-Oscar Wilde
Fairness is a feeling. A feeling that translates into actions or numbers.
During the Icepocalypse in Austin, electricity was out throughout large swaths of the city. The conversation turned to who deserves what.
Hotels
People attempting to book hotels saw prices 10x the typical rate. A judge passed an ordinance to disallow this surge pricing. The thought process being that surge pricing isn’t fair to citizens. Hotel prices went down to their previous rates. Hotels instantly sold out.
The tech savvy booked the hotels immediately. This cohort is largely young and healthy. I know many young, healthy individuals who quickly booked hotel rooms for multiple nights. The rooms were for them individually.
Imagine a world in which hotels were $2000/night.
There are only so many wealthy individuals who would splurge. Families could share a hotel room to split the cost. Groups of friends could split the cost of a reservation together. Higher cost of hotels would have incentivized sharing of hotel rooms.
Instead, the non-tech savvy were left out in the cold. A policy meant to optimize fairness led to additional lodging exclusively for the tech savvy.
Power
Those who couldn’t get a hotel had to live with no power.
Instead of completely shutting off power, imagine energy costs were completely transparent with examples. You knew it cost $20 to heat your apartment to 60 degrees for the night, $100 to heat your apartment to 68 degrees, and $200 to 72 degrees. You get to choose. Provide prices for hot showers, charging your phone, keeping your router on, etc. It’s a choice to keep power on. But you have to pay the cost.
Vaccines
There’s a lot of talk about fairness of vaccine distribution.
Vaccines are being distributed in order of what society perceives as most fair. The core assumption is that those who are most vulnerable are most deserving of a vaccine. Let’s take three people--
A) A retired 70 yr old introvert. They don’t interact much with others.
B) A 50 yr old salesperson who interacts with people for a living. They need to see people in person to support their family.
C) A super extroverted 21 yr old. They have a compulsion to be around other people. They can’t help but break quarantine everyday.
Given people A, B, and C— for a society optimizing for reduction of spread + reduction of deaths from Covid, in what order should they be prioritized? I’d prioritize C, B, then A. If the 21 yr old gets SARS2, they’re likely to be a super spreader. B sees more people than C for their job. Even though A is most vulnerable, they don’t need to interact with many people.
Even when prioritizing from a “most vulnerable” position, what if the vulnerability was self inflicted? If you go to jail, you get a vaccine. Federal rules state people who are overweight or smokers are prioritized for SARS2 vaccines. When millions of people are waiting for vaccines, this hardly seems “fair”.
Maybe it’s ok to prioritize vulnerability, but create another option. You can pay say $500 to skip the line. You pay the cost of your vaccine plus three other vaccines, and the cost to administer them. If you don’t pay up, you have to wait in the vulnerability line. This is a great piece that goes down this rabbit hole.
Trade Offs
What is fair comes down to what we’re optimizing for. And what we should optimize for is a personal preference. How could we run a society based on each person’s personal preferences? We’d have to change the prices constantly to see what is actually fair for each individual. Think of the insane complexity.
The government would have to determine what is fair for each company to pay each employee. The government would have to determine what is fair for each landlord to charge in rent. The government would need to decide the fair price and production of everything.
Luckily, this problem is already solved. It’s not perfect. It has edge case flaws. But after hundreds of years of trial and error, it’s the best solution we got. It’s called the free market.