As history’s greatest monster, I’ve long been disturbed by good bands’ aversion to efficient demand-based pricing for their shows. Annie Lowrey’s article about LCD Soundsystem’s anti-scalper efforts is confirming my priors:

But LCD fans were not left out in the cold. The debacle attracted the wrath of the band’s charismatic front man, James Murphy. On LCD Soundsystem’s blog, he wrote: “this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd MSG gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it’s knocked us on our asses.”

The market had failed in his mind. He told fans not to pay thousands of dollars to get into the Madison Square Garden show: “I will try to figure a way out to fuck these fuckers. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, IT IS NOT WORTH THAT KIND OF MONEY TO SEE US!” Soon enough, he realized he had an ace up his sleeve. He flooded the market, adding shows, upping ticket supply, and hopefully pushing prices down. (Those shows will go on sale this Friday.)

This is my current understanding of the dilemma. Optimal allocation of LCD Soundsystem tickets requires demand-responsive ticket pricing. But good rock bands are not composed of narrow-minded amoral profit-maximizers. Consequently, they’re motivated to price tickets at a lower level than the market will bear leading, in turn, to middlemen getting the rents. What’s needed is a way for bands to price tickets at demand-responsive levels in a way that’s consistent with the norm that the guys in a cool band shouldn’t be narrow-minded profit-maximizers. The best solution here, I think, is charity.

Someone (Bono?) needs to set up a trust fund to which bands will allocate the excess revenues that accumulate when the market price of concert tickets exceeds the “fair” price as determined by the bands’ moral intuitions. In that case, instead of a situation where “[t]ickets with a face value of $49.50 were going for 12 times that” on a secondary market you’d have a scenario where tickets are going for $500 and $450 out of that goes to the trust fund. The fund could take the money and give it to poor people in Africa and India. They need the money a good deal more than LCD Soundsystem fans do. You could say, very legitimately, “it’s too bad that not every fan can see the show, but we need some allocation mechanism, and I’ve tried to pick the one that will do the world the most good.” Hopefully Jeff Sachs would vouch for the plan.

Sallie James on House Republicans’ spending priorities:

The administration’s proposal would affect only about 2 percent of the total recipients of direct payments — subsidies that flow every year regardless of prices or farm output to owners of land that may or may not still be used for farming — and it does not by any means go far enough. But at least it is a start.

On the other side of the aisle, the Republicans followed their Republican Study Committee colleagues in failing to propose any cuts to “farm subsidies” as we typically understand them in their FY2011 budget proposal. To be sure, 22 percent of the $60 billion in cuts they propose would come from the “agriculture function,” and they indeed get rid of entire programs, but they are mainly to the nutrition and conservation areas of the USDA’s responsibilities. Nothing, so far as I can tell, from the commodity programs.

Money for rich landowners, but not enough for poor kids. It’s a problem of bad morals.

Harris Interactive has done another one of those polls about how almost all real spending cuts are unpopular. I worked it up into graphical form:

One important thing to note here is that people’s views seem to be swayed a lot by description. Cutting “welfare” is wildly more popular than cutting “food stamps” and I absolutely refuse to believe that’s because of some nuanced understanding of the differences between TANF and SNAP. Similarly, people like “pollution control” but hate “regulatory agencies,” which is the people who do the pollution controlling.

On the subject of Social Security, I think people sometimes get tripped up by over-emphasis on numerical quantities when thinking about this kind of issue. Obviously at some point you have to get down to dollars and cents. But at an initial phase, it’s helpful to think of this as more of a geometry problem than a algebra problem.

Here’s what we think we know about the geometry of the future of America:

One: There will be more people overall.
Two: There will be more stuff overall.
Three: The overall ratio of stuff to people will be higher.
Four: The share of elderly people to in the overall population will be higher.

Now think of the country as composed of two kinds of people, the retired and the non-retired both of whom consume some stuff. Fact four leaves us with the following choices:

One: A larger share of elderly people can be non-retired.
Two: We can import additional non-retired people to prevent the ratio from shifting.
Three: The average retired person can consume a smaller share of stuff.
Four: The average non-retired person can consume a smaller share of stuff.

Proposals to accomplish number one are frighteningly common in Washington and normally go by the name “raise the retirement age.” This is very regressive and I don’t like it at all. Proposals to accomplish number two I like a lot, but seem to have been arbitrarily ruled off the table as an option. This leaves us with three and four. The point here is that if a larger slice of the population pie is composed of old people, then either the elderly consumption pie needs to be sliced thinner or else the non-elderly consumption pie needs to be smaller.

Since we’re talking about a higher overall quantity of stuff per person, nobody actually needs to be worse off in the future but if the share of elderly people in the population grows then the consumption shares need to adjust one way or the other. Then in terms of programs to assign slices to old people, who have two big ones. One, Social Security, gives money to retired people which they use to buy stuff. The other, Medicare, buys health care (which is a kind of stuff) on behalf of retired people. You can fiddle with retired people’s share of “stuff” by fiddling with either program but the implications are quite different. For example, if you’re a hospital administration you really really really want the government to keep buying lots of health care for old people but don’t really care about old people’s ability to buy stuff. If you’re a nutritionist, you probably think that old people’s ability to buy healthful food has really important implications for their level of health and well-being.