broached fairness or morality or whatever. I was trying to explain the concept of demand in economics.
you are right, I am arguing semantics with you here because I think it is important. I understand your pain when someone is arguing semantics with you because I have the same thing happening often enough to me in university but I would not do this with you if I didnt think it was important, believe me I am not doing this to make you mad, I am doing this because I think there are genuine differences between the way how you and I define customer demand and a trade transaction in general.
this is my personal bias kicking in here so I dont think we will come to a conclusion that we both can agree on. You are right in a pure economic view what counts is that a transaction of goods between two parties occurs we can define this as a trade.
What I am trying to get at is that this definition while at its core not wrong, isnt really correct either. It's very broad and as I tried to point out with the example of the dirty socks outside influences that artificially generate a demand have to be taken into account.
I kinda have to play the foreigner card here a bit and say that while I find this discussion fascinating it is rough for me to find the proper economics words sometimes, so please bear with me.
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