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How market design can feed the poorworksinprogress.co/issue/how-market-design-can-feed-the-poor
177 sats \ 4 comments \ @supratic 27 Sep food_and_drinks
For most of its history, Feeding America, the nation’s largest nonprofit, relied on a broken system to distribute its 220 million pounds of food per year. It ignored existing stocks and donations, flooding fully stocked food banks in Idaho with potatoes and warehouses in Alaska with five gallon buckets of pickles.
To fix how America fed its hungry would require the economics of market design. The new system increased food supply by 100 million pounds annually, equivalent to feeding an additional 60,000 people every day. It is one of the clearest successes of market design so far. 1

Footnotes

  1. The Allocation of Food to Food Banks https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/11.1-Prendergast-food4-model.pdf ↩
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 27 Sep
Inspiring article. Free market principles in action.
the socialist board member who had opposed the system was now one of its strongest advocates.
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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 27 Sep
Yeah, market design is a pretty cool area of study in game theory. It's all about looking at the nuts and bolts of how things actually get allocated, especially in systems where classical price discovery isn't as applicable.
Market design scholars designed more efficient algorithms for matching kidney donors to patients, for example, and Amazon hires people with that training to help work on their internal logistics.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 8 Oct
The kidney donation system is flawed. Highest bidder moves to the front of the line. It’s immoral to pay for a kidney but perfectly acceptable to wait for a kidney when time is not on your side
Auctions, who would have guessed
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 20h
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/struggling-central-valley-residents-line-groceries-amid-californias-cost-living
The article from ZeroHedge details the struggle of Central Valley residents in California coping with the state's high cost of living, which has led to high rates of food insecurity. Key points from the article:
  • Long Lines for Groceries: Residents, including homeowners and those with jobs, are lining up for hours (sometimes overnight) at places like the Fresno Mission's First Fruits Market to receive about $250 worth of free, high-quality groceries, including fresh meat and produce.
  • High Poverty and Cost of Living: California has the nation's highest poverty rates despite having the world's fourth-largest economy. Residents face skyrocketing costs for gas, groceries, housing, and utilities.
  • Demand is High: The Central California Food Bank is serving 320,000 individuals monthly, a demand level similar to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. One in three children and one in four adults in the Central Valley struggle with food insecurity.
  • Housing Crisis: While the Central Valley has historically been a refuge for those seeking a middle-class life due to lower home prices, rising costs and complex regulations are now creating a divide. Median home prices have risen significantly more than incomes, and rising rents are hollowing out the middle class by eliminating market-rate "transition housing."
  • "Devil's Choice" for Low-Income Workers: The structure of subsidized housing programs often creates a disincentive to work. If individuals on "extremely low" income housing (30% of Area Median Income) get a minimum-wage job, they may lose their housing because their new income exceeds the strict limit, preventing a stable path to self-sufficiency.
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