*Damn *that cursed reality and its persistent refusal to conform to their ideology!
He had it all figured out, but the damned margins in the “post reply” box were too small.
There is no need to refute Braess’s Paradox. A private road network can optimize traffic according to any number of performance metrics and could incentivize behavior in a way that is not accounted for in Braess’s Paradox.
The paradox is not even a paradox in a meaningful sense. Sticking with traffic applications, why should anyone assume that the addition of a roadway would decrease travel times? Why would the subtraction of a roadway be assumed to cause an increase?
Why can’t I just assume that given property ownership and constraints, a given manager can either arrange resources in an optimal or suboptimal way? There is nothing paradoxical about that. There is nothing to suggest that a government manager of roads would avoid suboptimal arrangement of resources any more readily than a private manager. Indeed, your cite pulls case studies where government managed sub-optimality is revealed after a road closing.
If conservatives were slavishly devoted to the Laffer curve they would understand that there are points on the curve at which marginal increases in tax rates can yield higher revenues. Or maybe they understand that and want the revenues to fund wars and ICE busts.
If leftists understood the Laffer curve, they would be slavishly devoted to the notion that there are points on the curve at which marginal decreases in tax rates can yield higher revenues. Or maybe not and their slavish devotion to taxing the rich is about envy and not running a responsible government.
I said “purposeful misunderstanding”, as in the oft-repeated mantra of “lowering tax rates increases tax revenues because more money is available for private investment to increase jobs and boost the economy” bullshit.
As far as myself, trust me I recognize a simple revenue-maximization function when I see one. But I’m not the one telling the economically illiterate… the basic connedservative in the street… that this relationship is sacrosanct and holds true in all cases, no matter how low marginal rates fall.
For example, the Treasury Secretary runs with this bullshit:
"When the Social Security and Medicare trustees warned last week that both programs are ontenuous financial footing, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchinsaid: “The administration’s economic agenda — tax cuts, regulatory reform and improved trade agreements — will generate the long-term growth needed to help secure these programs and lead them to a more stable path.” "
How Trump and Republicans are damning Social Security and Medicare – New York Daily News?
Pure laffer curve ideological bullshit. Just like the tax cut debate, driven by a complete, and willful, misunderstanding of the theory.
We’re going to have to nominate you for Stupidest Doper. I’ll give you credit for clicking on the link, but I doubt you understood what you read even as well as Nitwit Stone did.
In Braess’s Paradox, an entrepreneur builds a bridge, extracts a profitable toll which travelers are happy to pay, and transit time between two points worsens for everyone.
Use the Zoom button on your browser and reread the preceding sentence until you understand it.
Government intervention doesn’t cause the paradox — in the purest form of the paradox, government intervention is the only remedy.
To forestall a cycle of rejoinders which would hijack the thread, note that the purest forms of Braess’s Paradox depend on scarcities, e.g. that there are geographic constraints on the building of competing roads or bridges.
In fact such constraints are not uncommon in automotive traffic networks: doubling the width of a street or avenue in Manhattan is not a simple undertaking. And, as the Wikipedia article points out, traffic engineers are sometimes startled when a real-world road closing (rather than a mathematician’s blackboard musing) actually speeds up traffic! (In Farnaby’s cartoon world where that closed road has a private toll-collecting owner, the road closure could not be “legally” enforced.)
Nobody claims that Braess’s Paradox, or its necessary constraints, applies to all economic activities. But it is an interesting reductio ad absurdem demonstration that the kindergarten-level economic model that hyper-libertarians like Farnaby and Stone insist on, shows laughable ignorance.
I clicked on the link and found something with narrow applications and unrealistic constraints and made a meta-critique of your claim. You resorted back to a “pure form” of the paradox because it is only within that framework your complaint makes sense.
I will continue to pile on your opioid-addled Boomer musings. Do you think government technicians are out there optimizing traffic flows and intervening in instances of Braess’s paradox? How fucking laughable is that premise to begin with? Again, the studies in your own cite point to instances in which sub-optimality of government traffic management is revealed by a coincidental road closing. If government was optimizing traffic flows as you apparently believe they are, they would have closed the road purposefully because they are such wise technicians. Lol get real Boomer.
No economic model I subscribe to claims that market outcomes are optimal for an arbitrary performance metric.
IDK about Sam Stone, but my preferred economic system is optimized for voluntary exchange based on property rights. I make no absurd claims that traffic will be optimized to minimize transit time. Do you believe traffic will be optimized for transit time under your statist system?
Too late to edit:
Again, in my model, a private road network could be optimized for transit time if the manager was willing and capable. Yes, NETWORK. The ridiculous assumption that each path on a network is managed by an individual entrepreneur is key to the example you posted.
No economic model I subscribe to claims that market outcomes are optimal for an arbitrary performance metric chosen by Braess or septimus.
IDK about Sam Stone, but my preferred economic system is optimized to maximize voluntary exchange based on property rights. I make no absurd claims that traffic will be optimized to minimize transit time. Do you believe traffic will be optimized for transit time under your statist system?
What in heaven’s name have you been smoking? :eek: I did not present Braess’s Paradox in any context of “statism” or government action.
You introduced government intervention to the discussion; only then did I point out that you had the plausible effect of such intervention backwards.
And when I ignore your irrelevant gibberish about “statism” the few sentences and phrases that survive pruning show me only that you sill haven’t grasped the essential nature of the paradox.
Compared to you, Sam Stone’s knowledge of economics is almost adult.
I don’t know why I repeatedly overestimate your intelligence. Your contribution this far has been “Muh, Braess’s paradox”. Yet post after post I present simple critiques of your limited understanding of its assumptions and expect more in return.
Simple questions, let’s try once more.
Do you believe road networks are optimized to minimize traffic times in your system?
If not, why do you think that presenting evidence that road networks will not be optimized to minimize traffic times in a laissez-faire system is something supporters of said system have to grapple with?
Please use as much font formatting and emojis as possible.
In my system? What is “my” system? I have introduced Braess’s paradox — understanding that paradox is your first chore. Possible remedies for the problem described by Braess’s paradox may be an interesting topic but are irrelevant to any point I have made in this thread. Let’s understand Braess’s paradox first.
I will depart from my usual sarcasm and try to answer this question in a straightforward way. But first I have to understand the question; and I do not. Please rephrase the question in a way that makes clear “statism” has nothing to do with it, nor is there a “your system” (septimus’ system) of any relevance.
My best guess is that your question means:
Why do supporters of laissez-faire “have to grapple with” the inefficiencies implied by Braess’s paradox?
If so, the answer is "They don’t have to grapple with such inefficiencies, anymore than proponents of apple eating “have to” grapple with rotten apples. They have the option, however, to choose better apples … or to understand economic inefficiencies and seek remedies.
Does this help?
Rereading your post leads me to suspect I missed your main point. Let me try again.
I think you’re claiming that there is no “solution” to the inefficiency described by Braess’s paradox; therefore it doesn’t argue against the (possibly laissez-faire) system which created it. Is that it?
If so, you’ve completely missed the point. The inefficiency disappears if some terrorist group (let’s call them The Anarchists and Libertarians Brigade) simply uses dynamite to blow up the troublesome bridge. If the entrepreneur repairs the bridge the Brigade blows it up again. Problem solved: traffic now moves faster. If that isn’t obvious to you, then you never grasped the peculiar nature of Braess’s paradox in the first place.
I hope you thank me for letting the Libertarians’ Terrorist Brigade solve the problem with dynamite. Heaven forbid that a government would intervene and shut down the bridge at gunpoint.
.
NETA: I am not advocating terrorism nor gunpoints. We’re just trying to understand Braess’s paradox.
No my point is that it is laughable that you believe a government manager would identify which bridge to shut down and make decisions based on this identification instead of some political motivation. You don’t understand the mechanism of government decision making and apparently believe it is some sort of disinterested technocracy.
It is also laughable that you believe a private firm operating the regional transportation network could not identify the optimality of the closed bridge system and close the bridge thereby minimizing transit times for customers. The mechanism for this decision would be clear to any idiot that’s made a voluntary buck.
I have provided a remedy. Private firms operating a regional road network can optimize for transit times just as easily as government. They can close bridges. They have clear incentives to do so.
It is not difficult to understand the paradox at a level that makes your application of the paradox clearly in error. You don’t even understand the assumptions.