Nobody who does this for a living seems to be willing to step up to the plate so I guess I’m stuck doing the job. The free-market solution to excess demand over supply is to raise prices. We are not raising prices to end the empty shelves because the government in various jurisdictions has made it illegal to raise prices in the face of an emergency.We've been all over this at Cold Spring Shops for years, and longer than that in the various survey of public policy courses I once offered.
Nobody has had the courage to say this. Everyone who has taken a basic economics course in the US knows this. This lack of even discussion on how to fix the empty shelf problem is deeply weird and nobody is talking about the odd silence either.
It's possible, though, that we've got an evolutionary bias toward finding Somebody To Blame. An invisible hand or mysterious billing clerks diverting goods in transit isn't satisfactory.
Funnily, the idea for that crazy claim came from Red Plenty, some historical fiction about the attempts of the intelligentsia to put the algorithms in charge of Building Communism during the early Khrushchev years. Then Novocherkassk happened. One of those geniuses had worked out the city's food allocation on the basis of the dietary requirements of students at the polytechnic. Then, when the comrades at the locomotive works bought unexpectedly more and the algorithm raised prices, what happened next was not pretty.
Thereafter, the story tells us, the geniuses created a commissar with the authority to override some of the decisions the algorithms made.
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