Today in Free Expression:
Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon eulogizes the typo;
Daniel Horan defends Flock cameras;
And David M. Cohen remembers a brother who knew how to be a villager.
Accurate Prices Are Good Prices
—Matthew Hennessey
Step aside AI data centers. The American left has a new economic bogeyman.
To hear Sen. Elizabeth Warren tell it, dynamic pricing is the biggest scam since Madoff. She has her war bonnet in a twist at the idea that brick-and-mortar retailers could do what e-commerce sellers have been doing for decades.
A market economy is a complex web of producers and consumers. Buyers are sometimes sellers and vice versa. Ice cream doesn’t grow on trees. Somebody has to make it using milk, sugar and energy, none of which are free. The prices of these inputs are constantly changing, as are the costs associated with running an ice-cream shop that employs workers, rents space, pays for electricity and must carry insurance.
How can anyone with a brain think the price of ice cream should never go up?
Ms. Warren hates economic complexity because she’s trying to tell a simple story of exploitation. Giant companies are trying to squeeze you. They’ll take your last dime in exchange for a half-ripe watermelon.
This is paranoia breaded in stupidity and fried in ignorance.
Prices aren’t trickery. They are indispensable information. Without good prices, everyone flies blind. Producers don’t know what to produce and consumers don’t know how much to consume. An economy must have the dialogue of price feedback or everything falls apart. Maybe that’s what Ms. Warren is secretly rooting for.
If you’ve ever been to a seafood restaurant where the catch of the day is marked MP for “market price,” you’ve experienced dynamic pricing. The cost of fresh fish pulled from the ocean fluctuates constantly. What restaurants have to pay their seafood suppliers depends on a host of inputs: the costs of fuel, labor and refrigeration; the seasonal availability of certain species of fish; and even, yes, the weather, which can affect the work of fishing boats and delivery trucks.
To account for all these variables, the restaurant updates prices in as close to real time as possible. Ask your server. He’ll tell you what the market price is and you can make an informed decision. That’s the opposite of squeezing you. That’s giving it to you straight.
There is no human right to low prices. If it’s hot outside, the price of ice cream should go up. But prices don’t only go up. They come down as well. What Ms. Warren and her populist friends never seem to consider is that any business in a competitive market has an obvious incentive to get prices right. When a price is too high, there is no sale and, therefore, no profit, which is why producers are in business in the first place. If the price is too low, the result is empty shelves.
Then nobody gets any ice cream no matter how hot it is.
All pricing is dynamic pricing—or should be. Accurate prices are the key to economic efficiency, which is the key to ensuring that a society’s resources are put to their best possible uses. Prices are all that stand between us and the barter system.
If Ms. Warren thinks that would be an improvement, she’s wrong.
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Job Bot: Looking for work? You might need to brag about your AI fluency to land the job. The Journal reports that job-seekers are trying to stand out to AI-obsessed employers by adding AI-buzzwords to their resumes. As one career coach put it, “Everybody’s keyword dumping.” In all, the number of American LinkedIn users adding “AI-related terms” to their pages increased 70% last year. That’s for good reason, since in the first quarter of this year, 8% of all titles on the job-hunting site Indeed mentioned AI. Time to spring for that Claude subscription. — Emma Camp
Coffee Bot: Imagine waiting no more than 30 seconds for a cup of joe at your local coffee shop. That dream is now a reality in Beijing, where a 24-hour coffee shop run entirely by one robot opened Sunday. CBS reports that it already set a Guinness World Record for the most cups of coffee served per hour at a robot-operated store: 202. Even a highly skilled human barista churning out lattes in the morning rush can’t beat that speed. But will a robot say “Good morning,” or remember your name, or foam the milk into a little swirl? You’d be better off buying your own espresso machine. — Mary Julia Koch
Space Sucker: Astronomers have discovered a new type of object in space. Researchers are calling it a “black hole star.” Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists spotted a bright red dot putting out over a 100 billion times as much energy as the brightest star—likely powered by a black hole at its center. No need to worry about getting swallowed up by it, however. It was found in what’s considered “cosmic dawn,” which was about 660 million years after the Big Bang and 13 billion years ago. — Megan Pidcock
I thought the WNBA was a sports league. Turns out it’s a reality-TV show.
— John J. Miller
The Typo is Dead. Long Live the Typo!
Meghan Cox Gurdon
With the advent of AI, we are rapidly entering an era when all text will be polished and smooth. It may or may not be compelling, but in spelling and syntax it will be faultless.
Perfection used to be the rarely attained ambition, but soon it will be so commonplace as to be boring.
Read Meghan’s Column ⧁
Flock Cameras Help Keep Communities Safe
Those who seek to forbid the use of Flock cameras don’t understand what it’s like to live in neighborhoods where fear of violent crime is constant.
By Daniel Horan
The Life of Jonathan
My brother spent 50 years building a village, one person at a time. When he died, the village came home.
By David M. Cohen
My Blind Date With an EV
I had always wanted to take an electric vehicle for a spin. Alas, it was disappointing.
By David Skinner
Farage, Binface and the Politics of Farce
The British establishment does a serviceable job of satirizing itself.
By Dominic Green
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When done right, it allocates resources efficiently; when abused, it destroys consumer trust.
I don't understand how you can look at the past 2 decades of deliberate product enshittification and reach the conclusion that dynamic pricing will be used purely as a market response mechanism. It's just so breathtakingly naive that I struggle to understand if it's a complete lack of pattern recognition or just a knee-jerk spite response to a political adversary.