Comment by jbxntuehineoh
4 days ago
shopping, 2000: go to store. take item off shelf. hand cashier indicated amount of money. leave.
shopping, 2030: use your personalized AI agent ($100/month subscription) to simultaneously impersonate a dozen clients across five different online shopping platforms with the goal of tricking the sellers' AI agents into thinking you're poorer than you are so that you can pay $5 for bananas instead of $25.
That's just called progress. What are you a Luddite or something?
Its pretty obvious that a society intent on making capitalism work would enforce price transparency. If you want a productive society, you need efficient markets, and if you want efficient markets, you need to reduce information asymmetry, not maximize it. Hopefully the people in power recognize the positive impact they can make by preventing this awful future.
I think the devil's advocate/libertarian reply would be roughly: its efficient to let consumers prefer venues with different pricing schemes. If dynamic pricing is bad, then competitors will differentiate by not doing it, and price out the ones doing dynamic pricing.
To be clear, I don't believe that (or even the premise that "making capitalism work" is a good social goal--some elements of capitalist economies are socially beneficial, but adopting it as an ideology rather than piecemeal is not). I think your point is generally correct: if your goal is an efficient free market, then price transparency is important. But that's just my hunch as to what the counterargument would be.
The core issue with pure libertarian ideas is that they ignore "shoe leather costs" and the role they play in making consumers "irrational", which the success of a libertarian society depends on.
In this case, plenty of places in the US only have one reasonably close grocery store.
Sounds like something Macx character from the book Accelerando would do.